Reply #63: I was pregnant with my second child [View All]

[ninkasi]

when JFK was assassinated. I was working as a temp during the holiday season, and the supervisor came in, white faced, to tell us that our president had been shot. Apparently, in the initial confusion, some reports were that Connally was dead, and Kennedy wounded. A few minutes later, the truth was reported. He sent us all home.

I was working in downtown Houston, and my then husband worked near the medical center. I can't remember whether I called him, or he called me, but I remember walking the sidewalks of downtown Houston, heartbroken, shocked, and afraid. There were so many people on the sidewalks, because almost everybody was leaving work, and going home. I must have arranged with my husband to wait for him outside one of the department stores, because it didn't take long before he pulled up, to take me home.

We picked up our 2 year old at the babysitters, and went home to turn on the t.v. I never returned to my part time job. Things were just too surreal, too painful to accept right away. After years of the ho hum politics of the day, Ike, and Mamie, and their daughter Margaret, Jack and Jackie were like movie stars, young, attractive, and oh, so glamorous.

The nation watched as Jackie got off the plane in D.C., the front of skirt stained with her husband's blood. She looked numb, completely dazed. She left on that trip the First Lady of the United States, and returned a grieving widow. By the time the plane landed, LBJ had been sworn in as president. I remember John-John saluting his father's casket, and Jackie walking behind the funeral cortege with Ted and Bobby Kennedy. We saw a frightened Caroline Kennedy mourning her father, but already with an understanding of her role as a
president's child. She carried herself with more dignity than the two current daughters of a president, and was
a great deal younger.

I think that his death was the beginning of the protests of the sixties. We had had a taste of Camelot, and were not willing to go back to tired old men playing games with everybody else's lives. The nearest thing I've ever seen that came even remotely close to the atmosphere back then was when Clinton was sworn in, an Fleetwood Mac sang "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow". He was not perfect, but I always had the feeling that he at least cared some, and was willing to work grueling hours to take care of his duties.

We saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald, on national t.v. and were horrified. I knew then, on some level, that he must have been killed to keep him from talking. The same malignancy still infests our politics, the names might change, but the agenda never does. This has become a game played with such high stakes, that I doubt any of us can fully grasp what they are doing.

I'm not trying to sound like a conspiracy nut, but I've seen too many things happen, to believe that every explanation we've been given is the truth. I keep hearing, in my mind, David Kelly's letter to Judith Miller, I believe it was, shortly before he died, of "dark actors, playing games." It is easier to paint us as leftist crazies, than to trace all of the evidence to it's source. Bush the first, and Bush the lesser, both in positions of power when tragic events unfolded. I know that Poppy wasn't president, but he was head of the C.I.A. What games are they playing now?