Was anyone out there alive and aware when JFK, MLK and RFK were shot?

[Bavorskoami]

42. If we weren't aware before we sure were after the assassinations.

I was a junior in high school in drafting class when the intercom was turned on with a radio at the microphone in the school office reporting on JFK's assassination. We were all shocked and rendered numb and speechless at first. I remember also days later being glued to the TV listening to the solemn drumbeat as I watched the entire procession of the horse drawn caisson with JFK's casket up the avenue to the Capital building to lie in state. As the shock wore off I have to say some of us were apprehensive of an LBJ presidency. (My friends mostly came from Republican families - but all of us had been inspired by JFK's charisma as President.)

In 1968 when MLK and RFK were shot I was in the Army in California - at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey. Without ready access to radio or TV we first learned of both assassinations in kind of a confusing word-of-mouth network so our shock was at first tempered by a lot disbelief, confusion and skepticism that we were getting the real story. RFK had been campaigning in CA for the presidential primary and I had seen him speak at the Monterey airport only a couple of days before his assassination.

The MLK assassination is in my memory also tied to a report from one of our language instructors who had been summoned to Washington, DC, to interrogate a Czech general (Jan Šejna) who had a bit earlier defected to the West. The instructor spoke to us later about the riots in DC and of watching the plumes of smoke rising from the arson fires.

The losses of Bobby Kennedy and MLK are also linked in my mind as one of the reasons for the atmosphere of despair and anger in demonstrations in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic convention.

It's a bit off topic form this thread but I can't think of 1968 without also remembering the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact armies. Almost all of our Czech instructors at the DLI had fled their homeland after the communist takeover in 1948 so you can imagine how emotional that was for them and us as their students.

Let's hope and pray that there is never another year like 1968 or a family of national public servants like the Kennedys that suffers so much tragedy.