Born in 1965. George Wallace was the first one I remember; Ford the first one where I had previously heard of the would-be victim. I don’t remember any of them as TV events in the JFK sense and really, none of them seemed that shocking to me.
One irony I do recall: In the early edition of the NY Times the day after Rajiv Gandhi’s murder, they ran a picture of Gandhi on the front page, with the caption “Rajiv Gandhi voting in yesterday’s elections in India, which were marred by violence”.
In Holland t
he murder ofPim Fortuyn
I hated him then, but now I hate how his Martyrdom even more
it changed the dutch politics and paved the way for Geert Wilder’s anti Islam party becoming the third party in the Netherland, …
I picked Giffords–mostly because I don’t recall learning about Reagan’s until long afterwards (I was 6 at the time of the attack).
But, reading the thread, I think I would have picked Rabin if he’d been included, because I traveled to Israel just a few months after his death. His assassination didn’t really affect our trip, though we saw where he was shot, and memorials to him, and some of our speakers talked about him and his influence on the Peace Process, which at the time seemed to be really hopeful.
Rafik Hariri. Only assassination I’ve ever actually heard with my own ears.
Senator Robert Kennedy–when I was very young, I was watching TV while my Mom & baby brother slept in.
My TV show was pre-empted for news of the killing, & all the grown-ups on TV sounded very upset. So I went & woke Mom.
“Mom. Wake up. Mr Kennedy is dead.”
“Honey, let Mommy sleep, that happened years ago.”
I went back & watched TV some more.
“Mommy?”
“WHAT?”
“It’s the other Mr Kennedy.”
A few minutes later, she got up. And saw. And started crying.
I blamed myself, because I thought that I had made her cry.
I couldn’t comfort her.
You and I are the same age, then, and like you I think I was more sad for John-John and Caroline than anything. I can remember seeing Caroline on TV and in magazines before the assassination and thinking how we were the same age and had the same hairstyle, and I sort of related to her, so when her father was killed, I felt really bad for her, although at the time, because I was six, I felt like I didn’t understand exactly what was going on.
By the way, the one thing about the Giffords assassination that has been haunting me since I read it last night was that the little girl who was killed was born on September 11, 2001. The idea that on a day of such tragedy this little girl was born, a symbol of hope, and that she died in another tragedy 10 years later . . . haunting.
On the morning of July 16, 1999, someone came into the office and said “John Kennedy’s plane is missing.”
I remember my thoughts exactly as I had them: What is this, the President’s Plane is missing? Kennedy’s been dead for years. Is he takling about the anniversary. No, that was in November."
Finally I said “What are you talking about?”
“Kennedy’s plane is missing.” A short pause when he sees the uncomprehending look on my face. “John F. Kennedy Jr. His plane is missing.”
Me, joking; Oh, you’re kidding, right?
Him: No. His plane is missing
Me, insistantly: Please tell me you’re joking.
Him: No. His plane went down and is missing.
Me: YOU–ARE–KIDDING.
I turned on the office TV and saw Dan Rather sitting before a map of Martha’s Vineyard. Then I knew.
I don’t care much if any politician is murdered — although I would prefer them not to be — certainly not more than when an ordinary person is killed.
Still, the only assassination that shocked me was the murder of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin in 2004 by a helicopter gunship: he was quadriplegic and nearly blind. 11 other people were smashed.
In honour I temporarily switched internet signatures to:
I have to kill a 67-yr-old man: considering he’s paraplegic should I choose a knife fight ? Or as he’s blind, it might be pistols at dawn: in order to demonstrate my sheer fighting courage perhaps I should use a helicopter gunship when his wheelchair is exiting morning prayers.
and more obscurely:
If you could have heard the old man scream as he fell, and the noise of his bones upon the pavement !
I have memories of Robert Kennedy as the earliest assassination/assassination attempt of an American political figure.
I will admit, no assassination/attempt has really impinged upon my life in the slightest. I would be seriously annoyed if one locked down a city I was in/traveling from/traveling to/needed to drive through/past on a road trip because of the interference in my needs.
Self-centered? Hell yes.
