30 years later, memories of JFK's death still haunt

The tranquility in the Furness Building was shattered 30 years ago yesterday, when a student ran in breathless, shouting that the president had been shot. While that November 22 must have started off looking much the same way it did yesterday, it ended in chaos as President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in what is still remembered as the modern shot heard 'round the world. At the University, life's ordinary routines were brutally shocked out of day-to-day circumstance. Art History Professor Malcolm Campbell had just walked into Furness's slide library, when a student ran in, saying, "The President has been shot." Someone found an old battered radio, he recalled yesterday, and faculty and students gathered around. "We were stunned – just stunned," Campbell said. "It was?it was very difficult to frame your ideas and make any kind of statement. People were struck dumb." On exiting the library, Campbell said, he found "a real pall settled over the campus." "It was a kind of shattering experience," he recollected. "The radio just kept repeating, 'The president is shot, the president is shot.' Nobody knew what to do." Other professors were out of the country at the time, making their memories perhaps even stranger. Emeritus Economics Professor Lawrence Klein said he was working at a university in Japan, and it was Saturday morning there when he heard the news. "The nephew of one of our hosts came to me with a [Japanese-English] dictionary," he said. "He kept looking and pointing at the word, 'assassin.' "We found a short-wave radio, and listened that way," Klein said. "But it was such a shock – and it felt isolated." Microbiology Professor Helen Davies and her late husband, Robert, were in London delivering papers at a meeting. "We were eating in a restaurant, and some people came over who had heard our voices and knew we were American," she said. "They said, 'Your president has been assassinated' – and it was devastating, absolutely devastating." Davies said the assassination is an especially clear-cut memory because, for her and many other Americans, it marked the turning of time. "During that period, we almost got used to assassinations – Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X," she said. "You know, you almost learned to expect it. "I never see a picture of a president in a large gathering without getting very frightened that something will happen to that person," she added. "I think the horror of that moment was so intense because this was the first assassination that most people had ever faced." Campbell agreed. "Lyndon Johnson coming in moved the time clock?it shifted," he said. "The image that Kennedy had evoked was almost mystical. We certainly knew the lights in Camelot had gone out, whatever else had happened." Assistant History Professor Thomas Sugrue, who teaches a class on the 60s, said that while he is "bored of the hype over the Kennedy assassination," he feels that to some extent it is indicative of an era. "It's indicative of the endurance of the Kennedy myth – the American public's desire to peg all of its hopes about the country's history on one powerful individual," he said. "But people project their wishes about where they think America should have gone on the figure of JFK. "And it's easy to do that. When someone dies young and tragically, it's easy to project all your wishes and fantasies on them."

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