In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, the College community takes time to reflect on the tragedy and share their memories of the tragic event. President Kennedy was scheduled to deliver the 1964 Commencement Address at Holy Cross. Sadly, he never made it to campus that spring.
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I remember well the moment when I heard the news of Kennedy’s assassination.
Early that Saturday morning I was sitting on the outdoor steps of my quarters at Saratok Secondary School, Sarawak, Malaysia. I was a secondary school English teacher with Borneo I, and the first Peace Corps volunteer from Holy Cross. Mr. Singh, a science teacher on
contract from India, came over and informed me solemnly that President Kennedy had been shot and was critically wounded in a Dallas hospital. I thanked him for the information, went inside, listened to VOA on my trusty Philips short wave radio for the rest of the morning, and wept uncontrollably as his death was repeatedly announced. I saw the rest of the teachers during the day – British, Sea Dayak (Iban), Land Dayak – and they all expressed their condolences as well.
How, I wondered throughout the day, was Lyndon Johnson, who had virtually no interest or experience in foreign affairs, going to guide our foreign policy, especially regarding the budding war in Vietnam?
Throughout all the years since – Stanford Graduate School, City College of New York professorship, USAID Foreign Service officer, United Nations consultant, and now USAID contractor -I have never forgotten the despair of the moment.
It was a terrible day.
(James) Matt Seymour ‘62
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On the day JFK was shot, I was a sophomore in college at St. Xavier University in Chicago, Ill. We were sitting in our class waiting for the instructor to arrive. Suddenly, there was a commotion in the hallway and someone came in the room and shouted that JFK had been shot. Everyone just sat there numbed. After a few minutes, we all realized that the instructor was not coming and we began to leave. Some students did not know what to do or where to go.
I was working part-time as a bank teller during college and remember driving to the bank, wondering whether or not it would be open. In fact, when I got to work, the bank president was seriously debating whether or not to stay open. He finally decided to remain open, which was good, because we had a steady stream of customers with their paychecks.
I remember being literally glued to our black and white television set during the weekend. I remember seeing Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on national live television and not really believing what I was seeing. I remember watching the funeral on television and noting how quiet everything was where we lived. There were no cars driving around. Everyone seemed to be in their homes watching television.
The mood of everyone I knew changed after that day. We were shocked that this could happen in the United States of America. This happened in other countries, not in ours. But, as we were to find out in the next few years, public assassinations of public figures was to become commonplace (MLK and RFK).
Tess Huaman, Catalog Librarian (Dinand Library)
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I have a miserable memory. I can hardly remember where I am when I’m still there. But there are things I can’t forget. I remember my wedding, with close to total recall. I remember a Nixon rally in Getty’s Square in Yonkers N.Y. in 1959. I was a Republican then and voted for Nixon in that election, something of which my Democrat father on suitable occasions reminded me. I remember a cold afternoon on South Broadway in that same season when I stood on the sidewalk watching John Kennedy pass in an open car. Though he was a beautiful man I didn’t vote for him.
On Nov. 22, 1963, I was walking into the parish school in Pelham Manor N.Y., to teach a religion class when the principal, Sister Teresa, told me that the president had been shot. I had already become a Democrat and an admirer of John Kennedy, but admirer and Democrat or not, I was shocked by the death of the man and mesmerized by the public events of his funeral. It was one of only a few that cut into the core of my being. I think of the terrible words of Michael Corleone, “If history teaches us anything it is that anyone can be killed.” And the words of Jesus, “…unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” We have civil rights legislation as the fruit of Kennedy’s death. God save us from another such price.
William M. Shea, Director
Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture
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That day I was a 25 year old graduate student at the University of Rochester, returning from lunch to work in my carrel in Rush Rhees Library. Someone had a radio on in a car in the parking lot, and a small knot of people had gathered. I went over and was stunned by the news: President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was being rushed to a nearby hospital. Some friends of mine joined the group. We listened for awhile, then agreed to meet at our apartment across town.
