Dare I ask where you were when you heard the news?

[Stillhomewardbound]

I'm in my 50th year and would have been nearly a year old when President Kennedy was felled in Dallas. Far too young to have had any cognisance of so shocking event but still I'm left with a heavy heart.

The term 'felled' is appropriate because it was as if one of the mightiest trees in the forest had been, inexplicably, axed and brought to the ground.

The fact is, the Kennedy legend is a most potent one.

I wrote elsewhere today of how JFK was a consummate, professional politician who horse-traded along with the best of them on the Senate floor and made his way to the White House by the traditional, malign route; but it's my reckoning that along the way he formulated a manifesto, with a striking determination, that put people at the heart of the political agenda.

He struck a bell-note of such sonority that LBJ could not but follow and see through the reforms he had started.

I posit all this by way of explanation for why he remains such a potent figure today. There's much more to the myth than his most handsome appeal, his most glamourous wife and his way with the press corps, not to mention the terrifying circumstances of his assassination and the global shock effected by a new, media age.

One could produce a long list of the errors of his administration ... The Bay of Pigs, the plotting against Castro amongst others, but ultimately there was a palpable humanity about the man and I feel that is why his spirit lives on after all these years.

He represents, if not the actual deliverance of social equality, then certainly the righteousness of that aspiration. He at least set the United States on a path to true equality, and while it still fails from day to day in reaching that goal, it dare not shirk from his legacy.

On this day, the 50th anniversary of his passing, may John Fitzgerald Kennedy continue to rest in peace.

[Dave2002]

I was at home, listening to the radio in the evening as we often did in those days. I don't think we were watching TV, though by then we must have had one. My parents had held out against having a TV for years, probably for behavioural reasons - they thought watching TV was a bad idea - rather than economic ones. That meant that the excitement of TV for quite a few years before that was experienced only by a mile or so walk up to my grandparent's house, where I recall watching Highway Patrol.

There was no instant TV from around the world then, though there were by then a few transatlantic broadcasts - see http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=m...nation&f=false The early satellite broadcasts had limitations. Unlike today, when now geostationary satellites are used, as well, possibly, as fibre optic links, for transatlantic communications, there were no wideband transatlantic cable links**, and the satellites used were LEOs (Low Earth Orbit) - http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=l...e%20TV&f=false, so there were limited opportunities to send and receive signals between countries as the satellites moved around the globe. Also, there were no video recorders, so images which which we eventually saw - I think a day later - were in fact done on film, and then replayed for transmission around the world. I don't know if the BBC or other broadcasting companies even had the ability to store the broadcasts when they arrived in the UK, or whether the re-runs over a day or two were all done by film. It may be that in fact the films were duplicated in the USA, and copies flown over to the UK, as there were limited ways of doing that kind of thing then. Physical transport of film copies was done quite frequently in those days. Possibly the first TV broadcasts were done directly from the USA in real time from film taken in Dallas, as I don't think video recorders were being used even in the USA at that time, though I'm willing to be corrected.

** There were transatlantic cable links, but probably mainly used for telephone, and with insufficient capacity for TV. It was not until 1988 that fibre optic transatlantic cables came into operation - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transat...ications_cable

[Mary Chambers]

One of the most vivid memories of my youth.....I was in the Amphitheatre at Covent Garden, watching Fonteyn and Nureyev in Marguerite and Armand. In the interval, a boy we knew vaguely said he had heard from a friend that President Kennedy had been shot. We thought he must have been making a silly joke - things like that didn't happen, did they? "He's not the sort of person to make that kind of joke" said the boy, looking scared.

Before the next ballet, someone (I think it was Frederick Ashton) came onto the stage and announced the assassination. The audience gave a great gasp, almost a scream. The performance continued, but we were asked not to applaud.

I still have the programme for that night.

[Suffolkcoastal]

I wasn't born until nearly a year later, so wasn't even a collection of cells at that time, but it was still fresh in my parents' minds when I was little.

