What's Past Is Prologue

At this writing, it is the 55th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

After 55 years, almost two generations now, the killing of the president, shot dead in the middle of a busy street on a sunny day in Dallas, Texas seems to many, if not most, people who are alive now, just another page out of a dusty history book.

If you're under the age of, say, 50, you probably think of the murder the way my generation thought of the Great Depression or World War I or even Lincoln's assassination. Events in the timeline of American history, just facts and dates and times with no personal connection, no emotional sense of it all.

It's true what's said about history changing events that take place in your lifetime. You never forget them, in fact, your memory remains clearer than you might believe it will for much longer than you thought possible. The most recent example would, of course, be 9/11. If you were alive that day, you remember it vividly. I was twelve years old on November 22, 1963 and, today, 55 years later, I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing at the moment that I heard that the president had been shot and where and what at the moment I heard that the president was dead.

The emotion of that day and that weekend poured out all over the world. The intensity honestly impossible to describe now, suffice to say that tributes and accolades and dedications came by the hour, books and magazines, television and radio shows, even songs appeared paying tribute and lamenting loss. The primal response to a nation's grief included almost endless renaming, the Florida home of America's space program, Cape Canaveral, became Cape Kennedy, you couldn't drive thought a town or city and not, at least once, travel by or on a Kennedy Boulevard or Expressway, most often past a John F. Kennedy High School. Today's under 50's traveling through or to New York probably don't realize that they have often landed or taken off from Idlewild International Airport.

In 1964, it became J.F.K.

And the rest of the world responded in kind, John F. Kennedy Plaza in Berlin and dozens of other memorials to a life cut brutally short.

The passion lasted for weeks, even months, actually, quite intensely for even a year or more and, for a long time, every year at this time, commemorations and observances showed up on our doorsteps, tributes that had, by then, become tradition, expected, like the sad, poignant inverse of the annual celebration of our births.

Eventually, with the passage of time, the commemorations came less often, reserved for the "milestones" like 20th anniversary, then the 30th, then, not again, to speak of, until five years ago on the 50th. And along with the various unwrapping of his human failings through the years, the almost mythical king of Camelot was inevitably reassigned feet of clay, giving validation to the school of thought that all of the grief and mourning and intensity of that November weekend was less about the man who died as it was about what the nation and the world had lost at the hands of whoever it was that pulled the trigger.

If you are young, the death in Dealey Plaza in 1963 is just a page out of a dusty history book. If you were alive then, you will most likely never forget.

And, from the words and tributes, accolades and dedications, airport signs, school banners, books, magazines and other expressions of emotion from that weekend 55 years ago, this song resonates as a poignant, if dated, even a little syrupy, reminder of a tragic time.

Somehow, made more tragic, if only just a little, when the promise lost and hearts broken on that day in Texas is measured against the unity lost and promises broken by someone now sitting in the very office where once sat a young man, human and flawed, but with an inspiring and visionary understanding of what America was...and was supposed to be.

And...is...supposed to be.



From 1963, words and music by David Lee and Herbert Kretzmer.

Recorded by Connie Francis.


In The Summer Of His Years

A young man rode with his head held high
Under the Texas sun
And no one guessed that a man so blessed
Would perish by the gun
Lord, would perish by the gun

A shot rang out like a sudden shout
And Heaven held its breath
For the dreams of a multitude of man
Rode with him to his death
Lord, rode with him to his death

Yes, the heart of the world weighs heavy
With the helplessness of tears
For the man cut down in a Texas town
In the summer of his years
The summer of his years

And we who stay mustn't ever lose
The victories that he won
For wherever man look to freedom ?
His soul goes riding on
Lord, his soul goes riding on