In a Word . . . assassination

It is safe to say there are few among our 2020 batch of new pensioners who don’t remember where they were on November 22nd, 1963. They would have been nine at the time.

The assassination of US president John F Kennedy was one of those rare events that people who live through them will remember for the rest of their days. A more recent one was 9/11.

In November 1988, to mark the 25th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, I contacted an eclectic range of people to get their memory of that day for an article in Magill magazine.

The magazine, like so many I spoke to then, is no longer with us.

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Playwright Brian Friel was in a flat in Artane, Dublin, which he shared with actor Ray McAnally. They heard the news with "absolute horror and shock" through static on a bad radio.

Gay Byrne was "stunned" in his Ballsbridge bachelor flat in Dublin having just returned from Manchester where he was broadcasting with Granada TV. Singer Mary Coughlan, then seven, remembered her mother "bawling crying" at the news.

Tragedy

Jack Kaarama, minister for culture in the Estonian Soviet Social Republic, whom I collared at an event in Dublin, was at university at the time of the assassination. He remembered thinking it a tragedy. People in the former USSR believed Kennedy "represented great hope for the future", despite the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Senator Ted Kennedy was chairing a meeting in the US Senate when fellow senators saw the news on ticker tape. (Hardly bears thinking about.)

Donal McCann, the actor, was the first at the Evening Press newspaper to get the news. He was a copy boy and picked it up from wire services.

The poet Seamus Heaney, who I accosted on the street outside Dublin's Shelbourne hotel, was courtesy personified as he explained how he had just got home to Ardboe, from Belfast, with girlfriend (later wife) Marie Devlin, when he heard the news.

There was then RTÉ personality Bibi Baskin who had no recollection of the assassination at all, which she found "quite remarkable really." Indeed, she was not alone. Brian Bourke, the artist, remembered nothing either. This business of everyone-remembers-where-they-were-the-night-Kennedy-was-shot was a load of codswallop, he said, and those who claimed to remember simply wanted to be part of a "community of myth". Well... ahem!

Assassination, from Latin assassinare, 'to kill wrongfully by surprise/suddenly'.

inaword@irishtimes.com