I was twelve on 11/22/63 but I remember the day as if it were yesterday.

It was cold and overcast. My Catholic school class was in choir practice when the payphone rang in the hallway. A student answered and reported to the nun that the president had been shot. Choir practice was quickly canceled and just as quickly the entire elementary school student body was called to the church to begin the Rosary. The phone rang again. A student reported again to the principal leading the prayers. The nun announced that President Kennedy had died. The nuns, and the seventh and eighth graders who understood, began to weep, some uncontrollably. The younger students looked on in perplexed horror. Something terrible had happened, but what could possibly cause our strong and stoic nuns to dissolve into tears? Everyone was frightened. Our Catholic hero was gone.

In October only the year before it was President Kennedy, our charismatic, young, and untested leader, who stood toe-to-toe with the powerful Khruschev and against the communist Soviet Union and won the Cuban Missile Crisis. How proud the nation was of Kennedy, of America, of democracy. Exhilaration and optimism were pervasive, even Kennedy’s moon mission was now a distinct possibility. The future looked bright, and in an instant, it was gone, our world was shattered. A piece of all of us died with the president in Dealey Plaza; we all saw the stain of Jack's blood on Jackie's pink dress.

America was inconsolable. The myth of Camelot evaporated. The free world was shocked into reality and even the subjugated world felt the loss of hope, the despair that maybe America hadn’t won after all. Hot war or cold war, no one understood the implications for the world’s future.

The days in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination were indeed a dark and foreboding time. It was cold and overcast.