It was 2:35 EST on November 22, 1963 at Amity Regional Junior High School in Bethany, CT and this was my big moment.
It was my first run for student council. My first-ever talk before an extremely large audience. The auditorium was brimming with a captive 7th and 8th graders gathered to listen to candidates, and I was trying to convince them to choose me for Treasurer.
This was only my second year in the Amity district. My father Richard Gandelman had moved my mother, Helen, my sister Nona, my brother, Roger, and our dogs George and Jessica from suburban New Haven to nearby, wealthier suburban Woodbridge at the start of my 7th grade. The reason: Amity schools were considered excellent and as good as private schools. Socially, I was an unknown quantity, and had no idea how to give a speech that wouldn’t embarrass me, so I tried the line my sister Nona had suggested the night before. “A lot of you don’t know me,” I told the crowd. “I’m just a regular kid who likes girls, elephant jokes, pizza pies.”
Well, in the early 60s that kind of speech could work (it didn’t). And, heaving a huge sigh of relief, my speech, FINALLY over, I returned to my seat.
I was fixated on mentally processing the fact I had gotten up and talked to so many of my peers — a BIG audience, not like my bar mitzvah audience a little less than a year before filled with the faces of smiling relatives and understanding kid friends. Another candidate for Treasurer gave her pitch, then another. I sat and looked but I barely heard them. I was too engrossed in my own self-conscious thoughts.
Then, at 2:45 EST, right before it was time for dismissal to the waiting buses outside, the principal got up and said something softly to the group.
And there was a loud collective GASP.
It was a sudden taking in of breath, a buzz from the crowd, then a quiet buzz.
It took me a few seconds to shift gears. I was still wondering whether I had humiliated myself. whether the other kids would think my speech was too corny, or if I should have added some humor, or if I would never live it down if lived to be 82. Just as I hadn’t heard the other speeches, I didn’t hear what the principal said a little at 2:45.
But clearly something had happened — something that I had never seen before.
I wondered why they they were filing out the way they were.
Some groups of kids were silent.
Some looked shocked.
No one was smiling or joking.
Some talked softly.
There was weird look on their faces I had never seen at school in all my 13 years, and there was a supremely sad look on the adults’ faces that I could not imagine ever seeing in a school.
It just didn’t compute.
I ran over to my math teacher Mr. Doyle, who was leaving the auditorium with his homeroom class.
“My Doyle: what happened? What did he say?”
Mr. Doyle, a kindly man who had the burden of teaching match to snotty kids who didn’t appreciate his dedication, patience and compassion and mostly made fun of his Baaaston accent, stopped and looked down on one of the school’s shortest 8th graders with a look of sadness and pain for having to explain.
“The President has been shot,” he told me softly.
It was a jolt. The President? Shot? Like Lincoln? I had been fascinated with Lincoln. It was impossible. Like many I had admired John F. Kennedy. I had watched his live press conferences, I didn’t understand anything about politics as a fifth grader, but I had watched two of the Kennedy-Nixon debates and loved him. A month earlier I had tinkered with a tiny printing press my father, a printer, had gifted me. I listened to a JFK speech live on New York’s newsradio station and asked my father: “Do you think the President will win if he runs again?”
I couldn’t comprehend what Mr. Doyle had just told me.
So I asked a question, partly because I wanted to know the answer, and partly due to being in denial:
“Is he dead?”
“Yes,” Mr. Doyle sighed. “He is dead.”
It was funny how the normal boistrous Thank-God-We’re-Out din of 7th and 8th graders vanished that day.
We got on our buses, which had speakers that usually blared local rock stations’ Top 40 nearly drown out by boisterous junior high schoolers. But this time WAVZ was all news bulletins.
National newscasters talked about the killing.
The local DJs who always talked in that supposedly cool 1960s cookie cutter patter that they all used in those days now talked like normal human beings.
The bus was quieter than I had ever heard it.
I came home and when I saw my mother she was red eyed and sad. I don’t remember what she said that day except that she was in a state of grief.
TV that day was all assassination news all the time — the first time all three networks threw out their schedules, united a nation in shock and in grief and became a forerunner of the early CNN.
