Another Excerpt From The Class of 1969
The winter quarter began on the second anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Early in the afternoon, Jan went to the library. Max stayed in the lab to talk with his classmates. He was still hot about the cheating, but nobody wanted to talk about it. As the lab thinned out, he said, “I have total recall. Coming out of the chemistry midterm, we heard on a lab assistant’s radio. We sat in front of the TV for fifty-six hours. All we did was eat, sleep, and take trips to the bathroom - I witnessed my first nationally televised murder when Ruby shot Oswald.”
“It’s our generation’s Pearl Harbor,” Jake said. “Our defining event.”
The Assassination of U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (a stillshot from the Zapruder film)
Max nodded. “It woke me up.”
Jake stood up. “I was impressed when LBJ spoke at commencement about Kennedy’s legacy, the Great Society - the Peace Corps, civil rights, and nuclear disarmament.”
“I’m grateful,” Max said. “No nuclear missiles in Cuba, and we still have a planet to live on. He had style, wit - a promise of great things to come.”
“I was working at Parkland in the ER,” John Girardi said as he patted his unruly hair. “I had a part-time job as an orderly to help cover room and board at Baylor.”
“Tell me what you saw. What did you hear?”
“I got nowhere near him. Police and Secret Service were everywhere. I cleaned up after they put him in a casket - not the way I want to get close to a famous person.”
“So what happened?” Jake asked.
“‘Pepper’ Jensen, the head of anesthesia, said it wasn’t pretty. The stuck a trach in a wound in his neck. The back half of his brain was blown away.”
“That sounds like an exit wound,” Jake said. “How could Oswald do that from behind? I’m not political, but something is fishy.”
Max said, “I didn’t like his assassination of Diem, but his murder had to mean something more than a lone crackpot with a gun.”
“Dallas is full of right-wingers,” Girardi said. “Lots of people wanted him dead.”
“Oswald said he was a patsy, remember?” Max said. “That’s a conspiracy.”
“Who?” said Jake. “The mob, right-wingers, left-wingers - Cubans, Russians?”
“What makes you think we’ll ever know?” Girardi said.
Max smiled grimly. “I don’t believe the Warren Report, but now it’s all Vietnam - all the time. They’ve changed the subject to distract us.”
Girardi shrugged. “A coup d’etat?”
“You may be right,” Max said. “We’re not the good guys anymore.”
