The latest Kennedy files spark memories of a day like no other

Amid the Kennedy-assassination file drop, the Washington Post ran a photograph of the president and first lady seated in that fateful convertible.

As a boy, I clipped and saved every newspaper and magazine photo I could get my hands on about that day.

But I'd never seen that particular smiling picture of JFK and Jackie in Dallas before.

And after I posted it on Facebook, I was struck by how many people who also were children when the president was killed — I was 10 — can vividly recall little details of that awful day.

Like the enduring fascination with "secret" Kennedy files and assorted conspiracy theories, comments posted by some of my Facebook friends attest to the enduring resonance of Nov. 22, 1963:

I remember walking home from kindergarten with two classmates from my block to discover all of our mothers sobbing.

One of my early memories…[I was] four years old playing and my mother ironing and watching a soap opera when Walter Cronkite came on with the news.

Fourth grade – [the] principal put the TV on and broadcast it on the PA. Will never forget …

I was in fifth grade at Houghton School in North Adams, Mass., and the fourth-grade teacher knocked on the door and said we should turn on the radio. An ad for a local department store came on, followed by an announcement that President Kennedy was dead.

A girl named Debbie put her head down on the desk and sobbed. The teacher suggested that we say a prayer. Even though we were no longer allowed to pray in school, she said, we needed to pray.

So we prayed, and then we walked home to the sound of church bells echoing up the hills from downtown.

I was six at the time and in first grade … I got on the bus to go home and our bus driver was crying.

Fifth grade … our principal came to our classroom and took our teacher into the hall to tell her and she simply sobbed. … My mom was at home glued to our tiny TV, sobbing as well.

When I got home, my mother was crying as she sat on the couch, giving my baby sister her bottle and watching TV. The sight of her and my father and all the other grownups in tears, everywhere, remains one of the most startling memories of that day, and of the gloomy, black-and-white weekend that followed.

The seemingly universal grief was inescapable, given that our two TV channels were all about the assassination and an aftermath that continued for days on end. It was cold and the trees were bare and the handsome president whom my blue-collar, Catholic family of Massachusetts Democrats revered had been taken from us.

I saw my Dad distraught, fighting back tears … watching the funeral on TV … the riderless horse … Jackie's veil … JFK Jr. saluting in his short pants … all of the air was sucked out of our lives.

Sure, we knew that the communists were a menace, and that the atomic bomb loomed.

We read about these things and saw the pictures in Life magazine.

But until then, life had been rather good to us. I was 10 and had no idea what a "sniper" was, no notion that anyone would take aim from a tall building and fire at another human being.

How could someone kill our President? 

So when those of us who were just kids when President Kennedy was assassinated find ourselves reacting emotionally to the release of new files, or to seeing a photograph we've never seen, we're not necessarily being nostalgic for a more innocent time.

We're also remembering the day we were made aware of what growing up might entail.