President Kennedy: It happened in 1963!

     
Back in 2013, Dallas remembered the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.  We had large crowds, parades, speeches and personal recollections of that awful day when Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy.

It was probably the last big remembrance of the assassination in Dallas.   

I’m not saying that people will forget what happened in Dallas.  

I’m saying that more and more people will remember it as a historical footnote rather than something that they lived through.    

On the morning that President Lincoln died, someone said that “now he belongs to ages“.  Today, we say that President Kennedy now belongs to historians.  They will analyze his brief presidency and speculate about what would have happened if he had survived or not killed that day.

Would Vietnam have been different?   Would President Kennedy had passed the civil rights legislation that President Johnson successfully completed?   Would VP Johnson have been on the 1964 reelection ticket?  

Historians will take it from here because there are less and less people who remember what they were doing when they got the news that President Kennedy was killed in Dallas.