The American Spectator

p> THAT DAY AND JFK br> Re: Wlady Pleszczynski’s November 22, 1963 : /p> p>Thanks for Wlady Pleszczynski’s iconic recollection. On the day President Kennedy was shot, I was 18 years old, on a two-year stint between high school and college, working as a quality control technician for a wire company in Redwood City, California. I remember the color and gauge of the insulation I was testing with a high-voltage charge when our supervisor ran into the QC lab and told us to turn on the radio. All of us who were over seven years of age at the time remember exactly what we were doing on the day Kennedy was murdered. It was at least another week, though, before I learned of another premature death which, even then, seemed to me more consequential. On the same day President Kennedy was assassinated — November 22, 1963 — C.S. Lewis died. br> — John R. Dunlap br> San Jose, California /p>

On That Day, 11-22-63, I was 10 years old, in Painesdale, Michigan (or rather, in the fifth grade classroom of Mr. Anderson, in the Adams Township Elementary School in South Range, Michigan), and in the late afternoon, he received a phone call, left the classroom, and returned shortly to tell us that the President had been shot.

The bus took me home, where my parents were speechless. But you must understand, my Father was a Lapsed Trotskyite. Some months before, I had first heard about the concept of “The Political Prisoner.” I asked Pa about what that meant, and he told me that if he were to stand on the street corner in America and say that Jack Kennedy was an idiot, all he would suffer was opprobrium. (And maybe unemployment: he was a college professor.) Were he to stand on the street corner in Peking and say that Mao Tse-tung was an idiot, he’d be shot.

We in the Upper Peninsula considered ourselves lucky: those missiles that Khrushchev installed in Cuba didn’t have the range to reach us. No thanks to JFK. But once he was gone, the Presidency devolved on LBJ, and God help us all.

p>JFK was elected with a bare majority; our household held the man in great contempt. Let us not join in his apotheosis, for such is greatly unjustified.