We seem to have made it through the 50th anniversary remembrance of the Kennedy Assassination. An interesting point I've seen on several blogs is that this is probably the last "round number" anniversary which will involve the participation of a significant number of folks who were in Dallas that day and involved. There's also, of course, been a demographic shift over the years. When we had the 10th anniversary, most of America still remembered that day and everyone had their own memory of where they were when they heard and how it felt to hear that "your" president had been murdered. Today, most of America was either too young for anything to have registered or wasn't born yet.
On 2/9/56, the game show I've Got A Secret had on a gentleman named Samuel J. Seymour, who was then 95 years old, though for some reason he gave his age as 96. Mr. Seymour, who passed away two months after this broadcast when he actually was 96, was the last surviving person who witnessed the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Here's the video. It looks to me like the panelists guessed his secret immediately but played dumb for a little while so as to not terminate the segment too rapidly. You can almost sense Bill Cullen trying to draw it out. Then questioning passes to Jayne Meadows, who has nowhere to go but to guess it…
It struck me last weekend that in just a few decades, someone who was a child in Dealey Plaza on 11/22/63 is going to be the Samuel J. Seymour of the Kennedy Assassination. And when that person goes at age 105, conspiracy buffs will probably be sure he or she was murdered to keep them from talking.
And at some point, those of us who were "witnesses once removed" — not there in Dallas but following the story in real time on TV — will also be few in number. Everyone will be able to watch the videos of that weekend's news coverage but we're the ones who saw it unfold without knowing what would come next. I remember that as a key element on November 22: No one knew what would come next. For hours there, we didn't know that the shooting of President Kennedy wasn't the first step in a series of attacks. Would Lyndon Johnson be shot next? Would the Russians then attack Washington? A kid today watching that day's news footage knows going in that the Kennedy Assassination was only the Kennedy Assassination. For a few hours that day, we didn't know that.
It was the same on 9/11/01. Many of us awoke to the news of the first plane hitting. Many of us were watching when the second plane hit. How many more would there be? Then came word of Plane #3. Would there be a Plane #4 and a Plane #5 and a Plane #27? The horrors of just watching the World Trade Center fall and the Pentagon hit were bad enough. For an hour or three there, the thoughts of what might come next were even worse.
I watched a lot of JFK-related programming this year on and around the anniversary of his death. Maybe my viewing selections were not typical but I saw less of two things than I have in past years. I saw fewer shows that, while ostensibly about the death of our 35th president were actually just the press congratulating itself on what a brave, efficient job it did of covering the news that day. (For the record, I don't think it was that brave or that efficient.)
More interesting to me is that I also saw fewer shows that gave credibility to the view that Oswald couldn't have acted alone; that there had to be dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of conspirators behind the murder of John F. Kennedy. (For the record, I don't think there were. Yes, the government does lie to us but that's not proof they did in this matter.)
I even saw a few shows that talked about John Kennedy — who he was, what he did and what he might have done had he lived. (For the record, I just plain don't know. I'm skeptical though of the belief that he would have done all the good things Lyndon Johnson did but none of the bad.)
Somewhere in all that, I got the feeling that this was the last time a lot of attention would be paid to 11/22/63 and that it was passing from an important date in "our" history to an important date in history, period. The shooting of Lincoln…the Great Depression…the bombing of Pearl Harbor…these are all events that happened to other people in another era. The ones who were alive to experience the more recent ones in real time are increasingly like ol' Samuel J. Seymour — novelties. Maybe in a way, that's a good thing. I've spent way too much of my life thinking about what happened in Dallas that day.