Forty-five years, and the nation still can't let go.
We doubt whether many people in 1946 paused to remember the 45th anniversary of William McKinley's assassination. A quick search of electronic archives reveals nothing — no first-person accounts from the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo; no recollections from people who knew Leon Czolgosz; no reminiscences from doctors who worked in vain to save McKinley's life.
And yet today, we have all of these from that day in Dallas in 1963. In recent days, reporters have interviewed Bill and Gayle Newman, the young couple who fell to the grass to shield their young children when shots rang out. They have spoken again to Buell Frazier, the co-worker who unwittingly gave Lee Harvey Oswald a ride to work that morning, with Oswald carrying a strange long package he said contained curtain rods. They have talked to Dr. Kenneth Salyer, one of a team of physicians who worked for about an hour to save Kennedy's life, even though they knew from the start it was hopeless.
On each significant anniversary, the same characters are brought forward again. Each became a part of history that day, their lives forever changed, in large part because Americans won't let go.
An entire industry has grown up around the Kennedy assassination. The books keep coming. The latest is a novel by Adam Braver, titled, "November 22, 1963." The Discovery Channel has just completed its own in-depth investigation that reinforces the controversial conclusion that Oswald was the killer. Millions of people each year pay to visit the assassin's perch in the old brick Texas Schoolbook Depository that now is a museum.
Why the obsession? Unfortunately, as with the many conspiracy theories, that is a question that may never be completely answered.
Americans can't forget because so many of a certain age can remember the moment they heard the news, as if it were a still photograph in their minds. They fixate on it because the crime became an icon for shifting societal tides that soon washed the nation in an unpopular war, racial riots and a youth movement that sought to redefine traditional morals.
But the answer runs deeper than that. Americans obsess because of the many shadowy facts surrounding that day, and of the awful thought that a nation's leader could be removed without the closure of a thorough and fair trial. They can't let go because the government itself has been so secretive about the documents that could shed light.
That is beginning to change, finally. Documents are becoming available. Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins recently opened the county's vault of documents to the public. Included in it are papers that might link Oswald to his eventual killer, Jack Ruby.
But also included is a possible reason why those documents were hidden so long. At a press conference, Watkins, who is black, made special note of how much of the official correspondence in the file is tainted with ugly racial epithets, spewed by people in positions of power and prominence. That sort of thing, especially when so intimate a part of the justice system, is embarrassing and appalling by modern standards.
Fortunately, that is one part of that long-ago world that has mostly disappeared. Whether the fixation on the assassination ever disappears is a question for future generations.