INFLECTION–NOVEMBER 22, 1963
Note: The following story is from my forthcoming memoir, Face Laite: A Good Catholic Boy Takes on the Swinging ‘60s, expected to be published later in 2026.
It was about 2:30 on the Friday afternoon before Thanksgiving. The school day was about over, and the weekend was achingly close. In Sister Judy’s second-grade class at L’École Sainte-Georges in sleepy Manchester, New Hampshire, we students were seated at our desks, working on a time-filling assignment before the dismissal bell rang. Despite being stuck in school, we were content. Sister Judy was young, slim and cheerful—a stark contrast to the black-robed “crows” who normally swept with an air of menace through the school’s halls. She was the first nun we had seen wearing the new habit adopted by the Holy Cross sisters. No more enveloping gloomy, thick robes and stiff headpieces that hid every bit of body but face and hands. The new habit was light, with a knee-length skirt that let us see Sister Judy’s legs and a small veil that let us see a few wisps of her brown hair. There was something comforting and very modern about the outfit that connected with Sister’s cheerful disposition. We were in a new, more relaxed teaching environment that reminded us of the smiling teachers we saw on TV, like Captain Kangaroo and Romper Room’s Miss Jean. Who knew what exciting times might be in store?
Suddenly, a sister swung open our classroom door. "The president has been shot!" she yelled, before streaking off to announce the news to other classes in the building. Where she heard about the shooting is a mystery. But I had no time to think about that as a rush of adrenaline punched through my body. My eyes widened and my nerves stood taut.
“On your knees, class,” Sister Judy instructed calmly, and we all dropped to the floor near our desks, hands clasped. She led us in the Hail Mary with its apposite verse to “pray for us…now and the hour of our death.” We prayed with a fervency not usually displayed at Sunday Mass when the stakes were low. Now we had something urgent and concrete to pray for. We repeated the prayer’s hopeful words over and over. A few minutes later, the same nun stuck her head through the door again. This time, her message was stark and short. "The president is dead."
Sister Judy had us take our seats again, intercessory prayer for the president's life now being beside the point. Whether we were dismissed immediately or had to wait for the regular dismissal at 3 o’clock, I, like most kids, went straight home. We were an NBC family. Maybe Chet Huntley or David Brinkley had more to say about what had happened.
What I knew about Kennedy was picked up from TV news and magazines. He was the first Catholic president—I knew that much—and thereby one of “us,” of which I was proud in a childish, tribal way. He was certainly handsome and was capable of both warm smiles and thoughtful seriousness. His wife Jackie was elegant and refined. The space program he championed fascinated me. He had saved us from getting atom-bombed by the Soviets. But his politics—our country’s first steps into the quagmire in Vietnam, his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech and his pale attempts at pushing civil rights for Blacks—were beyond my grasp.
The weekend was spent in front of the TV over which blurry, ghostly, shocking images from faraway Washington, DC, and Dallas, Texas, flickered in black and white. We watched as Kennedy’s casket returned on Air Force One and was lowered by a freight elevator and carried into a waiting hearse. On Sunday morning, just as my family got home from Mass, the assassin was shot to death on live TV as he was being moved from the Dallas jail where he had been kept since the day of the killing. Did I see that live, or do I remember seeing the footage replayed by news stations trying to fill the time? That evening, we watched as Jackie led her daughter Caroline to touch and kiss the flag on JFK’s casket as it lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Ominously, the casket was closed, something I had never seen in my frequent trips to Boufford’s funeral parlor, where dead parishioners and relatives were displayed for the viewing under coral-hued lights. Something awful must have happened to the president’s body if we were not allowed to see it. We had Monday off from school to watch the funeral. I recall hearing the muffled drums, seeing the horse with rider’s boot backward in the stirrups, John-John’s salute, and Jackie’s grim, veiled face. TV cameras were not allowed in church, so we didn’t get to hear Boston’s Cardinal Cushing growl in Latin as he presided over the ritual. Dad said later that he cried like a baby during the ceremony. I guess I was too preoccupied or alarmed by his tears to notice. A seven-year-old’s psyche can absorb just so much trauma.
