“Where were you the day…” Over the decades, there has been the landing on the moon – an interesting choice of “landing” – and the death of Princess Diana, the visually overwhelming 9/11 and the coronation of King Charles III. Many outside – and no few inside – the Anglosphere point to many others.
22 November 1963 is, of course, the major example of the modern era. Lou Reed’s “The Day John Kennedy Died” aptly captures the tragic energy:
I remember where I was that day, I was Upstate in a bar
The team from the University was playing football on TV
Then the screen went dead and the announcer said, ‘There’s been a tragedy,’Talking stopped, someone shouted ‘What?’, I ran out to the street
People were gathered everywhere saying
‘Did you hear what they said on TV?’
And then a guy in a Porsche with his radio hit his horn and told us the news
He said, ‘The President’s dead, he was shot twice in the head in Dallas
And they don’t know by whom’.
Officer JD Tippit was killed about 45 minutes after JFK. Lee Harvey Oswald was initially arrested for the policeman’s murder. Tippit’s death was dwarfed by JFK’s assassination but both Kennedy’s brother and LBJ contacted the widow that evening and there was considerable public sympathy, public money and, eventually and of course, some public suspicion as the officer’s death became part of wider conspiracy theories.
The death of Kennedy is often described as the death of America’s innocence. Whatever the virtue of the description, two other people died that day whose own ideas of heroes and innocence and evil have left a profound influence, Aldous Huxley the author of Brave New World and the Anglican essayist CS Lewis best known to the rest of us as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia.
I dreamed that there was a point to life and to the human race