Look, I do due diligence and research who I vote into office. Our constitution has procedures in place for all sorts of issues involving the change of office for various reasons, and for the temporary governing in case of death or illness. I will trust in them to keep the country moving along with forward momentum as shit gets sorted out.
I can be mildly sad in an empathic sort of way with the family of the dead person, but I honestly do not understand the wailing and gnashing of teeth at the death of a total stranger.
Mine is a strange answer. It was the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald that affected me the most. Part of it was seeing it live, of course, but there was more to it than that. You have to remember that the Kennedy assassination was the first in, what, sixty years – my lifetime anyway. Cermak was too early and besides, the assassination of a mayor wouldn’t have had the same impact anyway.
But it was possible to write off the killing of the President as an isolated event, not something that shook the fabric of the country. The killing of his killer, though, was different. It was an attack on justice and order itself. That was the one that shook me the most. I still wonder if the next decade of shootings would have happened if there had been an orderly closure to that first assassination.
Prior to Giffords, the only assassination attempt on that list that I was alive for was Reagan’s. Despite being very young, I remember it pretty clearly, because they interrupted Scooby Doo to talk about it, which pissed me off to no end.
Pretty sure that’s why I grew up to be a liberal.
Born fall 1960, so not old enough to remember JFK. (Though I should probably not be quite so sweeping, as I know people my age who say they do remember his death…in any case, I don’t.)
I was dimly aware of the killings of MLK and RFK (they happened when I was seven), not sure about Malcolm. I don’t remember them affecting me all that much one way or the other. It was not a safe time, in my recollection, and I was very aware of that; but that was more a local, the-streets-may-not-be-safe kind of a deal than a concern about assassination. I’d say being just 7 plays a role. Again, though, I know people my age who say they recall these assassinations very well, so age isn’t the only thing going on here.
I do remember Wallace’s shooting and (both of the attempts on) Ford. I don’t remember them as seminal moments. Leo Ryan I remember, but only as an adjunct to the greater horror that was Jonestown.
The Moscone murder did affect me big-time for some reason, though, despite the fact that I have never had any ties to San Francisco and had never heard of him (or Harvey Milk, for that matter). I was a college freshman, I think. Something about the idea that an elected official could be calmly working away and someone shows up and starts firing–
I see on preview that virtually nobody else has chosen this one as having the biggest effect on them. Interesting.
The earliest ones I remember are MLK and RFK. None of them had what you could call any real emotional impact on me. Some of the laws passed in reaction to them, though, piss me off to this day.
That is, I clearly remember hearing of the attempt on Reagan, and the Indira Gandhi killing, probably within minutes of the first TV reports–I was just too young and politically unaware to be “grabbed” and “glued” to the followup, as aceplace57 described.
For Reagan, my childhood friend got a call at our house from his mother. After getting off the phone, he excitedly met me halfway up the stairs to the second floor:
“Do you like President Reagan?”
“Uh–I don’t know. Why?”
“He just got shot!”
“Oh. Is he dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Huh.” What was the President to me? Pretty abstract. It was like hearing that an asteroid had crashed into Mars.
By the time of Rabin’s death, I was hyper-aware of politics, even in countries that I had no specific personal connection to. My mind reeled with implications.
For me, it was the killing of Olof Palme, because he seemed like a principled character, in a country where you would never think a head of state would be assassinated, and the killer made a clean getaway. It also reminded me of my home country (Switzerland) because he was walking home from a theater with his wife, with no bodyguards, something that the Swiss president would do (I remember once seeing a Swiss president talking with some foreign officials on TV, and his head had bandages on it; the newscaster mentioned that the president fell off his bicycle on his way to work that day.)
Yep. Prior to this weekend, all of the others that happened during my lifetime occured when I was ages 1-4 so they didn’t mean anything to me.
I’ve never understood the whole shock/crying thing when a politician, or anyone not close to me really, gets shot. It makes for interesting talk for awhile, then inevitably I get sick of hearing about it. The Giffords shooting hasn’t quite reached that stage for me yet, but give it time.
9/11 got me nervous for a little while, but I didn’t lose it or anything.