I was a second grader in Mrs. Mudre’s class at St. Mary’s Cathedral School, my parochial school here in Miami. The day started as all days back then did. I have no memory of it save that it was my birthday and I was expecting lots of presents when my class celebrated it later that afternoon. We had a Cowboys & Indians theme party and I received a great present — a gun that fired plastic bullets — that was a very cool plastic western Colt .44. It worked great and you could reload it just like the Cowboys in the movies. We sang songs, my classmates sang happy birthday, we ate cake and stuff, and all was right with the world. I was seven years old! When the dismissal bell rang, we formed our usual line to wait for our parents.
It was around between 2:30 PM, Miami time, on Friday, November 22, 1963.
The nuns who ran the school — for the life of me I can only remember the name of one of them, the principal, Sister Mary Esther — stopped us as we were leaving and said that we had to go to church to pray because something terrible had happened. I know that I showed the gun they had given me to my mom and she quickly told me to put it away. We went to church and prayed for, what seemed to my seven-year old mind, hours and hours and hours. I vaguely remember hearing that the President had been shot. What did I know? I sort of knew that the President was a Roman Catholic like I was. All I knew was that I had a great present and I couldn’t wait to go home to play with it.
That day, and the three days that followed, would, of course be forever etched in my mind. The black and white TV was on in our house for what seemed all the time. Nothing was on the TV except that the President had been shot. My mother and father, grandfather and grandmother, all looking very, very serious. On Sunday, November 24, I saw Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald on TV. Live. Ruby yelled, “Oswald!” and pow! Oswald went down. What did I know? I was seven. I thought I was watching a movie that lasted all weekend long. And I saw the funeral on Monday. The haunting drums that kept the pace for the escorting of the caisson carrying the President’s body still gives me goose bumps when I hear them.
In the intervening years, November 22, has held a special significance for me. Not because it’s my birthday — I haven’t had a birthday since when I haven’t remembered the assassination — but because of what it did to us, all of us, as a nation.
We were hurt badly that day.
And I became obsessed with the assassination. The theories about it have become a cottage trade, like spy novels or B-movies. I’ve read huge chunks of the Warren Commission Report. The “single-bullet” theory, promulgated by Arlen Specter and his Warren Commission staff, are monumental calumnies, designed to assuage a nation and to cover up the ineptitude (complicity?) of those that failed to protect the President. I remember hearing about it this “magic bullet” in 1964 — a year after the assassination. I was amazed at what that bullet had done! In my young mind, I was still thinking it was like a movie or a TV show. Little did I know then that it was also a fiction.
Over the last thirty years I’ve read books about the assassination by Anthony Summers, Mark Lane, David Lifton, Jim Marrs, Fletcher Prouty, Edward Jay Epstein, Gus Russo, and Henry Hurt; magazine articles and websites. I’ve seen hours upon hours of documentaries, all of them outlining their theories about what happened. I don’t believe David Lifton’s theory that the President’s body was altered on Air Force One to reflect an entry wound to the back of the head instead of a frontal shot, but I do believe the autopsy was badly bungled by someone who was not a trained forensic pathologist. I don’t believe that Connolly was the target of the attempt and the assassins missed. I don’t believe Oliver Stone’s JFK and its leftist paranoia of a right-wing cabal. I don’t believe it was the CIA: did they suddenly go from inept, after the disasters they had been involved in, to brilliantly efficient, and execute a complex murder almost flawlessly? I don’t think so. And I’ve seen the Zapruder film over and over again, its gory images etched in my mind forever.
I still remember.
I have my own theories about what happened that day, but I’ll keep them to myself. What is certain is that none of us will ever know the whole truth about the forces that came together on that beautiful sunny day in Dallas to murder the President.
No matter what I think of JFK — his fear of fidel and his betrayal of our brothers on Playa Giron; the sordid deal he made with Kruschev in 1962 that effectively sold out the Cuban exiles in the United States (myself included) by effectively preventing us from taking military action against fidel; the dishonest, some might say criminal, way in which he was elected in 1960 — the manner of his death, so public, shot like a rabid dog on a street in Dallas, in full view of all of us, young and old alike, is a trauma that has not healed.
On November 22, 1963, on my seventh birthday, our innocence died and our unbounded optimism was derailed. America has yet to fully recover from the shots fired in Dealey Plaza forty-six years ago today.
Happy Birthday, my brother.
Happy Birthday George, may all your wishes be fullfilled.