I drove with the radio on and heard the news that the President was dead. For three days (or was it a week?)my wife and I hardly left the living room and the t.v., rising to care for our baby, to greet or say farewell to guests, dozing off from time to time, but riveted by the dramas of history before us: the capture of Lee Harvey Oswald, his assassination live on the screen, the dignity and leadership of the new President, the dead President’s brother and his widow. “How do they do it,” we kept asking each other.
As a young Irish-Catholic from Massachusetts, enthusiastically anti-communist, I had been skeptical about our too liberal Senator John Kennedy until he ran for President in 1960. With my Notre Dame classmates I fell for him (the phrase is apt) when he visited us in February, 1960. Over the chapel door on that campus are the words “For God, Country and Notre Dame” and those all came together for me and my classmates in the campaign of our first Catholic President. His inauguration, with prayers pronounced in the raspy voice of Boston’s Richard Cardinal Cushing, his inaugural address, with its appeal to ask not what our country could do for us but what we could do for our country, his eloquence, informal grace, and contagious confidence made it a religious moment, a high point of my own civil religion. I admired him politically, but that day I realized that, in some mysterious way, I loved him, and my country.
So, too, his passing (the whole experience, from the shots in Dallas until the laying to rest in Arlington) was not just seen on t.v., but was experienced by all of us Americans, a shared liturgy which for a moment bound us together in a generous, compassionate spirit, one people, an experience comparable in my post-World War II lifetime only with the aftermath of 9/11.
Then, in 1963, I would not have understood the words “sacramental imagination,” now used to characterize how Catholics experience the world, but that was, in fact, precisely correct. For me, and those with whom I experienced November, 1963, there was a shared sacrament of solidarity that forms, and still forms, my feelings about life and history and our United States. A moment of incredible loss, experienced by so many of us, gathered before television sets, as genuine personal loss, was at the very same time a moment of revelation and communion. Like it or not, wherever we go, we go together.
David O’Brien, History Department
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It’s amazing the details you remember about such events, but I remember sitting in my fifth grade class when one of the other teachers came in and interrupted our class to tell our teacher.
At the time, we didn’t know what was happening, but by her reaction, we knew it was very bad. She then told us the president had been shot and that there was no other news.
When the other teacher came back a short time later, they both told us the terrible news, that the president was dead.
We were dismissed early that day, and like most other people in the country, the next few days were spent in front of the television watching the funeral services.
As a child, I remember feeling very proud that a president was elected from Massachusetts named Kennedy. My name is Kennedy, so the death of John Kennedy was like losing a family member.
I can’t believe it’s been 40 years….
Joan (Kennedy) Champagne, Purchasing
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I was in the Peace Corps in 1963. In fact, I was the director of one of the training centers for Central and Latin America volunteers. It was called Camp Crozier and was located in a tropical rain forest in Puerto Rico. We had been alerted that following the President’s visit to Dallas. He was planning to come to the Caribbean for a five-day vacation with Mrs. Kennedy. He was planning a visit to our Training Center. We were excited, only to have our hopes and the hopes of the Nation snuffed out in Dallas.
John J. O’Neill, ‘51
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On Nov. 22, 1963, I was just coming up from dinner at the Jesuit house where I was living in Sankt Andrae in Lavantal, Austria. It was 7:00 Austrian time, 1:00 in the States. Several of us Americans gathered around the radio to listen to the evening news from the Army News Network in Germany. We were stunned when we heard that the President had been shot.Four years before we had heard him give his acceptance speech in August, 1959. He was the hope of our future.
After we had heard the confirmation of his death, we sat around silently. Jesuits from other countries went to their rooms and brought back candy and other tokens of support and sympathy. I remember especially the kindness of a jovial, burly German Jesuit who came to my room with a bottle of vodka, some saltpork in a heavy wrapping, and some slices of black bread–his way of sharing in our sadness.
I have never forgotten that act of brotherly kindness. The next morning as we went through the town streets in our cassocks to the churches where we said mass, people stopped the Americans to offer sympathy and condolences. Unfortunately I experienced grief away from home give years later when I awoke in bed and breakfast in Glasgow, Scotland, to learn that Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.
