Nation Turns Solemn on JFK’s 50th Death Anniversary

It was the same time, 12:30 p.m., Friday, Nov. 22. It was the same place, downtown Dallas.

But 50 years later, the thousands of people who filled Dealey Plaza weren’t there to cheer but to remember in quiet sadness the young, energetic president with whom Dallas will always be “linked in tragedy.”

The solemn ceremony presided over by Mayor Mike Rawlings was the first time the city had organized an official Kennedy anniversary event, issuing 5,000 free tickets and erecting a stage with video screens.

“We watched the nightmarish reality in our front yard,” Rawlings told the crowd, which assembled just steps from the Texas School Book Depository building where Lee Harvey Oswald fired from the sixth floor at Kennedy’s open-top limousine. “Our president had been taken from us, taken from his family, taken from the world.”

Past anniversaries in Dealey Plaza have been marked mostly by loose gatherings of the curious and conspiracy-minded, featuring everything from makeshift memorials and marching drummers to freewheeling discussions about others who might have been in on the killing.

On Friday, the mayor unveiled a plaque with remarks the president was supposed to deliver later that day in Dallas. Rawlings’ comments were followed by a mournful tolling of bells and a moment of silence at the precise time that Kennedy was shot.

Shortly after sunrise, Attorney General Eric Holder paid his respects at Kennedy’s recently refurbished grave at Arlington National Cemetery, where a British cavalry officer stood guard, bagpipes played and a flame burned steadily as it has since Kennedy was buried.

About an hour later, Jean Kennedy Smith, 85, the last surviving Kennedy sibling, laid a wreath at her brother’s grave, joined by about 10 members of the Kennedy family.

The tributes extended across the Atlantic to Kennedy’s ancestral home in Ireland.

In Dublin, more than a dozen retired Irish army officers who, as teenage cadets, had formed an honor guard at Kennedy’s graveside, gathered in the front garden of the embassy to remember the first Irish-American to become leader of the free world.

This article appeared in print on page 3 of the November 25th, 2013 edition of Hamodia.