When after all it was you and me
By 
I had just turned four, didn’t speak any English at the time, and my parents didn’t own a TV (although my father went out and rented one from the corner drug store that afternoon). So I don’t have any memory of the event, although I’m told I was on a swing-set on the outskirts of Washington DC when my father came running up and said in Spanish to my grandmother “they’ve killed Kennedy.”
And I suppose “they” did, if one takes a appropriately sociological perspective on the event.
Some thoughts:
(1) For today’s college freshmen, 9/11 is pretty much what the JFK assassination was to me: a historical event that occurred after we were born, but could have just as well happened 50 years before. This is one reason why the concept of the baby boom “generation” is not very useful: for people born toward the end of it, “the Sixties” — which as many people have said began that day — mostly happened for us later, when we saw the decade replayed on TV and in movies and (endlessly) on the radio.
(2) It’s also an endlessly repeated truism that the public’s eventual rejection of the official story told by the Warren Commission reflected a fundamental shift in the America people’s willingness to trust the federal government in particular and authorities in general. I wonder how much actual evidence there is for this claim?
(3) I’ve never waded into the controversy over the assassination itself, so I have no opinion regarding it, but having just watched a couple of documentaries on the subject, I’m reminded of a story about Sir Walter Raleigh. Sir Walter, it’s said, proposed during his imprisonment in the Tower of London to write a history of the world. One day after he began this project, a fight broke out between two workmen in the courtyard below, which resulted in the death of one of them. Sir Walter tried to find out what the fight was about, and found he was unable to do so. Thereupon he abandoned his history.
(4) I will say that the Jim Garrison story ought to shake the faith of those who believe that it’s not possible for literal lunatics to ascend to important public positions inside the iron cage of bureaucracy.
(5) Oswald bought his rifle via mail order for $12.65 ($96.55 in current dollars).