The two saddest photographs in my memory both commemorate a tragic historical event that might not have happened, an alternate reality: a daylight photo of an iceberg with a streak of dark paint along its waterline that was seen from the deck of one of the ocean liners that rescued survivors the day after the Titanic sank. The other is a photo of the presidential limo in which President Kennedy lost his life earlier that day, but with its bulletproof top installed. It was about to be loaded on the plane back to Washington, DC.

It was a sunny day in Dallas sixty years ago today, so the top was deemed unnecessary for a brief parade across the city. I saw a presidential motorcade once myself, in 2004. It was a sunny day in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that day, too, but there were no convertibles to be seen. The specific route was not published; the city block I lived on included the arena at which President Bush was to hold a campaign event, so streets near my apartment building were blocked with large equipment.

I do not know if my family home was more or less Kennedy-saturated than the homes of other American families that were begun in the 1960s like ours: we had three JFK memorial books and one LP recording of the late President’s speeches that had a glossy full-color photograph on the front of the sleeve and his inaugural address printed as a long liner note on the back.

There were November 1963 issues of Life magazine boxed up—Life was the newsweekly that people kept and preserved and re-visited as if events had not happened until they were confirmed on the giant pages of that publication. (The media preferences I was exposed to when I was young stayed with me into adulthood: Life, not Look; Time, not Newsweek, NBC News, not CBS. To younger ears, I suppose all of that is akin to preferring Safari or Chrome to Opera or Tor or perhaps something even more arcane.)

In each of those publications—history books and issues of Life magazine alike—color is introduced with photos of the president’s inaugural and presidency, like the sadly happy one at the top. Greens were greener, blues bluer, and, after his murder, Kennedy seemed more like a president than any American could remember. Life (and Life) became less lively after his sudden departure. The photos of his funeral present a world that has returned to black-and-white.

My memories of these items, the magazines and memorial books, are from the early 1970s, as I was born in 1968. These were not ancient, dusty history tomes but books which were still in our living room, books whose pages could still bring a tear to my mother’s eyes and catch in my father’s voice. For those of us born after 1963, the president’s death was a known fact and unchangeable, yet the word our parents’ generation always, always employed to describe the event in Dallas was “unimaginable.” Perhaps the phenomenon of the known unimaginable reintroduces itself in a new way for each generation. Somehow, I feel like I’ve lived through something like five of these so far.

The fact that John F. Kennedy was shockingly murdered was the reason for each book’s publication, and also the reason for each book and magazine’s continued life in my family home, so some of the first history lessons I was exposed to were pretty fatalistic: Death is history’s companion. One book’s title, Triumph and Tragedy, from 1968, sums up the nature of almost all of the President Kennedy memorial books. The book presented the history of the entire Kennedy family, and it ended on a note of optimism about the young U.S. Senator from New York, the late president’s younger brother, as if tragedy was about to yield to triumph once again. We all know what the book did not. Its conclusion dated from before Senator Kennedy’s conclusion. Triumph and Tragedy, and triumph and tragedy.

Sixty years ago today, Camelot was still just a soundtrack from a Broadway play and not yet a metaphor. A black-and-white news photo of a limo with its top installed is its own metaphor, a glimpse of an American history that did not happen.

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Mark Aldrich is a journalist, award-winning humor columnist, and writer/performer with the Magnificent Glass Pelican radio comedy improv group, now in its thirty-second season:

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