When we returned to school on Tuesday, the day after the funeral, everything was strangely normal. After preschool recess, we lined up and marched into school as usual, and our lessons picked up where they left off on Friday. Kids fidgeted, nuns glared, and lessons were repeated aloud as though nothing had happened. We wrote no essays about the assassination, participated in no class discussions, and smeared no finger-painted tributes to the fallen president. The nuns did not talk about the assassination or show any emotion about it, at least in the classroom. Any child with a notion of world events had to interpret this weird silence as a good sign: the Soviets and Red Chinese were not going to take advantage of the chaos to bomb us into atoms. The tragedy happened and was handled in the appropriate Catholic manner with blessings, prayers, and a funeral. Taking time from lessons to comfort shaken children was not going to happen. There was little for us to do other than to tuck our fears and questions away and move on.
Treasure Chest, the monthly Catholic magazine that all Saint-Georges students were subscribed to, typically published stories about the young Catholic hero, Chuck White, grappling with this or that moral dilemma. The post-assassination issue featured a comic book-style telling of the president’s death with expressly Catholic framing. As shots rang out (“Blam! Blam! Blam!), Jackie cried "No! No! No!" As she cradled her husband's wounded body—a 20th-century Pieta—Parkland Hospital’s doctors, trying frantically to save the life of the president, were joined by a priest who swooped in just in time to administer the Last Rites that would erase the president’s sins moments before he expired. We breathed a sigh of relief: President Kennedy was dead, but his family and the nation could be assured that his soul was in heaven and not suffering the discomforts of Purgatory or—horror of horrors should a mortal sin remain unabsolved—the eternal pains of Hell.
In early December, barely two weeks after the assassination, the latest issue of the weekly Life magazine arrived at our home. It was packed with stories and photos of the assassination, including several frames from Abraham Zapruder’s home movie. Zapruder, a Dallas dressmaker, had filmed the motorcade from a cement perch on a grassy hillside overlooking the parade route. He caught just about every aspect of the killing—Kennedy’s odd movements after being shot, Jackie’s puzzled expression and attempt to help her husband, and the effect of the final, explosive head shot. The issue was stored in a magazine rack in our living room along with other recent issues. Mom and Dad didn’t forbid me from looking at the magazine, so I opened it and pored over the contents while sitting in my favorite reading area, with my back against the hissing steam radiator. The Zapruder frames caught my attention the hardest. They were blurry, off-center, and color-saturated like Dad's home movies. With anxious intensity of viewing forbidden and arcane material, I took in the ornate, gold-trimmed American and presidential flags fluttering from the black Lincoln’s front bumper; JFK's oddly balled-up fists and dull look of shock after being stuck by the first bullet; the slow droop of his head and shoulders as a quizzical Jackie reached out to assist; the president's brain exploding into an orange halo of blood and brains, a piece of his skull rocketing off into the air; Jackie jumping on the limo’s trunk and being shoved back in by a Secret Service agent; the car disappearing beneath an overpass. New terms—Dealey Plaza, Grassy Knoll, Texas School Book Depository, Stemmons Freeway, pergola—instantly became part of my vocabulary.
As a young Roman Catholic, the image of the president’s head opening up from the impact of the third bullet nagged at me. Could he really, as Treasure Chest suggested, have survived long enough to be alive for the Last Rites that were administered a half hour later? After all, cowboy shows had accustomed me to the “truth” that a bullet to the chest or abdomen delivered instantaneous death. So, maybe people didn't really die as soon as bullets hit them? Maybe they bled to death slowly like Jesus on the Cross? Did the priest really get to the president’s bedside in time? These questions were unanswerable. Asking them might reveal a morbid, perhaps sinful, obsessive curiosity. Unless a grown-up brought up the subject, I would have to keep the questions to myself. And as they did not broach the subject, my curiosity went unacknowledged.
