As many of us were doing this past week, Jim and I were recalling the terrible days following the assassination of JFK. [He was living in Japan with his family and I was in 8th grade.] This past week we've each come across some unusual stories.
Here are three stories you may not have seen.
"...'one of the most emotional pieces of radio ever recorded'...what is most remarkable to me as as listener, hearing the Boston broadcast from Symphony Hall on that Friday afternoon, is the sense of how those people in that time and place — performer and audience member alike — process this shocking event collectively, in a way that is totally unimaginable to us 50 years later, as we learn each minute's news within the weirdly solitary glow of our screens. First, we hear the gasps and shushes after BSO music director Erich Leinsdorf utters the words: 'The president of the United States has been the victim of an assassination.' Second, a wave of groans and sighs after Leinsdorf continues, 'We will play the funeral march from 's Third Symphony" — as if the crowd's shared response is that they couldn't possibly have heard the first part right, but that then the orchestra's change in repertoire confirms the awful, unimaginable truth. And then, for the next 14 minutes ... utter silence, save for the incomparably somber music.'"
[Ten minutes before the start of the performance the orchestra received the parts of a Beethoven funeral march as they were being told that President Kennedy had been shot and was dead.]
Read the story of Clint Hill, the bodyguard who believed all of his life that if he'd been a second sooner, leaping onto the back of the president's car, he could've saved his life.
'I completely failed': Guilt that still haunts bodyguard assigned to protect JFK's wife Jackie on day President was assassinated 49 years ago
And
two classic newspaper columns by Jimmy Breslin - one about the surgeon in charge when Kennedy was brought to the emergency room at Parkland Hospital and the other, about the man who dug the grave where the president's body was put to rest.
As many of us were doing this past week, Jim and I were recalling the terrible days following the assassination of JFK. [He was living in Japan with his family and I was in 8th grade.] This past week we've each come across some unusual stories.
