On a pleasant Ohio Friday in late November 1963, I stuffed my battered green book bag into the side basket of my bike and pedaled to my psychology class. I recently had returned to Oberlin College after my junior year abroad and was looking forward to Thanksgiving.
At the intersection of North Professor and West College streets, a classmate on a motorbike called out: “Janet, have you heard? The president’s been shot.”
“Carr?” I said, thinking of Robert Carr, the unpopular Oberlin president.
“No — Kennedy,” he said. “He’s not expected to live.”
On automatic, I continued pedaling to class. Suddenly the strap of my book bag became entangled in the spokes of my bike, bringing me to a halt. I continued on foot, locked the bike in front of the lecture hall and walked inside.
There was no lecture. The psychology professor paced back and forth, grim-faced. A classmate behind me had a radio. She was crying.
“Is he … ?” I asked.
She nodded.
I walked out. Students gathered on the steps. A classmate with a motor scooter took me back to my dorm, and I wandered aimlessly from room to room.
Have you heard? Have you heard?
Faces showed who had heard.
To my generation, Kennedy was a savior. Eisenhower was old, kind and avuncular, but uninspiring. Nixon was downright scary. Kennedy was youthful, charismatic.
He can’t be dead. He can’t be.
My thoughts raced back to freshman year, when I had boarded a bus to nearby Lorain, Ohio, to hear the young candidate speak. His hair shone golden in the autumn sunlight, and I was struck not only by his movie-star looks, but by his vision.
“I look to the 1960s with a good deal of confidence and hope,” Kennedy said.
We, too, looked to the 1960s with confidence and hope. Was it over for us?
Slowly people returned to the dorm, crying, sitting in silence or asking questions. The housemother, who had a color TV, opened the door to her sitting room. Reports filtered in. A motorcade. A grassy knoll. Gov. John Connally. The Texas School Book Depository. Lee Harvey Oswald arrested. Lyndon Johnson sworn in aboard Air Force One as Jackie watched, still in her bloodstained suit.
I headed to the Oberlin Review for the weekly editorial board meeting. We needed an editorial on the president’s death. Stan Ornstein and I were elected. Too numb to think, we probably wrote what we thought we should say, but what could any of us say?
That evening, the college held a service in Finney Chapel. The college provost said the death was tragic, “particularly for us Christians.”
Quickly, grief turned to righteous indignation. I spewed out my thoughts in a letter to the editor. The assassination of a beloved president, I wrote, was no more catastrophic to Christians than to the rest of the college community, or indeed, to the country at large. Were the feelings of Christians more noteworthy simply because of Oberlin’s history as “an avowedly Christian college”? “Because it’s always been that way” was not a good answer. Not anymore.
Although Oberlin had a significant Jewish population in the 1960s, we Jews had our issues. Before Sunday lunch, we stared silently as students sang a Christian grace. An all-campus women’s picnic was held on Yom Kippur. Classes took place on Saturdays, and there was no kosher dining. But that was then. Several years later, Oberlin dropped the “avowedly Christian” phrase from its catalog, hired a Hillel rabbi and created a kosher dining hall. Oberlin now has a Jewish president.
But memories of the assassination bare layers of pain.
That Thanksgiving, I couldn’t think of much to be thankful for, and I had no idea where my future lay. Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” was published in 1963, but it took a decade for her message to penetrate the workplace and for my career to get off the ground.
Fifty years after the Nov. 22 tragedy, I recall Kennedy aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s poignant assessment of the end of innocence. When columnist Mary McGrory said, “We’ll never laugh again,” Moynihan demurred.
“Heavens, Mary,” he said. “Of course we’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.”
And yet, despite that loss of innocence — other assassinations, world tragedies, a divorce, the loss of parents — I remember how it felt to be 21 and full of hope for the future. Despite everything, I’ve never lost hope.