Forty years on

JFK was shot dead forty years ago today. Media are full of it. First thing I heard upon waking was John Connolly’s window remembering the ghastly moment when the President and her husband were struck, followed by an interview on BBC Radio 4 with Robert Macnamara, JFK’s slickly-haired Secretary of Defense. I am old enough to remember vividly where I was the moment it happened. I was in my bedroom, sitting at a sloping desk my parents had bought in an auction, doing my homework. Nothing special in that. But there was an edge to my feelings, because I had actually seen the President, in the flesh, close-to, a few months earlier, on his visit to Ireland. Years later, I wrote about it.