A Requiem for Camelot

I think that we
Shall never more, at any future time
Delight our souls with talk of knightly deeds
Walking about the gardens and the halls
Of Camelot, as in the days that were.

__"Idylls of the King"
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Fifty years ago I was walking across the campus at UC Berkeley on my way to class, when someone said the president had been shot in Dallas. I wound up in a dorm room, clustered with a group of students around the radio listening in shocked disbelief as the news got worse...the mad dash to Parkland Hospital, the futile effort to save the president's life, the grim announcements that he was dead. It was the weekend that lasted forever--stores closed, football games and concerts cancelled, we huddled around our black and white television watching the grainy images.
--The First Lady, still in her bloodstained suit standing next to Lyndon Johnson as he took the oath of office on Air Force One
--The flag draped coffin
-- the riderless horse, boots turned backward in the stirrups
--little John John's salute as the caisson rolled past
--Jackie, in deepest black widow's weeds, walking with the President's brothers down Pennsylvania Avenue

Like everyone else, I will never forget how I spent that weekend or the grainy images. It was the end of our innocence as a nation and our dream of Camelot. Our boyishly handsome, smart, articulate president was dead, his beautiful, cultured wife maintaining her dignity as she mourned him so publicly. The conspiracy theories began immediately as the rest of the drama unfolded before our eyes, and I don't think we have ever regained our trust in our government, our elected officials, our "American Way of Life"....

I kept the newspapers and magazines, and I wept again as I looked at them today, fifty years later. I wept not only for our lost president and his beautiful family, but for our lost innocence. I think we knew then, on college campuses across the nation, that our belief and hope, our trust in our elected leaders, had died with Kennedy. The world has never been the same. Camelot is gone.