When I Became a Democrat

It was during John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign.  I wasn't quite old enough to vote, but I became a Kennedy supporter, as did most of my friends at the University of Arkansas.  We were young and idealistic and Kennedy seemed to speak directly to us.  He seemed not that much older than I was, and I came to think of myself as a Democrat before I ever voted for one, and I have never looked back.

Three years later, it was all over. I was walking back to work from lunch at my apartment, and noticed that all the store windows on the square had television sets turned outward. I didn't realize what was happening until I got back to the Courthouse, where I was working, and learned that JFK had been shot, and no one seemed to know if he was alive.  When Walter Cronkite assured us that Kennedy was dead, I hurried next door to the Abstract office where I normally worked, and my boss told me to go home. He said the office wouldn't open again until after the funeral.

My husband and another classmate in the Law School had gone to Little Rock with one of their professors to do some research at the law library there. He called and said they had packed up their materials and were coming back home.  I paced the floor and watched the horror that was unfolding in Dallas, on television.

That entire weekend, friends came and went at our apartment, and some simply came and stayed, and we watched, horrified as, time after time, we saw our hero clutch at his throat and slump over into the arms of his wife.  We kept telling each other that it couldn't be happening.  But, it was.

We watched when, a day or so later, Lee Harvey Oswald was being moved from the Dallas jail to someplace where he would presumably be "safer."  We leaped to our feet and lunged for the television set, when Jack Ruby jumped out of the crowd of policemen and shot and killed Oswald.  Now, we would never know why Oswald took a $12.00 rifle and, miraculously, hit his target.

Today, we are still hearing the theories.  He acted alone. It was a conspiracy. There was more than one gunman.  People swore they saw him behind a fence on the grassy knoll on Dealey Plaza. Johnson did it. J. Edgar Hoover did it. The Mafia did it. Castro did it. The KGB did it.  Rose Kennedy did it. The CIA did it. Frank Sinatra did it. The theories never end. 

I know what I think.  But, who do you think killed Kennedy?