Donna Gentile O'Donnell: A country still in mourning for JFK

Forty years ago today, America buried a murdered president. Buried with him were the aspirations of a generation that believed that they would remake the world into a better, safer, more civilized place where skin color would no longer be the dividing line between oppression and opportunity; where the sword-rattling of nations could be silenced and replaced with the timbre of peace; where the imagination of people was the only limit of what they could accomplish; where a Catholic, too long regarded as a threat to the separation of church and state, could hold the highest elected office in the land; where a new generation would fulfill the dreams of its hard-working parents, and wanted deeply for its lives to be better than that of its predecessors.

As the oldest of the current Daily Pennsylvanian writers, I am probably the only one who lived through the JFK assassination. And though I was just a child, like every other American, I remember where I was and what I was doing.

Home from first grade with the flu, I was lying on the couch, as my mother kept a watchful eye on me, my fever and my siblings. A news bulletin interrupted the television program I was watching. Walter Cronkite came on, and began reporting what was beyond comprehension. My mother sat down next to me, and kept repeating, "Oh my God," tears streaming down her face.

Over those four days, it seemed that the world stood still. We went to Mass during the week, instead of just on Sunday. My father, who worked in construction, was home with us, watching the funeral. We watched the caisson carrying the casket and the horses pulling it toward interment, followed by the president's grieving family and the leaders of the world, on foot and in sorrow. And I saw my father, a tall, strapping and strong asphalt contractor -- the biggest, toughest guy I knew, the man our family relied on to keep us safe -- sobbing, as if his heart was broken beyond repair.

I had never seen my father cry. I cried too -- not because I understood what all this meant. All I really knew was that everyone I saw in my little world seemed so deeply, and personally, affected. A trip to the bakery with my mother was more than getting fresh bread. It was another keening moment in the biggest wake in modern America.

For years afterward, as I moved through the grades of St. Mary's elementary school, I developed my own ritual of remembrance. When I would get my textbooks in September, I would immediately open them, looking for the word "Dallas" on the publisher's page. And in every book in which I found it, I obliterated that word. I didn't just cross it out; I marked it deeply, with black pen, to the point where the page would be dented or torn -- and the word "Dallas" was unreadable.

Those tragic days left imprints on the souls of all those who bore witness to the horror, young and old alike. These imprints were sometimes imperceptible. But on some subconscious level, they changed the way we felt -- about our world and about ourselves. Maybe it was because the murder was so public, so gruesome, so audacious. It was something we might expect in a banana republic -- not on the streets of a major American city, in the state that was the home of a sitting vice president.

The murder of our president was a harbinger of more terrible things to come. First, John Kennedy. Then, Martin Luther King Jr. Then, Bobby Kennedy. America was expected to believe that all this was somehow unconnected, the random acts of lone lunatics. And forty years later, volumes have been written about every aspect of this course-changing calamity. Legitimate speculation continues about what really happened that dark day in November, and in the bloodletting years that followed.

Almost no one I know buys the theory of the lone assassin. And as it turns out, 75 percent of Americans surveyed don't buy it either. There have been multiple official commissions, with many researchers and other investigative types digging in the black holes of speculation and doubt.

There was the now famous (thanks to Oliver Stone's docudrama JFK) but failed case brought by then-New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, the only actual trial brought against a suspect accused of conspiring in the JFK assassination. These efforts tried to tie the truth-ferreting process with some type of official sanction that would legitimize its work.

There are multiple conspiracy theories. Buried somewhere in them is the truth, which will likely never be fully known. And that is what is most deeply troubling.

The generation that John Kennedy led, that John Kennedy inspired, that John Kennedy believed could put a man on the moon, produce lasting world peace, end segregation, prevent polio, cure cancer and address deep, unrelenting poverty in America -- that generation could not find, positively identify and bring to justice the co-conspirator killers.

And that is the enduring American tragedy. Donna Gentile O?Donnell is finishing her Ph.D. in health policy history at the School of Nursing. She is from Philadelphia, Pa.

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