Days of Infamy

Every decade in modern times seems to have had its day of infamy. And each month, more or less:

Great San Francisco Earthquake, Apr. 18, 1906

Shirtwaist Triangle Factory Fire, Mar. 25, 1911

The Sinking of the Titanic, Apr. 15, 1912

The Stock Market Crash, Oct. 24 and 29, 1929

The Hindenburg Disaster, May 6, 1937

The Pearl Harbor Attack, Dec. 7, 1941

1st Atomic Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima, Aug. 6, 1945

The Andrea Dorea Collision, July 26, 1956

JFK Assassination, Nov. 22, 1963

The Watergate Break-In, June 17, 1972

The Challenger Explosion, Jan. 28, 1986

The World Trade Center Bombing, Feb. 26, 1993

The 9/11 Attacks, Sept. 11, 2001

Each event was different, in its own way. Today is Nov. 22. Forty-seven years ago, in 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Tex. I was four and playing in my room. Suddenly, I heard women crying out in the street. I pulled myself up to the window. The neighborhood women had gathered in the middle of the road into a group. I remember some of them were wearing jumpers, others the A-line skirts of the day. Their glasses were of the black-rimmed variety.

My mother was talking to my grandmother on the telephone. They’d both been listening to radio station WOR. My mother said something to the effect that it was official – the president was dead. She thought my father would probably remain at work but that the schools would probably close and that Billy would be coming home very soon.

She then went to the door, hearing the women crying. She was saw me looking out at waved at me to get away from the window. School would be closing. Billy would be coming home. I’d have someone to play with. Arthur, 2, was taking his nap. He was the same age as John-John. He’d be three in December.

Though my parents were not fans of Kennedy’s, they were still very sad. They felt sorry for his children and his family. He was, after all, so young, only in his forties. Even if you didn’t like his politics, you couldn’t help enjoying his speeches. He was a fantastic orator. He had a great speechwriter and he did well in his ad-libs with the press.

A day or so later, we would watch in shock as his murderer was murdered, right on national television. That was what set this particular disaster apart from previous disasters. There was still photography of the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake, but none of the sinking of the Titanic; only the account of the survivors and empty berth on the Hudson with a few displaced rowboats. The same with the Andrea Dorea, though she remained afloat long enough to be photographed. Newspaper reports of the Triangle Fire and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, with gory photos of the victims, provided us with information, though not the same sense of urgency. We weren’t “part” of the news, only witnesses. With the advent of newsreels and radio, we got nearer to the action with the Hindenburg and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Newsreel coverage showed us the devastation of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. But the Kennedy assassination brought all the media together. We wouldn’t see the Zapruder film until years later, putting us at the scene. But like 9/11, almost 40 years later, no matter where you were in America, or even the world, you felt the aftershock. We still have the newspapers from that date.

As television coverage progressed, we came closer and closer to the scene of the disaster. Newscasts didn’t capture the Watergate break-in, but it did capture the collapse of a presidency in 1973. Thirteen years later, live coverage would capture the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, though most of us who were working wouldn’t see it until we got home that evening.

No video was available to capture the first World Trade Center bombing. But once it happened, we again witnessed the aftermath. The only reason we didn’t feel the tremor was because President Clinton treated as a normal crime rather than the act of war that it really was.

Then came 9/11, and we finally started looking back at the terrible events in history that we’d either been first or second-hand, real-time witnesses to. Every day, some documentarian is trying to predict that next, great tragendy. Will it be another great earthquake? A super-volcano in Yellowstone National Park? A giant meteor crashing into the planet? The start of a nuclear war? A massive annihilation or the grim death of a single, famous figure.

My mother’s cousin was a doctor at Bethesda Naval Hospital. He assisted in President Kennedy’s Washington, D.C., autopsy. He sent a copy of the report, with photos, to my grandfather in 1968. I was then nine. I remember looking at the gruesome pictures. I’m no conspiracy theorist, but seeing the photos, I can’t understand how they think he was only shot from behind. But all the principal actors in that drama are gone now, so it really doesn’t matter.

Let us pray that our nation will never have to go through another period of mourning like we did in November, 1963.