JFK's Assassination: Where Were You?

After 9/11 we said that "everything changed." I'm not sure that's completely true anymore but I do know that 43 years ago, on the eve of another Thanksgiving, they really did. That, of course, was the day that President John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Texas. Where were you? It's no longer a universal question like it once was. Now, in 2006, probably more Americans weren't even born by November 22, 1963 than were.

I was in grade school, attending Peter Boscow Elementary in Hillsboro, Oregon. When we came into the lunchroom the TV was on and we'd heard that he was shot. Our entire class had to eat at the same table every day and our teacher, Mrs. Braden, was one of the toughest old birds in the educational system, so tough that she always forced us to eat our entire lunch, especially the vegetable, even if they included broccoli. On this day, however, she let us eat whatever we wanted and throw out what we didn't. She sat at the head of the table and cried. By the time lunch was over Kennedy was dead and Mrs. Braden looked like a really old broken woman. I had lived nearly three months in fear of her in the classroom and seeing her so weak and shaken shook me almost as much as Kennedy's death. Almost...

We went home early from school. My mother and father came home early, too. We turned on the TV, like everyone else in America, and cried some more. We cried all weekend, watched Lee Harvey Oswald get caught, saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald on live TV, and watched the funeral on Monday and cried some more. My father's name was Harvey and it really bothered me that the man who killed the President shared his name. What bothered me even more was that my middle name was Harvey. Bryce Harvey Zabel. Like that killer. Lee Harvey Oswald. I hated that name. I hated that if I ever did anything bad they'd use my middle name in the papers. So that, I expect, is why I've stayed on the right side of the law all these years.

I remember feeling about President Kennedy the way you'd feel if you had a really cool dad. When he was killed, it left me with just my own real father, who wasn't in the same universe of cool. My dad, the aforementioned Harvey Zabel, was incredibly reliable, honest, and a family man -- traits we assumed President Kennedy also had, although the facts as they've come out over the years have shown that not to be true. But cool, yeah, JFK had that down pat.

Six days after the assassination of President Kennedy, President Lyndon Johnson addressed the nation on Thanksgiving Day, 1963. He announced that Florida's NASA Launch Operation Center would be renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center and he asked the public to remain "determined that from this midnight of tragedy we shall move toward a new American greatness."

I'm not sure, but I think our family drove up to my grandparent's home in Bingen, Washington. I do remember that the food was good but none of us were that hungry.

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• Click here to read all the Kennedy posts on the Instant History blog.
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