Most people cognizant on November 22, 1963 know exactly where they were and what they were doing when they found out President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

But I think the details are more shocking – and would have been to people in 1954 – than the idea that an American president could be murdered. It had been nearly a century since Abraham Lincoln was murdered, and two other presidents had been slain – James Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901.

That’s not to mention the attempts. In my parents’ lifetimes, a gunman missed then President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami, killing Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak (there’s some question as to whether Cermak, not FDR, was the target). And just in November 1950, a Secret Service agent died foiling an attempt to kill President Harry Truman.

But President Kennedy’s death hit Americans harder. It’s not that he was universally loved – he was facing a tough re-election fight against arch-conservative Barry Goldwater, who happened to be a friend of his.

It’s partly because he was a relatively young man – JFK was 46. It’s partly because he was on the upsurge in popularity, having stood up to the Soviets in Cuba a year before and negotiated a nuclear weapons treaty. 

And it’s partly because Americans watched this crime unfold on television in real time.

They saw Walter Cronkite tearfully delivering the bulletin of the president’s death. They watched the casket come off Air Force One in Washington that evening. They were glued to their TV sets for the president’s lying in state at the Capitol and the chilly funeral procession to Arlington National Cemetery. They watched Jackie Kennedy bear up and 3-year-old JFK Jr. salute as the caisson passed.

And Americans – including my Dad and I, who were waiting for my Mom to dress for a dinner out to celebrate their 12th anniversary – watched live as another gunman emerged from a crowd at a Dallas police station and shot suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

The impressions of that weekend before Thanksgiving were indelible. And no matter how much you can imagine some cataclysmic event, it’s still shocking to think it actually happened.

The Kennedy Assassination was an event that scarred Americans. There are some on the left who believe the problems of the next 25 years were a result of JFK and his coterie of the best and the brightest – including his brother, Robert, killed in 1968 – not being there.

My mother was devastated. I remember seeing her crying at the door of our first-floor apartment in Flushing as I ran home, in tears myself, from school. She was one who believed in the Camelot aura. 

Much as I said about Vietnam, the country was never the same after the assassination. A presidential slaying was imaginable in 1954. But that doesn’t make it any less shocking.