I recently learned how one horrific event can impact a nation – and myself – years and even decades later.

Thursday, February 08, 2001

I recently learned how one horrific event can impact a nation – and myself – years and even decades later.

I had the privilege of traveling to Dallas, Texas, to attend a conference. While the conference was interesting and enlightening, the sightseeing trip I took while there exceeded the impact of the conference tenfold.

Like thousands of people every year, I drove to downtown Dallas on a quest to visit Dealey Plaza. For those of you who do not know, Dealey Plaza is the place where John F. Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963 at 12:30 p.m.

As a student of history, I knew of the specifics of that day 37 years ago, but I was removed from it emotionally. By 1970 – the year I was born – citizens of the nation were jaded. Americans had watched as JFK, his brother Bobby and Martin Luther King Jr. were killed while still young and vibrant. And then reports surfaced of those men’s personal lives, which seemed to dull their polished images.

By the time I was old enough to actually pay attention to the content of the news, the previously mentioned three deaths, Vietnam, Watergate and Ford’s pardon of Nixon had weighed the country down with an emotional burden that at times seemed too heavy to bear. Frankly, after examining that time years later, I wonder how the country made it through.

Some of us, of course, didn’t… which brings me back to Dealey Plaza.

I’ll be honest, I’ve always thought of JFK as a philanderer who made some effective social and political policies while in office, but was a failure at the two jobs which mattered the most – that of loyal husband and honest father. I could be removed from his death because I had not witnessed it.

The closest I probably came to experiencing the emotional impact of the Kennedy assassination was as a 16-year-old, when I saw the Challenger explode on TV and watched the continuing coverage for days. That incident was shocking and numbing to the nation. Years later, Princess Diana’s death had a similar effect.

Today Dealey Plaza appears much the same as it did in 1963. Some new buildings have been erected in the distance, but the same grassy knoll, the old red courthouse and, of course, the former Texas school book depository frame the murder spot. There is a faded "X" in the middle lane of Elm Street, between the book depository and the grassy knoll, a reminder of the position of the president’s car when he was struck fatally in the head with a rifle bullet – a marking to bring the murder home, for certain.

I stood and watched as people gathered, pointed to that "X" and moved on, each silent and fairly reverent. Some moved into the museum, now housed in the former book depository, and others walked up the grassy knoll to listen to conspiracy theorists question the Warren Commission report.

I won’t claim to know who is and was right about the assassination – the Warren Commission or those who challenge their findings – but I will sum up my own feelings about the crime with two words: I question. I question each thing I hear, which I suppose comes from heredity and the skills I was taught as a analytically-thinking historian in college.

Yet when I walked into the museum and found my way along its halls, I discovered the emotion of the murder within myself and thoughts of the conspiracy drifted away into the distance.

In the end this story is about the death of a man – and the life of a man destroyed in one incredibly violent act.

No one, no one deserves to die that way. And certainly no one deserves to see her husband die is such a hideous way, as Jackie did.

The trip to Texas was Jackie’s first since the miscarriage of her son. Imagine what it would be like to be her, sitting helplessly next to her husband as a bullet rips through his throat and then his skull. Standing there near the spot, I know there was nowhere to hide from the bullets. I believe that image and the feeling of being helpless would stay with me for the rest of my life.

For many people who witnessed the killing, it has. As the old cliche says, ask anyone who was alive then and they can tell you where they were when they heard. My mother, who traveled to Dallas with me, remembered she was in school and was let out early after hearing of Kennedy’s death. She watched the coverage on TV for days afterward.

A female professor once taught me about the irregular time frame of decades in American history by citing the Kennedy assassination as an example. "The sixties," she said, "began on Nov. 22, 1963 – not Jan. 1, 1960." What she meant is the attitude of the ’60s came out of the pain of the mourning after JFK’s death and what that one incident taught Americans about safety, idealism and the loss of hope.

No family is untouched by tragedy. We all find our share in this life, but some play out the scene in front of cameras instead of in private.

I was not alive in 1963 and can’t presume to feel everything which anyone who was in Dallas or watched those days of mourning on TV felt. But after reliving the incident and looking at the place where it happened, I felt a portion of the weight of the loss of innocence and wept for a nation which rode a wave of tears to the decade that ended with Watergate and the fall of Saigon- a "New Frontier" Kennedy could not have imagined.