November 22

Today is the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It is also my son Karl’s birthday.

We were living in Birmingham, Michigan. I was down in the basement hanging balloons. Nine little boys were coming after school for a Cub Scout meeting and birthday party. I heard the doorbell and ran upstairs. My neighbor was standing on the doorstep.

“The President has been shot in Dallas.”

I went across the living room to the maple cabinet containing a combination record player and radio. I turned on the radio and Dottie stood beside me as a male voice told us that the President was dead.

The little boys arrived, all in their gold-trimmed blue uniforms with matching beanies on their heads. I never saw a more disturbed group of children. They twisted and chattered. We always began the den meeting with the Pledge of Alliance. None of them could stand still but shifted nervously from one foot to the other.

One cherub looked up at me and asked solemnly, “Mrs. Gaarsoe, did the Communists kill the President?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Dallas people are very conservative. There are lots of people there who hate Mr. Kennedy.”

I was dumbfounded the next day when I learned the shooter was a young man who called himself a Communist and had lived in Russia.

It has been a long time. I divorced Wallace Gaarsoe and later married John Durkalski. John died in 1992, Wally in '97. After his father died, Karl came to live with me in Albuquerque for several years. Today he is 56 years old and lives in Arkansas.

My brother Preston believed Oswald had an accomplice. He did not believe Osward was good enough marksman to have fired those three hots. Once when John and I were visiting in Texas, we came to Dallas and rode the elevator up to the Sixth Floor Museum in the School Book Depository. John looked out the window at the clear view of the street below and said, “I could have shot him myself from here.” John was a man who in World War II landed on Omaha Beach and followed the troops into Germany without ever firing his rifle.

I have read all the articles I could find about the assassination. I read the biography of Lee Harvey Oswald written by his brother, and I own a copy of “JFK: Breaking the News” by Hugh Aynesworth, a newspaper reporter who was in Dealy Plaza when the shots were fired and in Oak Cliff when Oswald was captured.

Lee Oswald was a nut. He acted alone, hoping to become famous like John Wilkes Booth. Plain and simple. There was no conspiracy. Anyone who believes there was a conspiracy is a fool.

Hatred does terrible things to people. Hateful people inflame unstable men like Oswald to commit terrible acts. On the internet I read horrible attacks on Obama. I hear friends praise Russ Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. My friends are gentle people who would not harm anyone. But it gives me nightmares thinking that somewhere out there is another Oswald.