I was never besotted by JFK. He is the most overrated President in history. He accomplished nothing while in office, absolutely nothing. It was all hype because he beat Nixon at the elections and the media had a pathological hatred (and still does) towards Nixon because of his discovery of the Communist infiltration through Whittaker Chambers. (This cult of personality can be seen with Obama as well,btw) As for Jackie, she wasn’t glamerous, she was just a skank. The main cult of personality of JFK is primarily centered around NYC and Boston.
Z, I have a lot of wishes for my birthday next year: They involve the unemployment of lots of Dems and RINOs 🙂
Happy Birthday George, we share your wishes for next year.
George et al:
My school was just walking distance down the street from my house. At 5 years old my mother stood on the front porch in her bathrobe and slippers (I had a toddler sister and a baby sister in the house) and watched me walk down to the very bottom of the dead end street to the main drag where the school crossing guard was waiting.
I was in kindergarten. Oddly enough, my teacher’s name was Mrs. Kennedy. Her husband was the school custodian. Started off the same old same old (half a day kindergarten because there were so many kids they had to split into half day to accommodate the enrollment … I was afternoons). The ginger-headed snobby girl with banana curls and freckles (whom Mrs. Kennedy adored) graced us with her tunes on the piano as I sat on the floor and prayed for a fire drill just to escape. Someone knocked on the classroom door and Mrs. Kennedy chased us back to our desks.
She opened the door and a couple other lady teachers were on the other side crying. They told her Mr. Kennedy had been shot, and the principle was closing school and sending everybody home.
I was terrified to leave the classroom to head home because I was afraid I’d come across Mr. Kennedy bleeding in the corridors. At the end of the school shift my mom usually had herself and the little sisters together enough to stroll down to meet me on the other side of the crosswalk and escort me home. Not today because it was so early. So I sprinted across the crosswalk and up our street to hurry home to tell Mom the breaking news about the shooting of my teacher’s husband at school.
I came in the kitchen door and found my mother standing in front of our 3 channel b/w TV crying. I said, “Mom, somebody shot Mr. Kennedy!”
Mom sobbed, “Yeah, I know” and pointed to “Uncle Walter” on the TV.
I was completely confused …
I have an online buddy who is a retired Air Force Colonel. In WWII he’d been stationed on a bomber in the ETO. He then was a fighter pilot in Korea and Vietnam.
He wrote me over the last few years about what he was doing that day Pres. Kennedy had been shot. He was co-piloting on a plane hauling some Congressmen around. He and the other pilot got the call over the radio, He went to the back of the plane where the Congressmen were (and he told me who they were but I can’t seem to find the email I’d saved from him for their names) and broke the news to them. Wherever they were headed that day they turned the plane around and went back to Andrews AFB so the Congressmen could get back to D.C.
Sorry, George my good friend …
And an absolutely very Happy Birthday to you.
And I will do my damnedest to grant your Birthday wish for next year … as it’s my birthday, Christmas, and shooting star wish also!
Oh, here’s a party favor, George.
Post-worthy, I think.
The hounds of CNN fact-checking might be hard at work on this one:
http://tinyurl.com/y8awb95
George….Feliz CumpleAños. All the best in the world for you.
Feliz, Happy berz-day George,
Gus Russo is seriously on-the-ball on this issue. Also, I may have told you that Carlos Bringuier is my cousin… And helped me tremendously with my books.
And–stand back!!!–Jim Garrison was my wife’s godfather (My father-in-law’s best friend! (both were home-town boys and war buddies, fought together at Salerno and Anzio)–Garrison was great guy in a social setting, but a raving, raving NUTCASE!!!)
So here I had my wife’s godfather accusing my cousin of being in on the plot to snuff JFK!!
Unreal
Very best wishes and blessings to you George. Another year, and you made it!
BTW you share the same b/d with a couple of my relatives. 🙂
I second Spygirl.
The path to JFK fame was that of the typical government-sector faker: first, create a disease. Second, be the one to step forward with the purported “miracle cure”. You don’t have to actually heal anybody, you merely have to state your intention to provide a cure, and the Shadow Ministry of Propaganda simply has to make sure everybody knows the latter fact. Instant hero! Ask the men of the 2506th and see if, to them, the Kennedy regime felt more like disease or cure…
The physics required to create the conditions so vividly captured in the Zapruder film render the entire Warren report a complete joke. It doesn’t surprise me that a fakery-artist like Spectre is behind it. It’s the ultimate Northeastern oligarch circle-the-wagons exercise. It is said that we shouldn’t attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by mere incompetence, but the effects achievable by the mere latter have their limits before one must ask further questions. I’m not sure those limits weren’t exceeded by the Kennedy incident. It, like his entire tenure (and also oft-exhibited by the Obama regime) smacks too much of sibling warfare between competing criminal syndicates rather than a struggle of mere madmen and ideologues.