End of the Innocence

On Friday, November 22, 1963, at 1:30 p.m., I was sitting in the cafeteria of Central Catholic High School in Norwalk, waiting for the bell at 2 p.m. to end study hall and signal the end of another school week. There were real study halls in those days, or at least there was no talking allowed, so that the scream which echoed in the hallway outside the cafeteria seemed exceptionally loud as it pierced the uneasy silence. Moments later the principal made an announcement over the P.A. system that President Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas a short time ago.

There were gasps and other sounds expressing shock, followed by conversation among the students in their seats and the teachers on duty. My memory of where I was when I heard that horrible news is as clear today as it was fifty years ago.

This horrific crime marked the end of the innocence of a whole generation of Americans: the baby-boomers then in high school, who were in the process of planning for college and careers afterwards, and who thought that they could have a positive impact on their society, if not the world at large. That dream could still be fulfilled, but not without the knowledge of the cruelty of the world and the evil perpetrated by some people, and the powerlessness of any of us to change those harsh facts of life. We were permanently scarred and disillusioned from that day on, and the sadness and anger I felt then have not faded much, even fifty years later. Life is innately unjust, not only because bad things happen to good people every day but because we are so often powerless to stop such things from happening and because one evil person can permanently alter the lives of so many people for the worse. 

I will never believe that one man acting alone had the ability to kill the President of the United states, nor that the assassin’s killer simply walked into the Dallas police station two days later and shot him on his own. The whole aftermath of the assassination is not the subject of this essay, but the succession of events in America - including the escalation of the Vietnam War which divided the country, the incredible assassinations of Senator Robert Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. within two months of each other in 1968, the Watergate scandal, the attempted assassination of President Reagan – had a lasting negative effect on a whole generation.