In 1960, I cast my first presidential vote for John F. Kennedy. I was a 23-year-old graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. I wanted Kennedy to win, but didn’t expect it to happen. 
Upon his election, I hoped, without much conviction, that President Kennedy would fight for social programs to reduce poverty, end racial discrimination and negotiate reduction of nuclear weapons. Progress on those fronts in his two-and-a-half years in office had been slight.
My telephone rang late in the evening of Nov. 22, 1963, and I heard the trembling voice of Lasse, a young colleague of mine, inquiring if I had heard that Kennedy had been assassinated. I was dumfounded. Lasse asked if he and his girlfriend might come over to share their grief.
When I opened the door and saw their tear-streaked faces I began to grasp the power Kennedy exerted over the youth of Sweden –where I was living at the time – and much of the world. We sat for hours, drinking coffee and talking about our hopes and dreams for the future. Describing the first reports on Swedish television of the shooting, Lasse said, “My mother wept.”
Those three words have haunted me for half a century. They convey to me the essence of the assassination’s impact. Kennedy was, for all his flaws, a symbol of hope that suddenly vanished, leaving a menacing void.
I returned to Philadelphia in 1965 and taught at Community College of Philadelphia, where some students were veterans of picket lines, Freedom Rides and the battlefields of Vietnam. They described what had happened in my absence — the Port Huron Statement, the March on Washington, the murder of Malcolm X and, of course, the Kennedy assassination.
Moments of national anguish affect us differently according to our ages and experience. Generations may be defined by one traumatic event, or numbed by a rapid succession of images of violence and suffering — the helicopter evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, April 29, 1975; the disintegration of the Space Shuttle Challenger, January 28, 1986; the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, September 11, 2001.
Fifty years later, those who wept on November 22, 1963, are still part of a chorus of lamentation.
Bernard Mergen is a professor emeritus of American studies.
