Sixty years ago today, I was in my bedroom with two friends, waiting for our weekly tennis lesson. Indoor tennis courts were rare then, so playing tennis at the edge of winter was special. Our teacher’s voice preceded her down the hallway: “Turn on the radio.” TV in our house was still black-and-white – and restricted to an hour a week. News came from newspapers or, if you got lucky, newsreels before movies. Age twelve, the news did not interest me. I had worn a campaign button to school during the election. It was bigger than a silver dollar. The faces of Nixon and Lodge oscillated. I can’t remember any Kennedy-Johnson buttons. Anyone daring to vote Democrat would have kept it quiet.

            A male voice crackled from the radio, which I seldom used. “The President has been shot.” He had been transported to a hospital in Dallas. There was blood, but surely he would be alright. We listened to the radio instead of playing tennis. A while after – I can’t remember how long – the voice said the President was dead. Dead? My dad was an Ike man: he loathed JFK. JFK was a Boston Irishman, Lyndon Johnson a cowboy, but dead? I’d lost two grandfathers when I was younger, but it hadn’t registered. John Quinn, who taught us to ride horses, had died. I had gone to his funeral and sat where I could almost touch his box. He was an Irishman too, but apparently not a bad one.

            I was allowed to watch as much television as I wanted that weekend. The family didn’t watch, so I watched upstairs with our colored maids. Suzy Brown, who loved me, kept crying and hugging: “It’ll be alright, little man.” I watched LBJ being sworn in, with Jackie in her blood-smeared suit beside him. I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald as it occurred. I saw John-John saluting the caisson. I took a few minutes off from TV to learn the Navy hymn on the piano. It was in our hymnal, but I’d never heard it in church. Everybody on TV walked so slowly, the horses too. Some weeks later, National Geographic featured a pull-out of LBJ and his cabinet. I posted it above my desk and memorized the faces. Orville Freeman was Secretary of Agriculture. In big type, next to the photo of LBJ taking the oath of office, were the words, “Come, let us reason together. – Isaiah”

            I am still sad. Typing these memories makes me teary sixty years after. What broke that weekend, shattered like a vase on stone, was my dream of America. My America had been such a safe place you didn’t have to think about it. Five years later Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. got shot, then Bobby Kennedy, then my dad had his heart attack. America was a place where people died before their time.

            Premature deaths made me want to be politician. Politicians were heroes who risked death to do good. They shone like saints. I worked on campaigns several summers and found the work boring. Music and words were more exciting. Business paid more.

            Half a century has seen America’s politics slide from the heroic to the abhorrent. The occasional hero has not slowed the slide. Politicians are bought and sold by billionaires. The idea of Profiles in Courage, from today’s vantage, seems a sick joke.

            There are many reasons for this slide. It’s happened in many countries. Lee Harvey Oswald isn’t solely to blame. But those gunshots began my descent into disgust. Remembering them makes me sad.