John Kennedy, the first Catholic President had been martyred, like so many other good Catholics before him. In a sense, it seemed normal that such a thing would come to pass. Maybe that’s why the nuns didn't fuss about it so much. His death was all part of the familiar Catholic landscape of saints, martyrs, and the evil that plagued the world. Soon, portraits of the slain president would grace the walls of many Catholic homes. The ice-skating arena in town was renamed the JFK Coliseum. His death had been normalized and slotted into its appropriate place. What was there to dwell on?
In February, many Americans shook off their symbolic mourning attire. The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, giving many of us an excuse to exit our funerary cocoons. Meanwhile, the Warren Commission, a group of prominent lawyers and politicians chaired by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, conducted interviews and studied evidence about the assassination. Foremost on their minds was how the crime happened, who committed it and whether our Communist enemies in the Soviet Union, Red China and Castro’s Cuba had a hand in it.
In September, the Commissioners, including future president Gerald Ford and assisted by future Senator Arlen Spector, delivered their final report to the White House. Their conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald alone had shot at the President three time and scored two hits—one to the back and one to the head. The government published the 725-page report, and Dad picked up a paperback copy at a local bookstore. It lay unread by his bed, and one day I picked it up. My guess is that like me, Dad zeroed in on the overall conclusion and the graphics. Of these, there were many, and probably none intended for an eight-year-old’s eyes. But compared to the bloody mess I had seen in LIFE magazine, they were tame. I sat alone on my bed and absorbed as much as I could, trying to see how the published evidence fit together.
I pored over everything: the maps of the motorcade with “Grassy Knoll” and “sniper’s perch” marked with arrows and labels; the schematic renderings of Kennedy’s bullet-pierced head with several pieces of skull flying off; the head X-ray, which I could not interpret; photos of the evil Oswald, smirking as he posed with the murder weapon and Russian newspapers in hand; the pencil reproduction of an autopsy photo of JFK’s back wound, which was about as graphic as the report got.
The details of Oswald’s weird politics didn’t interest me. Neither did the theories of foreign involvement. I was after the pictures, which burned themselves immediately into my memory. I gave them the same rapt attention as I did paintings of Christ on the Cross, scrutinizing them for details and differences from other depictions of Jesus’s death. This more recent death, however, didn’t have to be imagined and captured in oil. The gruesome evidence, even when softened into bland inoffensiveness by government draftsmen, was extremely clear.
John Kennedy’s death didn’t strike me then as an inflection point in history. Good people died all the time, didn’t they? Jesus, Saint Peter, the martyrs of the Roman Coliseum, Joan of Arc, the French Jesuit martyrs in our church’s stained-glass windows, Abraham Lincoln and many other saintly men and women had been felled before their time. There was no reason that the old verities of God, country, and family could not continue as before. No one would die, and everything would forever stay the same. There would always be church Penny Sales, the Red Sox futilely trying to win a World Series, Rex Trailer and Boomtown on weekend mornings, Lawrence Welk and his orchestra on Saturday nights, and Disney on Sunday. Mom would always bring Honey Dew Donuts after her 11-to-7 shift and cook SpaghettiOs on Wednesdays. Dad would keep simonizing the car on summer days and broil steak into shoe leather for Sunday supper. One mémère would keep darning our socks while the other churned out peanut butter fudge on holidays. The old French ladies would continue to pray the rosary in the front pew during Mass. I’d eventually learn my altar boy prayers in Latin. America would keep winning wars, even that stubborn one in Vietnam, and never lose a man in space. I’d keep earning scout badges until I became an Eagle and stay addicted to Charlie Brown and Curious George paperbacks into adulthood. John Kennedy would stay buried, with no controversies being raised about his murder.
The world was still sane, predictable. “Steady as she goes,” as Dad would say.
Right?
Right?