A thousand days

I was a freshman at the University of Arkansas, relaxing in my room at the fraternity house after lunch and before class when a fraternity brother ran down the hall shouting, 'The President's been shot, the President's been shot!' That was a few minutes after 12:30 pm, exactly 50 years ago today.

Everyone ran into the den to watch the latest on television and then, strangely enough, most of us went to class. I had a French class at 1 p.m. and our professor, who was a native Frenchman, came into the room carrying a portable radio, already turned on. He announced that we would forego class to listen to the latest reports on the President and anyone who wished to leave, could. No one did. Shortly after 1:30, a bulletin broke on the air that the President of the United States was dead. Our professor wept openly and unashamedly, along with many of his students.

After class, I went back to the fraternity house where everyone was in a state of shock, be they Democrats or Republicans. One of my fraternity brothers said that he was a Republican and that he had never liked Kennedy but he sure didn't want him dead. That seemed to be the sentiment of most Americans on that horrible weekend.

On Saturday, I drove 90 miles south to my home in Atkins, Arkansas to be with my family during this tragic time. On Sunday my entire family was watching Dallas police officers move Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused shooter of the President, to the county jail when we saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald dead in the basement of the Dallas Police Department on live television.

It's a weekend that's etched in my mind forever as I'm sure it is for most Americans who listened to or witnessed the same thing I did. When a malcontent takes out his or her frustrations by acting violently toward a person elected by the people to serve all of us, it makes the whole nation cringe in horror and shame.

More people than I want to count have hypothesized about what life would have been like in the United States had JFK lived. Although he was young and popular and was married to the most beautiful first lady ever, he wasn't popular with everyone. He had totally botched the Bay of Pigs invasion but countered that huge misstep with his firm actions in the naval blockade of Cuba which made Khrushchev blink to the point of turning Russian ships around and heading them back to the Soviet Union. Shortly after that, the Russians also dismantled and shipped back all the nuclear missiles they had surreptitiously erected in Cuba which greatly reduced the immediate tensions of the Cold War.

Much of the prognostications have been about whether we would have waged the kind of war in Vietnam that Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, did which resulted in 58,000 American soldiers being killed, 1.1 million total deaths in the war on both sides and over a million additional people injured. They all have their theories but the measured response is that we just don't know. Kennedy believed in the domino theory like a vast majority of Americans did in the early 60s and was very afraid that if one country in that region of the world fell to communism, the rest would fall too. So from that perspective, many have postulated that the Vietnam War result wouldn't have been much different, regardless of who was President.

On the other hand, documents exist indicating that Kennedy hoped to have all military personnel out of Vietnam by the end of 1965, unless there were 'justified' exceptions. But in the end, how Kennedy would have handled the Vietnam War during an election year will always be a mystery.

Speculators are a dime a dozen and they are able to speculate because they're dealing with a subject that no one will ever know the answer to. What we do know is that if Kennedy had of removed all our troops by the end of 1965, the anti-war movement that took over this country would never have happened and all kinds of things, including presidential elections, would have turned out different because of that.

But we don't know. We always talk about how things would have been better and never about how they could have been worse, all the while knowing full well that the scales could have been tipped in either direction.

Because Kennedy was assassinated at a young age, we have turned him into a saint, perhaps deserved, perhaps not. But we have. There have been thousands of books written about him, his Presidency, and his assassination as well as hundreds of movies and documentaries. He will be remembered forever, but especially each year on the anniversary of his assassination.

"Don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot."