“Oh, my God! The president’s been shot!”

For those of us of a certain age, the moment we first heard that President John F. Kennedy had been shot has enshrined itself among our most indelible memories. I was 13, and it was after lunch at school, and even though I loved history, sitting in a hot un-airconditioned classroom right after lunch, listening to our 8th grade Georgia history teacher drone on about James Edward Oglethorpe — well, like most of my classmates, I was fighting to stay awake.

And then everything changed. A girl in the back of the classroom had hidden an earpiece, including the cord, beneath her big hair and had been listening to rock music on the little transistor radio hidden in her big purse. Suddenly she stood bolt upright and screamed: “Oh, my God, the president has been shot! He’s been shot in Dallas!” Everything stopped around her, and then the teacher, very gently, asked her to unplug the earpiece and turn up the radio so that all of us could hear. As we tried to come to terms with what we were hearing, the principal’s voice crackled in the public address box above the blackboard, announcing the terrible news that President Kennedy was dead.

I honestly don’t remember much about the next couple of days, except that everything became a blur of news items on TV and retrospectives about the president. The assassination had taken place on a Friday, and although my dad had to work on Saturday, my mom and my sisters and I spent pretty much the whole day in front of the TV in the living room. On Sunday morning, however, we dressed for church as usual — going to church, praying for the dead president, for his family, and above all for our devastated country, seemed only right and proper. 

But even as we reached for our Sunday finest, the TV stayed on, or, actually, both TVs. We’d just recently bought a second TV, a reconditioned, very much second-hand Crosley, made usable by our next door neighbor, a former Navy radio repairman. This had been placed in my big sister’s bedroom, so the children could watch their shows while leaving my dad to watch Edward R. Murrow and Lawrence Welk in peace. She had this TV on as she finished getting dressed for church.

And then she screamed, loud enough to be heard throughout our not-very-big house: “Oswald’s been shot! Oswald’s been shot!” Church momentarily forgotten, we ran back to see what she was talking about; the family gathered as the scene was replayed, Oswald being led out, Jack Ruby pressing forward, my 4-year-old little sister again in tears, as she had been most of the weekend, unable to comprehend what was going on but very much aware of the tidal wave of emotion that coursed through the rest of the family.

In the years that followed, her young life would be marked repeatedly with “someone’s been shot.” Unlike her older siblings, who’d at least reached their teen years in the relative peace of the 1950s, she’d be less shocked than we were on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when the news from Dallas struck like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky. Only a few short months after the Kennedy assassination, our quiet little country town was riven by the news that three policemen — a full one-fourth of our entire county police force — had been executed in a gangland-style slaying that marked the first time in TV history that our hometown made the national news.

And then more, and, for the country at large, much worse. First came the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., then, just over a year later, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. All this took place against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and a country grown more divided and angrier with the passing of each day. There were, of course, many more deaths. Our little town welcomed home its Vietnam dead, sadly, quietly, as did other small towns and big city neighborhoods all across the country. Although many large demonstrations were genuinely peaceful, no one pretended that the violent ones were “mostly peaceful,” as cities like Detroit and Los Angeles burned across our TV screens, and the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago became a byword for how utterly divided our nation had become. Then, as the sixties ended, Kent State. Neil Young’s “Four dead in O-hi-o!,” and demonstrations shutting down college campuses across the nation.

For me, personally, the headline death that marked the end of this era was that of Robert Fassnacht, a postdoctoral student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who was killed when Sterling Hall was bombed by left-wing radicals because of its association with U.S Army mathematics research. I was a student at a nearby small college, and, several weeks after the bombing, I went up to Madison to use the big research library at the university for my senior thesis. I didn’t mean to drive by the building, but I didn’t know my way around Madison and came upon it inadvertently, surprised by what looked like something from a war zone, shocked that it had come to this. What had become of my country? Could we ever recover?

But — and this is the point I want to make — we did recover, in large part. I won’t disagree with anyone who chooses to assert that the country has never been the same, that we lost something in the sixties that we never regained, that no small part of our current divisions had their roots in those years. Still, as I enter upon Thanksgiving weekend in this year of our Lord 2023, on the 60th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, I look back across those years and marvel at the resilience of our great nation. I categorically reject the notion that the United States has been an irredeemably bad actor, domestically or on the world stage. On the contrary — I insist that there has never been a nation that, for all its faults, has been so much and so often a force for good.

It’s time we stepped back and remembered that there have been bad times before, and yet we have recovered. The ills of the sixties have not defined us; the time of the assassins has not diminished us. We face many grave challenges today, both here at home and around the world. We have the ability, as a nation, to overcome these challenges, one by one, rejecting complacency and moving forward with a confidence born of a belief in ourselves and our country that has been earned a thousand times over in the years since the very first Thanksgiving.

I hope that, when you read this, you’ve enjoyed a happy Thanksgiving with family and friends, that you’ve appreciated all the good things you share, that you’ve been reminded, over turkey and football, of the things that bring us together. Look forward to Christmas and to the year ahead.

We’ve got this, America — we’ve got this.

James H. McGee’s 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. Not incidentally, it is also a meditation on the nature of heroism as exemplified by an international team of special operators. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.