Before JFK was assassinated............before Marines in

[DarbyUSMC]

my unit had been shipped to Nam.......probably before most of you were born.

St. Patrick's Day 1963. The beginning of the end of the innocence.

http://darbythorpe.homestead.com/CamLejGlobeArchive.html

[angstlessk]

1. Is Pomykal and Irish name?

That was very interesting. Everyone loves a parade, indeed!

[peacetalksforall]

2. So true. So true. We didn't even know it then. Strange how the same

people and their friends and helpers who were around in politics and related jobs are still bringing us death and a lot of noise about patriotism when we can pinpoint their patriotism to other countrries, companies, and causes plus the loss of rights that some of us owned back then, but have had taken from us such as privacy and a certain trust.

This is a pre and post 1963 country. And it's so easy to pinpoint the players.

[chaumont58]

3. I was in the AirForce from 1956 to 1960

I look back on the years before Kennedy was killed with wonderment. We all seemed so nieve. When one looks at what happened after JFK was killed, some good, some bad, but real change nevertheless. Civil rights revolution, sexual revolution. Even a movies revolution. Think at what allowed to be said in movies before the late sixties, and what goes now. I really liked the book, From Here To Eternity. I later came to understand it was very close to how a 30 year man talks. The movie couldn't even use the phrase 'whore house' to describe where soldiers went on their time off. An entire world bending to the standards set by American churches.
We drove cars made in America. We made what we comsumed, for the most part.
I wouldn't go back to the fifties, if I could, but from a stand point of 1959, I think the next 20 years were better for more Americans than what some one standing in 2001 sees as his future.

[thethinker]

4. It could have been so different

We could have evolved in a different way. If the money that was spent on foreign wars, WMD, weapons, corporate welfare, etc. had been spent on the people and making the country stronger, what a different world it would have been. The country had a good start in the 50s. And the JFK assassination was the turning point.

[Retired AF Dem]

5. It has always been my opinon

that JFK's daddy used the mob to get John Elected. John and brother Bob turns on the the mob. John gets shot, LBJ another Democrat benefits, than Bobby gets shot. It's all about money, and when it comes to money everyone is a Repug.

[chaumont58]

6. For what its worth

The Kennedy brothers were obsessed with killing Castro. They tried numerious times, using in some instances, organized crime.
A few years ago, maybe five, I saw Joseph Califano(sp?) interviewed by Brian Lamb, about a book Califano wrote about his years in DC. Califano seemed(to me, anyway) to believe Bobby believed Castro got his brother, before his brother got Castro. Lee Harvey Oswald was a part of the Fair Play for Cuba crowd. It makes sense to me.
I am not much for complicated conspiracies. I never believed Clinton was on the grassy knoll, that November day in Dallas.