In November 1963 I was a secondary schoolboy in my third year at Palmer’s Endowed School for Boys, Grays, Essex. As far as I was concerned, 22nd November was a normal Friday. I’d left school at the normal time and travelled home on the 370 bus from Grays to Corbets Tey, and was watching the BBC with my family when, at just after 7.00pm, a newsflash announced that President Kennedy had been shot. The newsreader was someone I did not recognise. (When researching the background to this blog post, I discovered that it was John Roberts, a member of the BBC staff.) From what I can remember, my family’s reaction was total shock.
Normal BBC TV programming continued for about another twenty minutes, at which point there was another newsflash that told us that President Kennedy had been shot in the head. Before normal programming resumed, the telephone on the newsreader’s table rang, he answered it, and then stated in a very solemn voice that 'We regret to announce that President Kennedy is dead.'
Sixty years on, and in an era of rolling twenty-four-hour news programmes and instant electronic social media, it is difficult for many people to understand how slow news stories were to develop in those days. Radio news tended to be slightly quicker in keeping listeners up-to-date with developing stories, but not by much. From what I can remember, we didn’t see any images of what had happened in Dallas until the following day because the only satellite link was Telstar, and that didn’t operate on a geosynchronous orbit and was only available for about twenty minutes in every two-and-a-half hours.
Not long before President Kennedy was assassinated, I remember being asked to take part in a class quiz during an Art lesson where we were asked all sorts of questions about the modern world. (Our art teacher was a bit eccentric and sometimes did this sort of thing.) Almost universally, the class agreed that President Kennedy would be our 'man of the century' ... even though we were only just past the middle of it!
He seemed to radiate hope in a way other politicians we had heard of did not. (Don't forget, this was the time when Harold Macmillan was Britain's Prime Minister, Charles De Gaulle was President of France, and Nikita Khrushchev was Prime Minister of the Soviet Union and not averse to banging his shoe on the desk during meetings of the United Nations.) There seemed to be an air of optimism abroad, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and he seemed to be in the centre of it.
This started with his inaugural address, during which he stated, 'Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country' as well as calling on the whole world to fight the 'common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself'. I certainly remember reading his first State of the Union address, during which he outlined his support for Civil Rights, but to someone brought up in the era of Dan Dare, it was his speech about the space race and going to the moon which probably lifted my spirits most. In it he said 'No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. ... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard'.
Just the sort of thing an impressionable twelve-year-old wanted to hear.
Nowadays we know that he was not the perfect person that we thought he was at the time. He was, after all, a man who had the same weaknesses as other men and who had the opportunity to indulge some of them, possibly to excess ... but looking back sixty years on, I still remember the hope that he gave us that the world could be a better place, and that is something that seems to be sadly lacking in today's world.
