USD Magazine, 1993 Winter-Spring 1994

Michael P . Soroka

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n that particular afternoon of my senior year in high school - Nov. 22, 1963 - I was fighting to stay awake in my "Problems of Democracy" class. It was a Losing struggle. Brother O'ReiHy was trying to make the federal government's system of checks and balances inter– esting, but my mind was occupied by more pressing thoughts: both the Long-dreaded Scholastic Aptitude Test and the Long-awaited Thanks– giving dance were coming up, and I was not prepared for either. Just before the dismissal beU rang to end this agony, our shaken principal came on the public address system to announce the news that changed everything. The president had been shot. One era had ended, another was about to begin. Looking back on that day from a distance of 30 years and 3,000 mites, I am stiH amazed at the intensity of my response to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Normatly one to keep my emotions in check, I became unglued as events unfolded in DaUas and in Washington. "This can't reaUy be happening," I thought. "Kennedy hasn't reaUy been shot - weU, maybe he has, but he can't be dead. Maybe he's just wounded and they have him hidden away until he recovers and they catch whoever did this terrible thing." But it soon became painfuUy clear that the president's wounds were fatal. After recovering from the initial shock, my neighbors and I crammed into a beat-up car and headed from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.,

where Kennedy's body Lay in state in the Capitol's rotunda. For eight hours, our tittle neighborhood con– tingent joined a half-miHion people in an eerily hushed march of mourn– ers filing slowly through the rotunda to pay their respects. The bitter, cold wind numbed our bodies much as the events already had numbed our minds. To this day, I'm not sure just why I made that trip, as I never was much of a Kennedy supporter. Cer– tainly, I was glad that a Catholic had at Last been elected president, but unlike many of my friends, I had not been swept away by the glitz and glamour of the Kennedy clan or by the myth of Camelot. Perhaps, on a subconscious Level, I joined that pilgrimage to bring about closure in a world that suddenly had gone chaotic. Closure was not to come, however _ not for me and not for many other members of my generation. The fiag– draped casket in the rotunda was closed. Who could teU whose body, if any, was in there? Perhaps there was something to the rumor that Kennedy, temporarily shattered by the would-be assassin's buUet, was in carefuUy guarded seclusion await– ing fuH recovery and a triumphant return to the White House. But John F. Kennedy never did recover, and neither, it seems, wiH our country.

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