It was the week the nation gathered around television sets to watch the tragic story of JFK's assassination unfold - the same medium that helped vault the dynamic young leader to the presidency less than three years ago.
Farrell, Dan
Letting go of his mother's hand, John F. Kennedy Jr. salutes his father's flag-draped casket as it passes on Nov. 25, 1963, the boy's third birthday. Behind JFK's son is Robert Kennedy; Ted Kennedy is on the other side of Jackie, behind young Caroline, who was about to turn six.
In the early afternoon our teacher, a nun named Sister Hortense, walked out of the classroom and came back in a couple of minutes later and told us that President Kennedy had been shot, and that we were being dismissed from school early. But before we left, she told us, we would all put our heads down on our desks and say a silent prayer for the President.
So many remember exactly where they were when they got the news, remember vividly that day and the days to come. I remember my head pressed against the cool surface of that desk.
This was Oneida, N.Y., on Nov. 22, 1963, and what I remember next about the day was the short walk home and not seeing a single person other than my classmates on the streets and not one car, because already the country was gathered around television sets in a way it never had before.
It was television that had helped elect John F. Kennedy as much as anything else, because of the way he looked in that first debate against Richard Nixon in 1960, as though America was being introduced to his youth and good looks and great charm for the first time. RELATED: JFK'S LINCOLN LIMO SERVED LONG AFTER THAT FATEFUL DAY IN DALLAS
Now it was television that began to tell us the story, in real time, of what had happened in Dallas that afternoon, hour by hour, through the weekend until we were having lunch on Sunday and watched as Jack Ruby walked up and shot Lee Harvey Oswald because we had moved our small black-and-white set into the kitchen, because this was the weekend when we could not look away.
The other day I asked my father, who flew in B-24s over Europe in World War II and loved Jack Kennedy for his own service to his country on his PT boat in the South Pacific, PT-109, what he remembered best about that weekend 50 years ago and he didn't hesitate.
"I remember that we were afraid to leave the TV set," he said.
Mario Cuomo, a young Queens lawyer at the time with small children, one of whom would grow up to hold the same job he once held, governor of this state, was talking about all of this on Thursday afternoon.
"The way we were all attracted to the television on 9/11," Mario Cuomo said, "that was the way it was that day, maybe for the first time."
This was before we would see all the images on television of the funeral, the image of John F. Kennedy Jr., known as John-John then, saluting his father's coffin, that picture captured as well by a great old Daily News photographer named Dan Farrell as it was captured anywhere; I have a framed copy of that photograph, signed by Danny, on the wall above me as I write this. RELATED: WHAT WAS JFK'S FAVORITE COLOGNE?
Farrell, out of St. Paul's Place, Flatbush, Brooklyn, was carrying a Hasselblad 1000 F camera with a 300-mm. lens that Walter Ranzini, the old photo assignment editor at The News, had handed him that day. Then the door to the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle was opening. Out came the coffin carrying the 35th President of the United States. Danny put his camera on Jacqueline Kennedy and her children and left it there, Danny still talking about the black veil over Jacqueline Kennedy's face and reading her lips through that veil as she said, "John. Salute."
The little boy put his hand up and saluted. Dan Farrell out of Flatbush took the picture. RELATED: OBAMA HONORS BILL CLINTON, OPRAH WINFREY WITH PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM
"One shot," he said. "One frame. And it was all over."
But then this was the moment in America, memorialized today 50 years later, when gunshots Oswald fired from the Texas School Book Depository brought the country together the way it did, an American moment that seemed to stretch on for days. PHOTOS: JOHN F. KENNEDY ASSASSINATION: 50 YEARS LATER
Mario Cuomo is one who says he cannot remember where he was exactly when he found out that President Kennedy had been shot. He talked instead on Thursday afternoon about where the country was a half-century ago.
"What was late 1963 like?" Cuomo said. "It was as if we were starting a new phase in this country, a phase that had been started and ignited by John Kennedy. It wasn't just one thing, it was everything: His looks, his charm, his record in the war, a beautiful wife. It was just . . . ideal. And somehow all these things made the country feel good about him, and good about itself." PHOTOS: THE DAYS THE EARTH STOOD STILL
Cuomo, who should have been President himself a quarter-century later, paused now.
"There was all this hope," he said. "A lot more hope than there is now when people all over the world are killing themselves and threatening to kill us." PHOTOS: JOHN F. KENNEDY ASSASSINATION REVISITED
You have to know that Cuomo is too smart to think that Kennedy was some kind of great President, because he was not, despite our fascination with him, all the good and bad of his life, 50 years later.
"What he was," Cuomo said, "until that terrible moment, came more out of charm than out of conquest. Did he make a good decision with respect to what could have been a very dangerous situation in Cuba (the missile crisis)? He did. But other than that, there was no great personal belief, certainly not one like Martin Luther King's." PHOTOS: KENNEDY REMEMBERED
Cuomo added this: "But somehow he had suggested there was a way to run the country, a way that struck people as new and bold, maybe because of his youth, because of all the flash he had to him, because he had been a war hero."
Then he was gone, gone at the age of 46, with his wife sitting next to him in pink, and a Secret Service agent jumping on the back of that moving convertible and the whole country, within moments, as we began to get the word on television, coming to a stop. PHOTOS: 50 YEARS LATER: RARE PHOTOS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY'S LIMOUSINE
My parents liked to watch Walter Cronkite do the news on CBS in those days. So my mom was watching that afternoon when Cronkite - another image, another moment - announced that the President was dead, Cronkite looking up at a clock in his newsroom to tell you that had happened "38 minutes ago," putting his glasses on as he tried to compose himself after looking up at a clock in his newsroom.
From that moment on, the weekend became like this one long sad televised wake in America, where it seemed disrespectful somehow to Kennedy to even go out of the house; when we were finally allowed to walk into town on Saturday afternoon, the streets weren't as quiet as they had been on Friday afternoon - there was more life on them by then. But if you ask me what I remember best about the weekend when President Kennedy was shot, I remember the quiet that seemed to be everywhere once we got up and moved away from the television. PHOTOS: MARLIN, THE KENNEDY YACHT, THROUGH THE YEARS
Of course, before the decade was over, Martin Luther King was gone, too, in 1968, shot dead in Memphis. So was Robert F. Kennedy, running for President himself that year, gunned down at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
The first shots, though, were fired on that Friday afternoon in Dallas. PHOTOS: A FINAL GOODBYE TO TED KENNEDY
Mario Cuomo struggled Thursday to ascribe permanent meaning to what happened that day, what ended and what began, what strong new message came from the assassination of John F. Kennedy, some kind of new fear in America, perhaps about the future, a future that Kennedy seemed to make so thrilling, as if his presidency was just the beginning of some great adventure for us all.
"So much has happened since then," Cuomo said finally. "But one thing hasn't changed in this country, all this time later. All it takes to change everything is madness and a gun."
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