In Memory

Where was I when President Kennedy was assassinated?

In utero. Fifty years ago today, I had not been born. Close but not yet.

On that infamous day the nation lost a President and today we remember his death. Forty-eight years later on another tragic day in U.S. history, we almost lost 40,000 frozen moments of President Kennedy's life.

From Big Think...

This week we mark the loss half a century ago of President John F. Kennedy. For that generation, Kennedy’s death was the “where were you” moment. For our generation, the “where were you” moment is September 11th. In the middle of all that devastation, few knew that we “lost” JFK in that moment, too. Locked away in a safe in Five World Trade Center were 40,000 negatives of photos of the Kennedy circle by photographer and family insider Jacques Lowe. The trusted photographer of the Kennedys since the late 1950s, Lowe captured many of the iconic pictures of JFK and Camelot in the making…

...When Lowe’s daughter, Thomasina, to whom Jacques entrusted the negatives, learned of the attacks on September 11th, she faced a unique dilemma: “Do I save myself or my father’s precious negatives, depicting one of the greatest statesmen of the modern era…?” “In my mind’s eye,” Thomasina writes in the preface to the book, “I could see my father running down Broadway against the flow of traffic with just one aim: to rescue his negatives. I have no doubt that he would not have paused for thought.”