Fifty years after the murder of President John F. Kennedy, the event is scarcely less shocking and saddening than it was in its immediate aftermath. It must rank with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as the most graphically shocking and horrifying memory in the minds of the hundreds of millions of people who remember that day. The reason it is such a vivid memory is not just that it was the murder of a president; the United States had endured that three times before, though not in the electronic age, and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln was a greater tragedy for the country, in terms both of the greatness of the deceased president and in what could legitimately be expected of him had he finished his term.
In the cases of Lincoln, James A. Garfield in 1881, and William McKinley in 1901, the assassinations were vividly sketched and described, and the country was profoundly shocked in every case, but the endless televised reruns of the motorcade in Dallas, the solicitude of Mrs. Kennedy, and then the horror within the presidential car and on the roadside when it was clear that a terrible wound had been sustained, is a ghastly and indelible recollection to everyone, in a way that a drawing, however skilfully executed, cannot be. (Contemporary sketches of Lincoln being shot in the head at point blank range in his box at the theatre beside his wife, were, and remain, very chilling.) And though President Kennedy was not a gigantic statesman who had saved the Union, emancipated the slaves, and seen the country through a horrible war in which more Americans died than in all other American wars until then combined, he was only forty-six and was not three years into his presidency. Lincoln announced that he was ”an old man” in his famous leave-taking at Springfield in 1861 as he went to his inauguration “not knowing when or whether ever I may return,” though he was only fifty-two. It was a century earlier and Lincoln had led a hard life. And he was departing his home to assume the headship of a country that was already in the deepest crisis in its history, with states seceding preemptively by the week.
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