REFLECTIONS ON THE ASSASSINATION OF JFK
How It Changed My Life
by Tom Calarco
(I wrote this about 30 years ago and it was never published, but realizing that today another anniversary of that momentous event has come, I thought I would put it up on Medium)
The intercom surprised us during my high school chemistry lab. It was about 1:45 p.m. EST. Strangely, the radio was being piped in. We didn’t hear the broadcaster’s first words, but we froze when we realized he was reporting that President Kennedy had been shot during a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. No word had been received on the seriousness of the President’s injury, he said, only that he had been taken to nearby Parkland Hospital. The intercom went off.
We went to our seats; our teacher, a gray-haired man with a distinguished moustache and one leg, wheelchaired himself up to his desk in front of the room. He grabbed his crutches behind his desk. Facing us, he stood up on them and folded his hands in prayer.
“Let us now pray to whomever your God is that the President will be spared,” he said.
There was silence.
The intercom came back on. We sat and listened to conjecture and speculation. A report said the President had been hit in the head; the room shivered. The announcer reported that witnesses had seen two men and a woman running from the Texas School Book Depository.
After several more minutes, a report stated that a Catholic priest had left Parkland Hospital. Apparently, the announcer speculated, the priest had given the President last rites.
Another report flashed: the priest said the President was dead.
Our silence grew. Then the announcer made it official:
“President John F. Kennedy, the 36th President of the United States, was pronounced dead today at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas at approximately 1:00 p.m. central standard time.”
Our teacher now seated at his desk slumped down and started to cry.
At least that’s my best recollection. Events of such magnitude are both so clear and yet so much a blur.
I remember shortly after, at the end of the period, they dismissed us from school. I got home early and to my surprise found my father home from work. He had voted for Nixon in the election yet he looked shaken.
After that I don’t recall much of what happened in the next four days except seeing Oswald shot on live TV and the President’s coffin being pulled by horses, their hooves clunking down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington to a funereal beat of military drums. Childhood had ended for me.
Not only my generation, but our country changed after that. Not all at once but gradually. Within two years we were committed to a land war in Southeast Asia. Six years later one of the guys from my neighborhood was killed in Vietnam during a helicopter mission. In the seventh year after the assassination, I applied to have my 1-A draft status re-classified to Conscientious Objector.
Among my parents’ generation I had become an alien; but to my peers it was different. It was our “thing” to do. I was torn. I had been brought up naively patriotic and proud that America was a special, wonderful place where everyone could live happily together. Now I was hearing such awful things. The government wasn’t trying to win a war but to keep one going.
About the time Watergate happened, I saw a five-hour presentation by Robert Saltzman that included my introduction to the magic bullet theory and first viewing of the famed Zapruder film. When I saw it, I felt like I had been shot myself. I couldn’t believe what I saw.
I began reading some of the books: Six Seconds in Dallas by Josiah Thompson, Legend by Edward Jay Epstein, The Secret Team by Fletcher Prouty, John Edgar Hoover by Hank Messick, The Yankee and Cowboy War by Carl Oglesby, an Esquire expose about the mysterious deaths of persons who saw or knew something suspicious relating to the assassination.
In 1981 I saw David Lifton lecture after his stunning book The Best Evidence had come out. The book demonstrated through eyewitness testimony that Kennedy’s wounds had been tampered with to make it appear that a lone assassin — Oswald — had done the job. I talked with him afterward. He said the book had taken 14 years out of his life, and now he had to stop and get on with his life. I sensed that he thought his life would be in danger if he continued his investigation.
Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, shook me up again. More books followed like Gaetano Fonzi’s The Last Investigation. Looking at it with the perspective of many years and much reading of history, I believe that JFK’s assassination radically changed my life and the course of our nation’s history. If it hadn’t happened, organized crime may have been permanently disabled; if it hadn’t happened, there may not have been a Vietnam War nor an epidemic of drug use in our country; if it hadn’t happened, Nixon would likely have never become President and there would’ve no Watergate; if it hadn’t happened, who knows how what course the promise of American life would’ve taken and how differently the lives of myself and others from my generation would’ve turned out.
But no matter what they say, I believe you can find the truth in the history books if you simply open your eyes. A single viewing of the Zapruder film (despite doctoring by the CIA)* speaks volumes. If you haven’t seen it, you should.
To grow as a nation, we must recognize and admit to our imperfections. Then we can heal and go forward. To know the truth about who killed JFK, I believe, will bring us a new birth of freedom.
- Earlier I had written that it was doctored by the FBI, but on reviewing this, I realized that it was doctored by the CIA. Doug Horne in his massive five-volume study of the assassination, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (a U.S. govt study during the 1990s), goes into the details of how this happened.
