I was five in 1963. Kennedy was a Catholic; he was from the northeast; he was young, and had a young wife and kids that were the same age as my sister and me. I don't know if my family had voted for him - but we were Catholics and he was one of us.
There are some odds ways that I feel connected to Jack Kennedy. We share the same birthday. There were the two children - and the son who died. My mother had a baby boy who died four days after his birth (1962). She had miscarried at least once, like Jackie. I didn't now that when I was little, of course. But it's his death, and the funeral, and then my mother's death and funeral less than a year later, that really seal this link.
I remember JFK's funeral: the adults huddled around the TV for hours. I remember the drums, hearing the horses' hooves on the pavement; those children, Jackie, and all the military and dignitaries. The riderless horse with boots reversed in the stirrups mesmerized me. I liked horses; this horse was out of some mythical realm. I remember Oswald getting shot on national TV and not understanding why everyone was upset, because after all he was the bad guy, who had killed Kennedy. The funeral made a deep, deep impression.
My mother was already sick with breast cancer. I have a few fragmented memories of her illness...she died in September of 1964. It's coming up on 50 years. Her funeral and Kennedy's merged somehow in my experience....my family apparently felt it would be too traumatic for us kids to go to the funeral and the burial, though we did go to the wake and I remember it well: the relatives sobbing, all in black; kneeling at the casket, saying a prayer. I think I felt somehow I was with the Kennedys, and I knew what this was all abou because of that. And since I wasn't at my mother's funeral, that televised funeral has taken on all the more significance.
Maybe a year later I was waiting to cross the street in Yonkers, NY and there were a lot of people and a man in an open car with a bullhorn yelling "Senator Kennedy is coming!" This one was Bobby....he went by waving, on campaign. I felt again some kind of connection; it was Jack's brother.
And then he was gone too. When Jackie remarried, some of my relatives were disapproving, but my matriarchal aunt basically gave her a pass: after what she had been through no one could judge. We all went on and faced the rest of our lives.
Many are writing today with memories and some are offering new theories, or debunking Camelot, and drawing analogies between the haters in those times and the Tea Partiers now. I have been steeping all week in pictures, film, and audio that has catapulted me back to my earliest memories and formative experiences. I am almost unable to read another word, and if you are reading this I guess you aren't quite done yet....but I want to share the memory of the drums, the procession, the solemnity and the grief. Peace to all.