November 22, 1963. Home alone after a moment of prayer and an early dismissal from P.S. 148 in Baltimore, Maryland. Heads bowed and hands clasped on behalf of newly slain President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. With both parents away at work, and seven older siblings busy about with school and such, this eight year old is so sure that the assassin has made his way to the east coast and our two story row house that I was in a horizontal paralysis state, unable to harness the will to climb the stairs to my bedroom to change clothes nor the desire to travel down to the basement to grab some recreational distraction. Stuck. No relief was found two days later, when our household witnessed the murder, murder, of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby on that Sunday morning. It seemed so surreal, that live footage, like watching a rerun of an old Untouchables episode featuring Robert Stack. There was no seven second delay back in the day, live was live, and the news anchors had to at least try to husband their shock and disbelief, this just mere hours after the usually stoic Walter Cronkite removed the huge black bakelite eyeglasses from his face, with his glare and body language breathing, reeking of contempt and major disappointment in a world that could let the events of that weekend take place. The assassination of JFK represented the induced birth of the grief counseling movement, that is for those who were wise enough to pursue that remedy. Many businesses closed for a measure, sporting events were cancelled or postponed, but for the most part, I remember people just going about their normal way of life. However, little did we know, that the slayings of JFK and LHO ushered in the induction of altered news cycles and " The Body Watch" into the American lexicon. Since that horrible day in Dallas, each and every moment that the President of the United States is in the public arena, he is photographed by people who are paid good money so that a cataclysmic moment in time is memorialized, forever. There are many of us who are inclined to believe that, had JFK lived out his presidency, then the Viet Nam war would not have mushroomed into the premature death of too many of our young men and women at that time. The oldest brother in my family sought refuge in academia: Studying at the Sorbonne, then on to Harvard Law School, and finally outlasting the draft at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies, of all places. My second oldest brother fared not as well: With the Selective Service System reps just about waiting at the foot of the high school graduation dais, he decided that the U.S. Air Force was his best option. Man, what an insight he provided. All in all, the JFK assassination has obviously left the nation in a collective cloud of Post Traumatic Stress. No other event has had such an immense impact on the American psyche, even now, some fifty years later. HRM
