Looking a lot better after it's 60th anniversary

Through the merciless lens of time when looking back on childhood memories the sun shone brighter, the skies were bluer, greenery was greener and a memorial hewn from seven tons of Portland stone looked freshly carved and pristine.

That would have been the summer of 1965 when my parents took my two elder brothers, our dog “Skip” and me to see the memorial to John F Kennedy (29th May 1917 – 22nd November 1963) and 35th President of the United States. It was unveiled in May 1965 and our parents thought it was important for us to see it.

In October 1962 we were living in Edmonton on the western fringes of the Canadian Prairies. That was when the Cuban Missile Crisis kicked off. Every one of the thirteen days the world looked into the abyss and apocalyptic threat of nuclear war. We would sit as a family watching the TV when The President would address his nation and the world. I was only eight then and really didn’t fully appreciate the enormity of what was going on. All I knew was that it was something quite serious. I wasn’t aware of how my parents and brothers were reacting as they were probably all on the sofa while I sat in front of them on the floor with “Skip”.

Even when we came home from school one day with letters telling us that if we lived more than a specified distance from it and a nuclear war started we would not be allowed to go home; I just didn’t fully understand what was going on.

When the crisis was over and the world was able to breathe, President Kennedy was a hero. Both my brothers, David and Brian, adored him. They cut out all of his pictures from the papers and magazines that came our way. They even reversed their partings from right to left to copy his own hairstyle. That lasted as long as the three of us had to wait before Dad took us all to the barbershop for our collective cuts.

In November 1963 we had been living in England for over a month. I was not allowed to go straight home from school as I was too young at the time to be home alone. Instead, I would walk to my Grandparents’ home to have “tea” with them while I waited for my parents to come from work and take me home.

22nd November 1963 was a Friday and my Grandparents and I had finished “tea” at the table. We were settling down on the sofa to watch children’s tv between five and six. Sadly, that merciless lens of time cannot focus on when we heard that the President had been shot. All I know is that in just a few seconds the three of us had gone from one end of the dramatic scale, comedy, to the other end, tragedy. That moment, less a few details, is seared into my memory so strongly I can still smell the fug of Granddad’s cigar smoke and my Grandmother letting out a “Jesus wept”, twice.

In 1969 my brother Brian made an amazing collage. The main image was that iconic photograph into the helmet visor of either Armstrong or Aldrin. Brian replaced the reflective image of the moon with cut out images of Kennedy at his inauguration, with his wife on the campaign trail, on the beach at Hyannis Port along with images from Dallas of when the world heard one of the loudest shots ever and knew the President had been assassinated. Sadly, it got lost in the different house moves but the imagery he created is remains in my mind’s eye.

In December of 2020 I was able to visit the memorial. How very different the memorial and the acre of land gifted to America looked and felt. Even allowing for it being a winter’s day the atmosphere was dark, damp and dreary. All made worse by the state of the stone which was streaked with stains of tannin that had been drained from decaying leaves that had fallen on to the top of stone.

I was able to revisit the memorial in August 2025, soon after the 65th anniversary of its unveiling and sixty years after that first visit with my parents, two elder brothers and Skip.

The day was just like the one I remembered from all those years ago. Maybe the memories of childhood do not deceive us? It was warm and sunny. I walked across the Runnymede Meadow and into that one acre that is freehold America on British soil. The leaves still held their full summer green and the strong sunlight dappled through them on to the fifty steps up to the monument and into the surrounding woodland. As I walked up those steps, each representing one of the fifty states of mainland America. I retained that image from five years ago and wondered what state the memorial stone would be in today. By about the fortieth step I glimpsed part of the sharp top edge of the stone. It looked alright. At each subsequent step as the stone became increasingly visible my negative thoughts about its condition became a fading memory. There were no black stains trailing across the first words near the top edge “To the United States of America…” down to the last words “…the survival and success of liberty”.

Despite countless acres of paper, gallons of ink and bytes of computer memory America and the world still does not know the full back story to the events of 22nd November 1963. In his campaign for a second term in office, Donald Trump pledged to release all the files on the case. He fulfilled that pledge. The records have been released, poured over and analysed. Yet there is still no smoking gun revelation.

There are some events from history that the merciless lens of time may never be able to focus on. Maybe that is a good thing, sometimes.