It is hard to believe it happened fifty years ago. Even in the current generation, it remains a great dividing line in American history. It was the greatest national trauma since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln at the end of the Civil War in April 1865.
Those who were alive in the fall of 1963 and were old enough then to remember it today shudder at the mere mention of the date. Find anyone you know over the age of sixty—a parent, grandparent, or friend—and speak one phrase: “November 22, 1963.” At once they will tell you where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. “I remember,” they will say and then tell you their story. Many still shed tears for him.
The drama could have been scripted by Shakespeare: The elevation of a young hero scarred by war and haunted by death. This charismatic leader of his people—beside his beautiful wife, whose natural poise captured the nation—is struck down at the height of his power and fame, leaving behind a young widow to conjure his legend. It is a tale filled with irony and foreshadowing, with heroes and monsters.
This book attempts to re-create a moment when time stopped. It seeks to recapture how Americans lived through this tragedy and to resurrect the mood and emotions of those unforgettable days between President John F. Kennedy’s murder and his funeral. To those of you who remember, I hope this book does justice to your memories. To those who do not and who know—or think they know—the story only through retellings in books or films, I hope this book evokes the mood, the loss, and the emotional and historical truth of the fall of 1963.
Our misguided modern-day obsession with exotic, multiple, and contradictory conspiracy theories involving tales of grassy knolls, umbrella men, magic bullets, second gunmen, Oswald imposters, doctored films, fraudulent photographs, and all-powerful government cover-ups has caused us to lose the emotional connection to the events of November 1963. We have strayed too far from the human truths of that day. A wife lost her husband. Two children lost their father. A nation lost a president.
This is not meant to be a complete history of the Kennedy assassination, if such a book could ever even be written. Nor does it travel down the rabbit hole to endorse or rebut any of those complicated webs of conspiracies. Except for some brief observations, I leave that journey to others. This book is no more than a modest attempt to tell a story, to restore the balance, to travel back in time to the days before it happened, and to return to the day when we did not know what would happen next.
John Kennedy’s days ended on the sunny afternoon of a brilliant fall day in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. It was a day when the death of one man caused a nation to weep. Half a century later, Americans refuse to forget him. We mourn him still.