John F. Kennedy was killed thirty-five years ago today (November 22). It was an event so personal for any American with a radio or television that we cannot forget the pain and despair we felt for him, his family—and for us, the nation.

He rode in a Lincoln motorcar, top down, sitting next to his wife in her pink pillbox hat and waving at the crowd. With the welcome came the shots.

Earlier Presidents had been assassinated, of course, but this one occurred in the age of electronic media. Murder invaded our homes and cars. TV and radio brought it home to us in ways newspapers never could, and we were not yet desensitized by decades of violent images to come.

The face of Lee Harvey Oswald, the killer with the smirk, festers in our consciousness forever. Immobilized unmercifully in front of our television sets for days, many of us witnessed the killing of the assassin under the eyes of the world and the Dallas police.

"Camelot" had been shattered, and the will of the people—the election of 1960—was overturned in six seconds flat. Back in Washington in searing black and white, we would never forget the young daughter kneeling beside her mother and touching her father’s coffin. Then there was the procession: the starkly tapping drum, the empty prancing horse, and there would never be a more desolate November.

Only later did investigators and yellow journalists rake the muck of the dead President’s dark side. In 1963, we knew him as a child of privilege, grown up to wealth, but devoting his life to the greater good. He never actually had to work—in the sense that he needed a paycheck to survive—but he worked hard to change that which was wrong about our wonderful country.

For disenfranchised Americans, he made the impossible seem within reach. For earthlings, he pointed to space as another new frontier.

Nowadays, we cannot offer unadulterated praise of John F. Kennedy, the person. We can, however, admire the ideals he advanced and his legacy of civil rights reform and space exploration.