A friend was cleaning out some of her mother’s stashings, and was sorting into trash, giveaway and keep piles. She came across ‘The torch is passed…’ and decided it could be given away to me. I actually may have it somewhere still, though I haven’t seen it in years.
It is subtitled: The Associated Press Story of The Death of a President. Mostly pictures with AP stories of the four days in 1963 of President Kennedy’s murder, followed by Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder (with those unforgettable pictures we remember, of murder, live right on our TV sets), and then the magnificent and somber presidential lying in state and funeral.
Almost every picture is iconic, a reminder of that dreadful event, which became the first of three devastating assassinations in 5 years’ time. By mid-summer 1968, many of us wondered if public violence and murder were going to be America’s new way to deal with its problems.
That long season passed away, as all seasons do. But the pain and devastation remains in memory, and we live every day with the changed history, so different from what might have been.