[rauschwerk]

It was at a meeting of my school film society, where we had just watched a film - Wajda's Ashes and Diamonds - about assassination. I thought the friend who told me must be joking but he said, don't laugh, it's not funny.

[Petrushka]

I was only 8 at the time yet it remains one of the most vivid memories of my childhood. We had had a TV for some time, since 1957 I think, and I well remember hearing of the shocking news on the ITV bulletin in the evening at around 9pm. I think, but may be wrong, that Andrew Gardner was the newscaster that night. I was in the very same room where, 34 years later and with the (different!) TV in the same place, news arrived of Princess Diana's death.

With some degree of foresight, my mother saved the following morning's issue of the Daily Express and I still have it somewhere. It carries the same picture that appeared in most papers that day but then being a broadsheet there is plenty of room for reportage. I've read several books on the assassination since then, some silly and some excellent and thought-provoking but what is so striking about that Express coverage, written within hours of the event, is how accurate much of it is. Wild speculation and conspiracy theories galore hadn't surfaced at that stage!

That Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy is probably not in doubt these days and I believe that current opinion has it that Kennedy was killed by the CIA or the US military establishment who were alarmed at his attempts at peace with Khrushchev and Castro.

One of the best books I've read is this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/JFK-Unspeaka...he+unspeakable

I did have some sort of fantasy that, come the 50th anniversary, one of the culprits would break silence and reveal the full truth.

[Don Petter]

Contrary to the popular theory, I have no idea where I was when I heard the news, although I was twenty at the time, and I don't think I would have remembered it for the last forty years or so.

(I do, however, remember exactly where I was when I learned of my mother's and father's deaths, in 1960 and 1971.)

[Alain Maréchal]

Settling down in front of a tv to watch Britten's 50th birthday concert, when the news was announced. I didn't believe it at first - such things did not happen. The studio concert, broadcast live I think, and conducted by Rozhdestvensky (at the time the participation of soviet musicians was considered daring, but BB had many friends and champions in the USSR), was delayed but went ahead. 50 years is hard to believe.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i can not remember where i was or how i heard, but it was profound in impact on my family and friends [i had just turned 18].... it was also one of the first real television events .... we watched the tv in stupefaction [as if hypnotised] for news ... the world felt a really more dangerous and bad place that such a thing could happen so soon after Cuba and the missile thing which had already scared the living daylights out of the world ... nobody had a naive view of the USA after that; and the further assassinations of his brother and the Rev King consolidated a view of that country as having a much darker side and i am sure this perception was critical in the later 1960s in the UK and Europe as we rebelled in our diverse ways in '68 ...

the history of the Cold War is quite extraordinary Berlin Budapest Dealey Plaza et seq ...
for me the assassination was the end of any innocent belief about the cold war, before Vietnam entered the discourse of protest the USA was suspect because no one i knew believed Oswald was alone in it and no one thought it was the Russians ... our best received conspiracy theories were the mafia/teamsters cuba/bay of pigs or the US Military/LeMay [or an unholy alliance of all three and Hoover as i recall] .... the USA lost its good guy image when Kennedy was shot ...

[amateur51]

I was aged 11, just starting at an all-boys grammar school where I felt lost, and trying to come to terms with feelings that I didn't understand but about which I knew enough to keep quiet. My mother had told my ten year old brother & me that she was expecting a baby. And then I heard this news on the transistor radio that had been my reward for passing the eleven-plus exam.

I confess that I am still fascinated by the whole thing and that I have never delved deep into the conspiracy theories because I don't understand Amarican politics and society well enough to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

Last Summer I read this book and my interest in JFK was re-kindled because I guess that he might have been the sort of friend that I would have craved in my grammar school. The book, quite unsensationally, reveals another side of an already famous and glamourous person, revealing a depth that many might not have expected.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jack-LEM-Billings-Extraordinary-Friendship/dp/0306816237/ref=sr_1_16?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385115388&sr=1-16&keywords=JFK%27s+friend

[Dave2002]

This was an interesting radio drama last weekend - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03hmh3t Air Force One.

