The Kennedy Assassination: 45 Years Later

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. It's hard to believe that it has been forty-five years since that fateful Friday afternoon. For four days, the three major television networks broadcast very little programming that did not directly relate to the assassination and its aftermath. Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK's accused assassin, was himself murdered in the Dallas City Jail on Sunday morning by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner. Although there has been a great deal of controversy over the years as to whether Oswald acted alone, we may never precisely know the chain of events that led to JFK's tragic murder in Dallas. Many Americans rejected the findings of the Warren Commission, which essentially concluded that Oswald was solely responsible for the assassination. I will leave that discussion for another time.

At the time, I was fourteen years old and a ninth grader in Plymouth, Michigan. I will never forget when our school principal, Mr. Carl Taylor, came down to our gym class about 1:00 P.M. to inform us that Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. It was almost surrealistic, and frankly, it took some time for the impact to sink in. I rode home with my dad, who happened to teach in the junior high where I was a student, and we began watching what turned out to be a four-day marathon of the coverage of the assassination, the swearing in of Lyndon B. Johnson as Kennedy's replacement, and the funeral on the Monday after the assassination.

The course of United States history changed on that day in Dallas. The Vietnam War would become a major political issue in the politics of the 1960s, as many Americans took to the streets to oppose the war. The culture of America, particularly as it related to music and public morality, was also dramatically changed. During the spring of 1968, as the presidential campaign heated up, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were also assassinated. It seemed as if America could not escape its national nightmare.

Eventually, America moved on, but not without further tragedies and scandals. We can be grateful that a sovereign God is still in control, and he holds the hearts of kings in His hand. We can rely on Him, even when things seem to be falling apart all around us.