Something Just Broke

I hadn’t been born on November 22, 1963. (Missed it by three years.) So I don’t have first-hand knowledge of what it must have been like to hear that dreadful news at about 2 pm EST. I heard much from my parents, grandparents, and older family friends. And my impression is that it is very similar to what September 11, 2001, was like. Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing. Images are forever burned into our minds’ eyes. It’s not very hard to evoke the sadness, the hurt, the anger.

On the fiftieth anniversary of that infamous day, we have been through a stream of memorials and TV specials about Lee Harvey Oswald, all the conspiracy theories, and of course the tragic event itself—the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States. It was the end of Camelot, that “one brief shining moment” when America was on the verge of possibilities.

Kennedy had not had a glorious first term in office. The Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba was an unmitigated failure. And some of his foreign and economic policies were less than stellar. But things were really beginning to turn around. The administration deftly avoided World War III with its handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962. And the first family’s hold on the American psyche was undeniable. It was the first Presidency that widely broadcast on television, giving the public an unprecedented look at this charismatic man and his charming family.

Much of America really took the assassination personally, as if a beloved family member were the victim rather than a President that few had actually seen in person. I tend to believe that Oswald indeed acted alone, although I don’t doubt at all that some kind of official cover-up was involved. There was more to the story than the Warren Commission or any other governmental arm has yet owned up to. Whether the full truth will ever come out is to be seen. At any rate, the assassination unleashed a flurry of upheaval unseen in American history—Sirhan Sirhan, James Earl Ray, Arthur Bremmer, John Hinckley, and unfortunately on and on.

Several of us had a unique perspective on all this through the production of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins at the Ephrata Performing Arts Center. The final scene of the show has Oswald at the Texas Schoolbook Depository being convinced to assassinate the President by John Wilkes Booth and all the other assassins (and would-be assassins) past and present. They overwhelm him with their pleas to be remembered and validated. After he pulls the trigger, several unnamed characters sing “Something Just Broke,” portraying quite vividly the impact of Kennedy’s assassination on America, and indeed the world. Yes, it brought people together—the way funerals and all other tragedies do. It also started to chip away at the innocence of the culture. Through this horror and those that would follow throughout the rest of the 60s, 70s, and beyond, we all grew more cynical and skeptical. Some would say more pragmatic.

But, oh, the cost.