23 Front Pages Covering The Day President Kennedy Was Assassinated

I was nine at the time. My family had just moved to Great Britain in Aug. '63 because my father, a Major in the Air Force, had been assigned to work at the new Ballistic Missile Early Warning Station (BMEWS) at RAF Fylingdales on the North Yorkshire Moors outside Whitby. Our family, along with about 200 other American and RAF families, lived in RAF-owned housing in Whitby, a small fishing town on the NE coast of Britain, just north of Scarborough. Nov. 22 also happened to be the birthday of our next-door neighbor Mrs. Henning. My parents were hosting the party at our house, all the kids of the various Air Force & RAF families were outside playing soccer in the street and the adults were inside our house or milling around the backyard drinking copious amounts of liquor and beer. The party had been going on for about an hour and everyone seemed to be having a great time. Around 6:30 p.m., Mrs. Henning came flying out the front door of our house weeping projectile tears and hysterically sputtering/yelling that “the president has been shot, he’s been killed!” or something to that effect, began reciting the Lord’s prayer and ran over to her house. An eerie slience had taken over the hubbub of the party and all of us kids just stopped dead in our tracks looking confusedly at each other. Carl, the oldest Henning son (also my age) ran after his mother. About that time my father and our other next door neighbor Capt. German came out, both looking visibly shaken/choking back tears and grimly told all of us that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Capt. Henning came out and gathered his other two kids, Paul & Becky, and went in to his house. He was reciting a prayer I couldn’t quite make out. All the now-somber and sobering-up parents began gathering up their respective progeny and making their way back home. My little brother & sister, Hal & Jody, and I went inside where the TV was on the BBC World News and watched the CBS feed where Walter Cronkite made his famous on-air reportage confirming the assassination. Everyone was crying, Mom was on the phone talking to my oldest sister Michelle who was in a private girl’s school outside London. My next oldest sister Cindy was by the TV, rocking back and forth, silently weeping and wondering aloud “does this mean we are going back to America?” As for myself, my first thought when I heard the news was “why would someone want to kill President Kennedy? Everybody likes him, don’t they?” There was also a very strange disconnected feeling I had which, in the next few days after assimilating everything, boiled down to “I’m not so sure I want to go back to America.”