Rev. Philip Rule, S.J., English Department
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I was in the 5th grade and had not gone to school since I was mildly ill. My mother, a teacher, was at school, however, and my father, a farmer, was outside working in a field. When the news flash came on CBS (the only channel we got on our TV!!), at about 1:50 p.m. I ran outside to tell my father. He was, of course, shocked but continued his outdoor work on what seemed to me to be a bitingly cold day.
I also clearly remember having a day off from school the day JFK was buried (I guess every kid WOULD remember that) and my mother allowing us to eat in the living room as we watched the events of the day unfold. I was most impressed by the riderless horse which followed the caisson, that was not cooperating and was giving its handler difficulty.
Jane Reynolds, Administrative Assistant
Vice President for Student Affairs/Dean of Students
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Nov. 22, 1963 found me in a third grade classroom in Soutern California. I went home for lunch that day, to discover my mother and a traveling saleslady glued to the television to receive news of President Kennedy’s wounding and announcement of his death. It was a very somber school to which I returned that afternoon, and for many days thereafter we children were gathered in the cafeteria to watch television news and the ensuing events. The newspapers of those days and the issues of Life Magazine were preserved in our home, and while poring over them in the years to come may not have been the key factor that made me a historian, they certainly impressed upon me the power of history-making events.
On Nov. 22, 1988, I married Professor Emeritus James Powers. We chose this day with great deliberation, and not any sense of ghoulish irony. We both remembered where we had been that day 25 years earlier: I am probably the youngest person he could have married who would have had a personal memory of the event. As historians, we revere the study of the past, the commemoration of courage and achievement, and the richness that history imparts to our culture and our lives. Marriage is a sharing of memories as well as a giving of one’s selves, and our anniversaries inevitably have a resonance beyond the personal.
Lorraine Attreed, History Department
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Like most everyone else who lived through it, I have a well-etched memory of that day. These memories were revitalized last year when Chris Matthews published his book Now Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, including me in his memoir of that day (p. 89), and also mentioning me in his interview with Tim Russert on MSNBC. Colleagues both inside and outside the College informed me of these occasions, much to my surprise. Chris mentioned me again in his recent TV special on MSNBC (17 November 2003). Since some of my reaction on that day is now part of the “public record,” I believe it is worthwhile to fill in the rest of the story.
I had started my first year of teaching at Holy Cross that fall, fresh out of graduate school at the University of Virginia, my doctoral dissertation still in progress. I had just finished dining at the faculty lunchroom in Fenwick (now occupied by Graphic Arts), and was headed for my afternoon history survey class in Haberlin Hall, when I was intercepted by some of the students in that class. They informed me of the terrible news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was in the hospital there. Would we be having class? Green as I was, I had no certainty as to how to react. The College administration had made it clear that one met classes unless one was physically unable to do so, and Holy Cross also had a severe and enforced cut policy for students. The students accompanied me the remainder of the way to class while I pondered what to do regarding this unhappy situation.
Once there, I announced that I believed myself obligated to hold the class, but in concern for the troubled students, I permitted anyone who wished to follow the news to leave free of any recorded cut. Chris Matthews must have left with that group. I would have liked to have taken an unrecorded cut myself, but perceived duty has a strange way of holding you back from what you would like to do. It has to have been the most difficult class I have ever attempted to teach. One student had a portable radio with an earpiece, and requested that he be able to listen to the news during class. I let him do so with the proviso that he inform us if something happened regarding the President’s condition. About two-thirds of the way through the class, that same student raised his hand and told us that they had announced John Kennedy’s death. The pretense of continuing the class was no longer possible, and I asked everyone remaining to pray for the President and his family, and dismissed them.
As I packed up to leave the classroom, a student came up to me and reminded me that I was supposed to administer a make-up exam to him after class. Almost unbelieving, I asked whether he was sure he wished to do this, and he insisted that he did. Since I had his exam with me, I presented it, telling him to take all the time that he needed. He certainly had a better grip on priorities than I did at that point. I stayed in the large, almost empty, room as he wrote. By this time the fading light of a late November day was beginning to darken our surroundings, while I stared out the window of the Haberlin classroom at the western hills, increasingly shrouded in gloom, unable to seek the consolation of family and colleagues for the time being. The dying day seemed to foreshadow the dark times to come.
James Powers, Professor of History Emeritus
