[Crossposted and adapted from my blog, Peace Tree Farm]
Why do I write blogs and/or diaries on most November 22nds? Before this one, I wrote Forty years on my blog in 2003, The end of the innocence in 2004, and 43 ... and 46 in 2006. And here it is, November 22 again, and I'm posting another time on the JFK assassination and its impact.
I suppose that's just what we Boomers do in Kennedy's memory.
In any case, please follow me below the fold as I endeavor to define what it takes to be a Where were you when...? moment.
For my parents' generation, the Where were you when...? moment was surely December 7, 1941. With, perhaps, April 12, 1945 as a secondary moment.
In the generation following mine, I've heard, January 28, 1986 was an important Where were you when...? moment. I must admit that the Challenger disaster was nothing of the kind for me. In Pittsburgh working on my dissertation at the time, I recall hearing about the explosion that morning, shrugging, and going back to my writing and research. It registered only slightly for me, and I didn't see the video until the evening news, at which time I wondered why they were showing it over and over and over.
Without a doubt, September 11, 2001 is and will remain such an event for many people, myself included.
What defines a Where were you when...? moment? What makes its importance and effect more searingly visceral, for a huge number of people, than other events? I would suggest that there are at least three reasons that these particular moments live on so meaningfully, and with such immediacy even after many decades, in the lives of those who experience them.
Surprise and shock
Undoubtedly, some Americans knew in 1941 that our nation was on the brink of entering World War II. There's no question that some Morton Thiokol engineers tried to stop NASA from launching the space shuttle that frosty morning. Two and a half years too late, we learned that Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US.
But at the time each of these events transpired, the general populace had no idea whatsoever that such troubles were afoot. More than that, even as they happened, such things were, for all intents and purposes, inconceivable in the public mind. As the shuttle lifted off the pad at Cape Canaveral that morning, NASA was all about beating the Russians to the moon and the heroic engineers of Apollo 13. As the presidential limousine turned onto Elm Street, assassination was something you read about in dusty old books; we knew about Lincoln, of course, but few could have told you much about Garfield and McKinley. If New Yorkers were thinking about anything other than the gloriously clear, bright weather that Tuesday morning, it was the primary to determine who might replace Mayor Giuliani.
Where were you when...? moments come at us totally out of the blue, without warnings or premonitory events. They assault our conceptual spaces from hitherto unknown directions, instantaneously producing novel and unwelcome thoughts, questions, fears, ideas that consume us to our very being.
The death of Franklin Roosevelt doesn't really meet the criteria for this sort of moment. It was a surprise, but anyone who watched newsreels at the local movie theater could observe FDR's frailty and deterioration (seeing those photos, it's shocking to realize that he was only 63 when he died). A surprise, then, but not really a shock. Similarly, in post-JFK America the two 1968 assassinations could no longer shock us in anything like the way we were shaken exactly forty-five years ago today.
Transformative
Many events surprise and shock us. But very, very few also transform our world and our view of it. In a very real sense, the world we occupy in the instant following a Where were you when...? moment is a very different place from the one we were experiencing immediately beforehand.
I don't think I really need to belabor this point. Although "everything changed after 9/11" soon became a political weapon for George W. Bush and the Republicans, its effectiveness arose in no small measure from the truth of the phrase. In my 2004 November 22 post, I argued that what we now think of as "The Sixties" actually began on that afternoon in Dallas:
As I see it, what we now know as the Sixties started exactly and precisely during that sunny lunchtime in Dealey Plaza. The ferment, the torment, the uproar, the outcry of the next decade and more—from Vietnam to Prague Summer to Dylan going electric to Bader-Meinhof to the Mexico City and Munich Olympics to Salvador Allende to Yoko Ono to Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars to Woodstock to Kent State to Watergate, and a thousand more events—all of that exploded into being when the core of our national being was ripped away in Dallas. What may have been bubbling under the surface, what might eventually have produced major, earthshaking changes in American and world society, was suddenly and violently facilitated by a single rifle bullet ripping through the brain of one man.
For me, the Challenger explosion falls short on this criterion. It certainly altered my impressions of NASA, the way it was administered, and its safety/quality culture, but my worldview wasn't fundamentally changed by it. I felt no deep discontinuity, no wrenching loss of focus.
Widespread and immediate
A Where were you when...? moment is shared by a huge number of people. It becomes a point of shared experience instantaneously.
Thus, it is difficult to envision such a moment before the existence of broadcast media. No matter how great their influence on the rest of the 20th century, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (June 28, 1914) and the October Revolution (October 25, 1917 on the Julian calendar, November 7 on the Gregorian) fall short because the news of their occurrence crept, rather than leapt, around the world.
[Parenthetical note -- family tradition has it that my paternal grandparents were married, in Russia, on the exact same day as the October Revolution. But, as peasants in a small Ukrainian village, they knew absolutely nothing about what was happening at the same time in St. Petersburg, and wouldn't learn of it until days or weeks later. As supporters of Kerensky, I'm sure they were (eventually) disappointed to hear about it.]
Only after radio became ubiquitous in the 1920s was it really possible for an event to be widely and simultaneously experienced in something close to realtime. News of Abraham Lincoln's murder -- which surely meets the sudden/shock and transformative criteria -- spread like wildfire by the standards of 1865, but that still wasn't anything like the speed of reports on the radio or television, much less the internet. With the availability of realtime dissemination, both the sudden, transformative event and its sequelae and ramifications can be shared widely. The Kennedy assassination discontinuity, after all, wasn't just the death of JFK; we also co-experienced LBJ's swearing-in, Jackie's bloodstained dress, Oswald's murder, the world leaders descending on Washington DC for the state funeral. And we saw others, all around the world, sharing in our grief and disbelief and transformation.
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These are my thoughts today, on the 45th anniversary of what was undoubtedly the most important and monumental Where were you when...? moment of my life, the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
