John F. Kennedy Memories Of An Assassination

The memories come flooding back, all the way from fifty four years ago.

- Syed Badrul Ahsan

A young leader is shot on a happy ride through happier crowds, his beautiful wife cradles his bloodied head in her lap as the limousine carrying them rushes to hospital, men and women on the sidewalks suddenly in tears after the cheering of only seconds and minutes earlier. Camelot was no more. The young, handsome President of the United States was dead. It was the end of a world.

When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963, I was in class three, playing football with my classmates on the school playground in Quetta, Baluchistan. Midway through our game, the bell sounded in what appeared to be quite a mystifying manner. Students from all classes were asked to assemble on the large space before the principal’s office, where Father Joshua Sterk, the principal, let us know there would be no more classes that day. We could all go home early as something dreadful had happened. The President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, had been murdered in Dallas. We had no idea where Dallas was, but we did imagine it was far away.

That was the first time I knew that America had a President named Kennedy. It was also the very first occasion when the word ‘assassination’ made its way into my lexicon. When Father Joshua told us the President had been assassinated --- he used that word --- all of us, and we were children well below ten years in age, cried hooray. We thought something good had happened. The principal swiftly silenced us, to explain that it was a sad thing that had happened, that JFK had been killed. We felt properly ashamed for our display of callous behaviour.