November 21, 1963

I was surprised to see that the speech he gave at Brooks Air Force Base was only about nine minutes long. When I was ten years old, leaning against a lamp post and watching him deliver it, the speech seemed to last a million years. I remember that the wind, which you can see in this clip blowing the flags almost straight out, was moving his hair around. When it was all over my father took my brother and me back home, having done his duty as he saw it, taking his children to see the president of the United States. The next day on the schoolyard after lunch some of the children who had gone home to eat, and been around the TV or radio, said that he had been shot. On some deep level, it still makes no sense to me at all. Perhaps that's the point.