I wonder how many young people know what happened on this date (I’ll let them off the hook on the matter of what year it was) if they are not told ahead of time. I wonder how many of you do as well.
Tomorrow will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of these United States. I think that I saw there have been 40,000 (or was it 400,000??) books written about JFK (short for John Fitzgerald Kennedy for those of us in the know), not sure how many were written specifically about Lee Harvey Oswald (the man who reportedly killed JFK). He never went by LHO as far as I am aware but there was LBJ (if you need to know then please look it up).
It really seems to me that we may never completely know what happened that day but I would bet it would not be as simple as the Warren Commission concluded and it would not be as complex as the conspiracy theorists would have you believe. I even see that a recent book again tries to finger LBJ for the murder. Guessin’ I ain’t really believin’ that all that much.
There is the mental game you can play as to what would have happened, where would we be today, had he failed to travel to Dallas or had Oswald missed or had they installed the bubbletop or had Oswald gotten the flu… If only the rain had continued the latter part of that morning the man’s life would have been saved and history altered as we know it. How could a more tragic event hinge upon such a simple thing as the fact that the rain had stopped? There are many such little things we know that greatly altered history and I’m sure many, many more we will never know.
It was such a different world in those days. How much more information would we have today about the act, about the day? The Zapruder film (look it up if you need to) seems so antiquated from our perspective today- almost like from some old 30’s movie. No, today, we would have so much video and so many pix and audio from countless sources. And likely the assassin would not have gotten so easily away from the scene. And J.D. Tippit would still be alive. And Ruby would have never gotten the chance. And Oswald might still be alive- an old man- today in some prison cell.
So maybe JFK didn’t have to die or, if he did, maybe we would know more had Oswald also not been killed.
And the world today, this country today, would likely be much different. I’m not saying better or worse because who really knows for sure. Just saying…different.
But, I suppose, there are lots of little things that cause impactful moments to happen a certain way and there isn’t much we’ll ever be able to do to change that, either before or after the fact.
We just keep going as best we can.