Another casualty in Dallas

The greatest tragedy about what happened to President John F. Kennedy 59 years ago today wasn’t his death. It’s what happened to our confidence in our institutions — and it lead to the crisis we’re in today. Here’s what I wrote about the Kennedy Assassination ahead of the 50th anniversary in 2013.

If you’re looking for a sepia-toned, John-John saluting reminiscence for the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.

I was only two when President Kennedy was killed, so I have no personal memories of the event. By the time I was old enough to know what happened, the Kennedy Assassination had become something else.

It had become a joke.

The picture you see above was part of a magazine my friends and I made and passed around when we were in ninth grade. This is one of the few safe-for-work drawings in it. It included a very NSFW parody of the William Manchester timeline that described President Kennedy’s final moments in a way that would make Oliver Stone blush. (For example, it accused President Kennedy of being bad in bed. I didn’t learn until later his problem was that he was way too good in it.) Mostly, we were skeptical of the official conclusion that President Kennedy was killed solely by Lee Harvey Oswald.