November 22, 2008 marks the 45th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.

For years after his assassination people would sometimes ask one another where they were on that tragic day when they heard the news. I remember some of my older cousins talking about how they were in elementary school and when the news of the president’s death was learned many students wept.

Where I was the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy is one of my earliest memories. I was at my grandparent’s house and I remember seeing my Great-Uncle Francis (my grandfather’s younger brother) praying for Kennedy. My uncle worked for my grandfather (he bailed paper and flattened corrugated boxes) in this hand-operated bailing machine that compressed the paper and corrugated boxes into bales the size of refrigerators that were then tied together with metal wire. This was part of my grandfather’s recycling operation (before recycling became a 70’s buzz word) that he had in his warehouse. I must have gone out there looking for my grandfather when I noticed Uncle Francis praying.

And I guess it also must have been right around the time I first became aware of death (the other time was when I was saddened when a character played by Dennis Weaver of Gunsmoke was killed on an episode of Combat!—and I thought I would never see Chester (Dennis Weaver) on Gunsmoke again) and our mortality. I think it really shook me up or at least had me thinking about things (as much as a five-year-old could) because when I was watching the State Funeral on television, my grandmother told me years later that I turned to her and said, “he’s dead.”

Five years later, in 1968 I would be old enough to know how to react with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. By then I knew what terms like tragic meant. By then I knew that the deaths of those two men had a profound impact on America that fateful year of 1968 and the years since.

This past weekend I watched Oliver Stone’s JFK again and despite a lot of the criticism the film received when it first came out for taking liberties with history—the interweaving of fiction with fact that might confuse some viewers—it is without question a cinematic tour de force. It may not be one of Stone’s better films like Platoon but it is still worth watching, especially with the stellar cast. The film still holds up quite well despite all the criticism.

There is another film—a lesser known one—about the assassination, Flashpoint that I would love to watch again one day. I’ve only seen it twice and it ranks up there with another fine film Executive Action (1973) that also explored the possibility of a conspiracy. What's most interesting about that film was that it was made just 10 years after the assassination when many people were wondering if there had indeed been a conspiracy.

Another interesting movie was a made-for-TV-movie, The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald that imagined what would have happened had Oswald not been shot and killed and had stood trial.)

And yes, I am one of those people who believes that Oswald did not act alone and that there was another shooter on the Grassy Knoll.