Like DougJ, I can’t say that I really understand what it would feel like to have the level of hope that my parents’ generation had about JFK, since I was 7 months old at the time. Oddly enough, what I remember in their telling of their JFK assassination story was what they did the weekend after it happened. First, they borrowed a TV, which for my parents was a big deal because they hated TV and wouldn’t buy one for us until 1970 (after which we proceeded to watch it obsessively to make up for lost time). Second, they watched TV all weekend, which to me was unimaginable since my dad worked 60-80 hours a week and my mom was always bustling around the house taking care of her ungrateful brats.
Having grown up hearing about MLK and RFK getting assassinated, if I didn’t know what my parents did that weekend, I would have thought that JFK was like the other two. But, it was clear that, for them, time stopped for a couple of days while they were glued to the TV, so I knew that something extraordinary had happened.