Portrait of a Moment: November 22, 1963

This article is the third in a series of articles commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy

It is difficult to watch, even after all these times, and I am certain I have seen it a hundred times, at least.  It is the death of a president—through violence, through murder. Through the Zapruder lens or through the other media—the photos, the articles, or the commentaries—it is all the same.  It is the death of a president, there in his best days, there with his beautiful wife beside him, and there, in that car, carrying with him all the hope of America in his official limousine, heading to his next stop to talk about what he wants to happen in America, this most blessed of all nations, on his campaign tour.

And then it happens.

He is gone.  His wife, scrambling out of the back of the car, looking for an explanation, trying to hold her husband’s body together, and trying to understand the most simple of questions: how was he here one minute, and gone the next?

November 22, 1963, Dallas.  Most every press outlet in the world would carry that flash.

I was a child—a baby—in Memphis, Tennessee, a place that would have its own sorry dateline attached to a press clipping another five years later.  But my generation would grow up with this death, this murder of a president. It would be one of those transformational moments in American history whereby I could ask someone when I was growing up, “Where were you when President Kennedy was killed?”

My basketball coach in junior high said he was sent home from school and went out to the driveway to shoot baskets.  He said he shot baskets that whole day, and he was angry, unable to figure out why someone would want to hurt a president—seemingly liked by many, voted in by many, hated by someone enough to commit this unimaginable treachery, a presidential assassination.

Walter Cronkite said on the news that afternoon—news I was too young to watch or to understand—“From Dallas Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1:00 pm central standard time, 2:00 eastern standard time…Vice president Lyndon Johnson has left the hospital in Dallas but we do not know to where he has preceded; presumably he will take the office as the thirty-sixth president of the United States.”  Cronkite switched his glasses on and off his face and was shaken as he read the news.

Asking people where they were on the day President Kennedy was killed is similar to asking people where they were on September 11, 2001.  Seminal moments in the American experience bring out stories in all of us.  We register our lives in those places and moments; those times are coordinates upon which we fix other events in our lives—marriages, holidays, birthdays, where we were working, where we were playing.

But it is more than this.  It is us, attaching ourselves to history.  It is us claiming ourselves as Americans at a critical moment in American history.  We commemorate death and tragedy just as we celebrate life and success.  It is ritual.  We grasp at the successes that we might overcome the horrors.  It is not just American, however; it is universal.  As we wept for the death of the young president, the world wept with us; as we tried to understand the madness, so the world tried to understand.

This sort of horror became common in the twentieth century— the world wars, the assassinations of Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, plus the other wars, the other deaths, the other terrors that man doled onto his fellow man.

All lives end in death; it is the story of the life that needs to be told. This is the very reason we study history, biography, and portraiture; we seek out stories that are inspirational and passionate, courageous and idealized, often virtuous, and occasionally sad. Those are the stories we must tell our children on these dates of commemorations, holidays, and anniversaries.  Some dates we celebrate heroism, while on other dates we honor births, elections, marriages, and deaths. Some moments are marked by tragedy and we review history through the lens of that moment, that place. 

Such is November 22, 1963, Dallas.     

- Warren Perry, Catalog of American Portraits, National Portrait Gallery