How much is true? Who knows? Worth a listen.

[mangerton]

I was twelve, and heard the news around 7 pm from a school friend who phoned me for some other reason and mentioned it.

I went into the sitting room (phone in the hall in those days!) and told my parents, who as I remember seemed singularly unmoved. Strange, because they had a keen interest in the news and current events.

[robk]

I was at scouts aged 13. Someone came in late and said that JFK had been assasinated. I couldn't believe it until I went home and heard it from my parents. The world seemed a more uncertain place after that.

[chapman19]

I know exactly where I was on this day 50 years ago – working as a Trainee Film Editor for BBC TV News at Alexandra Palace.

The news that evening was read by a radio news reader up from Broadcasting House on attachment, his name was John Roberts.

The first pictures of the event were shown by the BBC, they were sent from America by what was known as ‘Cable Film’. I wrote about this system in my book, It’s Alright Leaving Me… published in 2008 and still available from Amazon.

In the same Videotape area was housed the Cable-Film machine, a system whereby moving pictures could be sent from the USA across the Atlantic along the ordinary transatlantic telephone cable. It worked on the same principal that the newspapers had been using for many years to send their pictures ‘by wire’, by scanning the photograph line by line. In the States an identical machine to ours would be loaded with the film to be transmitted and the image was turned into a signal that could be sent down the line. At the London end our machine would display the lines onto a very slow scan TV monitor, which would retain the image until all 200 lines were present. A film camera would then expose a frame of its film with this image, and then continue to the next frame, which would be treated in exactly the same way. After the whole film had been exposed it had to be developed as normal, which took another 15 minutes. It was a slow process but it meant that within about three hours we could be showing important American news film many hours before our rivals down the road at ITN.
On Friday, 22 November, 1963 I remember watching the first shaky pictures coming in from Dallas of the assassination of President Kennedy, as frame after frame of the remarkable footage showing the limousine containing the President and his wife clicked onto the little yellow-coloured screen. Some days later, the dramatic film of the shooting of Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, by Jack Ruby who was standing in the crowd outside the Sheriff’s office in Dallas, was fed over the Atlantic in the same way. Another scoop for BBC TV News! I was always surprised that the people at ITN were never to invest in a similar machine.

Incidentally, videotape recording was very definitely with us by 1963, I wrote about that as well – in the same book.

The VT area was run by engineers because the quadruplex videotape recorder, using 2-inch-wide magnetic tape, was a highly technical beast to line up and operate, and it needed many hours of complex electronic engineering training to master.
At first there was no thought of editing videotape, but soon a technique involving physically splicing it, just like audiotape, had been developed. At the start of the edit it was necessary for the engineer to find the exact start point of the picture frame; this was done by spreading a paste containing iron filings that revealed the pattern of magnetic fields on the tape. The tape was then cut and spliced to the new incoming shot using adhesive tape. This process could take anything up to twenty minutes per edit. The invention of the electronic editor, where two machines were used, was to speed up videotape editing significantly. If there was a need to make more than a couple of edits in a recording – say a recording of a complete day’s play at a cricket match – then the engineers would record the whole match onto film using a QPD (Quick Pull Down) machine. This was basically a film camera that filmed a special flat-screen television monitor; this resulted in a considerable drop in picture quality but at least, after processing, we film editors could then edit it.

Happy days – a long, long time ago!!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Its-Alright-Leaving-Travels-Editor/dp/0755210999/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1385118881&sr=8-2&keywords=Geoff+Hale

[Ferretfancy]

I was in the dubbing theatre at Lime Grove, and remember dashing in to the mixer where a tricky dub was happening. I said "Kennedy has been shot ! " The reply was " Close the door would you ? " We worked until 1 am.