Unlike many other people who were alive at the time, I can't claim to remember precisely where I was or what I was doing when I heard the news of the 20th century's most written-about assassination. I was eight years old on 22 November 1963 (it was 23 November here in Australia, across the international dateline) when Lee Harvey Oswald — and perhaps another — shot dead the then US president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in Dallas, Texas. But I vividly recall the global outpouring of grief that ensued, and in which my parents, my older brother and I shared.
Oswald — and perhaps another, too. I say this because it is not possible to avoid acknowledging the swamp of conspiracy theories that the world's media has so assiduously dredged by way of marking the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination. And also to announce that in what follows I shall not wade into the swamp.
This is not because I have any wish to defend the Warren commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone. I have no idea who 'really' killed JFK. It is because for me the most interesting thing about his death is not the elusive answer to the question, 'Whodunit?', but the particular quality of grief that the assassination elicited.
It was not only a matter of mourning the violent death of a world leader who, at the time, was much admired. It was also a sense that something uniquely precious had been irreparably lost. That sense has withered under reassessments of Kennedy's character and record in office but it has never been extinguished entirely. If it had, the 50th anniversary of his death would be getting scarcely any attention at all.
It was in the aftermath of the assassination that I first heard some television pundit use the phrase 'loss of innocence' to describe the popular mood in the US. It was a silly notion even then. Were we supposed to believe that Americans had somehow retained their innocence — whatever may be meant by that — during three previous presidential assassinations, including the first, that of Abraham Lincoln, which was the tragic culmination of a catastrophic civil war? Loss of innocence, as much for Americans as for anyone else on the planet, goes with the human condition. Innocence is what you're already starting to lose when you're eight years old.
Nonetheless the notion stuck that something called innocence had been lost because