Today marks the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination and yet I know that many reading this post were not born yet. It's hard to realize that 50 years have gone by and all that has happened since.
I was a young mother working as a lab tech in a Hartford, Connecticut hospital. My husband was an actuarial student at one of the insurance companies in Hartford and my little son was 7 years old. At 12:30 PM, someone ran down in hall in our laboratory yelling, "the president has been shot." At first, it was hard to comprehend the words as we gathered in small groups to try and make sense of what we heard. We all went home early that Friday, and from that moment on until the funeral was over on Monday, our television set was on, black and white of course which made what we saw even more dramatic and poignant.
I think that day marked the end of innocence of our country, at least from our generations' point of view. How could this happen here, we thought. And little did we know, more assassinations were to come, Martin Luther King on April 4th, 1968 and Robert Kennedy only two months later, June 5th, 1968.
Assassinations are not new in history, but to a young country such as ours, they were. Our immunity from the political turbulence of Europe somehow protected us, even though our country was involved in World War I and II, they were not fought on our soil, and not-withstanding, Lincoln's assassination, with Kennedy, here was someone we knew, someone we saw on television, in magazines, someone whose voice we heard, whose family we admired, their youth was our youth, and our hopes for a bright future seemed somehow linked with theirs.
And then two more murders of political leaders, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy made our reality complete.
