Phrase of the Day: ASSASSINATION OF HOPE

A sunny Friday afternoon in Dallas, Texas.  Crowds line the streets.  A presidential motorcade goes by.  Vice-President Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird Johnson sit in the third car with Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough.  Inside the first car sits the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, his wife, Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie.  

A large crowd has assembled for a luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart, awaiting the President's arrival to give a speech.  He would never arrive to deliver that speech.  

At 12:30 p.m., local Dallas time, three shots rang out in Dealey Plaza.  It would be approximately a half-hour later that the President was officially pronounced dead, and Governor Connally wounded.  

Kennedy became the second president assassinated in the twentieth century, and the fourth president ever assassinated.  Before Kennedy, William McKinley was assassinated in 1901; James Garfield was assassinated in 1881; Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.

Radio stations first broke the news of the shooting.  This is the first radio bulletin:

Here's how the three major television networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC, broke the news:

I'll preface this next thought by saying it is not a case of the American public getting used to assassinations, but the first three assassinations (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley) took place within a span of thirty-six years.  The span of years between McKinley's and Kennedy's assassinations was sixty-two years.  In addition to many more failed assassination attempts, the American public was more than a couple of generations removed from such shocking news. 

As President Kennedy has been referred to as the "first television president", the television coverage brought the horror directly into peoples' homes.  No one will forget the images of the basement of the Dallas police building with the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald...

...Jackie Kennedy kneeling next to John Kennedy's coffin as he lay in state...

...and JFK, Jr., saluting his dad.

The sorrow that gripped the U.S. and even around the world resulted for a number of reasons.  One would clearly be how young and vibrant he was.  Much like those who died far too young in their lives, Kennedy's death was far too soon; he was only forty-six years old.  Another was that he was perceived as a good man, a man who wanted to change things for the better.  Another was that he challenged us to dream big and to try big.  Yet another was the promise for a better tomorrow that he represented...a promise unfulfilled.  

It's that promise unfulfilled that still lingers even today.  It is always better to look at what is and what will be than what could have been, but that could-have-been is where the sorrow lingers.  While many not-so-pleasant pieces of information about Kennedy's life has come out into the open over the successive decades, those shortcomings are unfortunate expressions of his humanity.  It is still important to remember that the potential of which I write rests solely in the doing for others.  

How different this country, and perhaps the world, would have been had he served his time in office, we will never know for certain.  Mere speculation attempts to fill that hole.  It was this event that spawned the conspiracy theory era -- remember, this occurred before the Gulf of Tonkin "event" during Johnson's administration was exposed as a hoax -- and it is an era that still exists today.  No amount of speculation will bring back John F. Kennedy, however, but the distrust remains.  It was an assassination of both a man and of hope.

One big thing that John F. Kennedy represented was hope: hope in ourselves, hope in each other, hope in our government, hope in humanity...hope that a better tomorrow was not just possible, but actually achievable.  Such hope cut short so abruptly and so violently is a huge jolt, and it might be argued that it is a jolt from which this country has not fully recovered.  

In the successive decades since Kennedy's assassination, and particularly as we have entered the twenty-first century, such expansive hope is hard to find...certainly almost impossible to find in government.  The kind of hope Kennedy embodied was not a kind of digging our way out of a hole, but of challenge and potential.  What hope we have now is the kind where we hope we get dug out of a hole.  It is a very different kind of hope...from empowerment to angry wistfulness.

Certainly, it is not the hope Kennedy wanted instilled in us all.

Terry