That the night I was scheduled to sleep over the house of my friend at the time, Larry Garber, who was a grade lower than me. My mother drove me from our home on Tallwood Road to Larry’s house on Tumblebook Road. The radio continued to give more details about JFK’s murder, shocked reaction, and the whereabouts of the newly sworn in President Lyndon Johnson.
Just before we had gotten into the car, my mother looked at TV with the photo of Lee Harvey Oswald.
“I can’t stand to even look at him,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
When I was with Larry and his family that night the TV was on constantly. We sat on a coach and watched on the black and white TV tuned to ABC the arrival of newly sworn-in PresidentLyndon Johnson in Washington D.C at night, the lights shining on LBJ as he deplaned with his wife, and said his first words as President: “This is a sad time for all people. We have suffered a loss that cannot be weighed. For me, it is a deep, personal tragedy. I know the world shares the sorrow that Mrs. Kennedy and her family bear. I will do my best; that is all I can do. I ask for your help and God’s.”
A few days later, I watched TV and saw Jack Ruby murder accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald live. My father was sitting in his den with my grandmother, Anna Gandelman, who had suffered a stroke a few years before but was mobile and could speak in limited sentences. I ran in and told him what happened and he quickly turned on TV.
“This means that for years — fifty years from now — they’ll be arguing about who shot Kennedy and why.”
There are lots of nice, ringing beautiful, poignant phrases about what the murder represented, and where people were that day, and its impact and you’ll find them in a lot of columns and posts. Some are near works of literary art. But slice away all accounts about Where Were You When Kennedy Was Shot and the bottom line is this:
Things were indeed never the same.
It was like a big hand had sucker punched America in the stomach, and stole something from them forever and no one could compensate us or definitively explain the crime.
Yes, it was a murder; but it was also a major mugging.
Kennedy had been the epitome of The Greatest Generation World War II veteran in so many of his attitudes, humor, swagger, and world view. Today, when many young people see Mad Men or see the swagger of a Frank Sinatra video for the first time, they note how different the era was in the way people behaved and were. JFK was indicative of the 40-year-olds who had started to replace the older generation typified by grandfatherly-looking Dwight Eisenhower. His generation, which had lived through the depression and World War II and was shaped by the advent of sound movies, was now in charge. He had his many critics, but he was cool to people of all ages.
And he had something Americans had not been able to experience collectively in great numbers: due to TV, you could feel his grace, charisma and wisdom. It jumped out from the tube and grabbed you.
Anyone who lived through the times can recall how while he was alive despite his many setbacks, it was felt he was learning in office and could turn out to be “another FDR.”
Even before the bullets made him a martyr, many Americans sensed that this was a special man and we were living through a special Presidency in a special time. And that the sky and outerspace itself was the limit — or, rather, no limit (he made that clear).
He had sparked a cottage industry in Kennedy spoof cartoons, a best selling comedy satire album, “The First Family.” This branding beyond the image created by his father and political handlers was partially due to his skillful use of the press conference, where his humor reached right through the TV tube to charm audiences. And it seemed organic, not scripted. He was a natural.
Videos of him give a glimpse of the moving, living man — not the man in the photos or grainy film being shot, or that guy with part of his head open, lying on his back with his eyes fixed open in that autopsy photo. That was the JFK who had captured much of America’s heart.
It wasn’t just that “the President was shot.”
It was that an engaging, dynamic, promising young American whose family symbolized the vitality and hopes of youth, who had something about him that suggested the promise of greatness, and who symbolized a new generation, had been grabbed from us in the most abrupt, brutal way.
Watch this collection of his most engaging press conference moments — which is virtual news to most Americans who only now think of him as an assassinated President. MUST VIEWING:
There was also was a little personal fallout when Kennedy was killed. I became a political junkie on 11/22/1963, developing an insatiable appetite for political news. And I have concluded as many have who were just coming of age at that time:
Someone may be referred to as “another Kennedy,” but there was only one real JFK.
The living JFK is seemingly lost in the focus on how he died on that day 50 years and a world ago.
But when you take the time to watch a video of him and can sense the spirit, you’ll get a better idea — even in light of all the negative tidbits that have come out about his personal life since then — of why we all cared.
And care.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.