Eyewitness Turns Back Clock a Half Century to JFK's Assassination

Thanks to grant funding provided by the Foundation for Belmont Education, tenth graders at the Belmont High School were given the opportunity to hear from Norman Katz, one of the Secret Service agents on duty in Dallas when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

“Assassinations have happened before,” he told the audience of sophomores, “and they will happen again.”

Katz outlined how far security measures have come in the 50 years since Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. 

“In the early 1960s, we weren’t even thinking about assassination; we were just there to offer general protection.”

He added that 50 years ago, there were 312 Secret Service agents employed by the US Government; there are more than 7,000 today. President Obama, he stated, receives more than 400 death threats a year and wears a bullet-proof suit and underwear.  

Technology back then, he said, consisted of hand signals and walkie-talkies – when they worked, he added.

The students seemed especially rapt when he described the moments that JFK was shot and killed. The limousine, he said, should have sped off when the first shot was fired, but the driver slowed down thinking the limo had backfired. The second shot hit Kennedy in the neck.  

“He would have survived that neck shot,” Katz said, “it was the third shot that shattered his brain.”

The students saw photos of that were taken during the shootings as well as photos of JFK’s autopsy.

For a group of students born 35 years after these events occurred, they certainly left this presentation with a clear idea of what happened on that fateful November day in Dallas in 1963. And from the perspective of a man who was standing just a few feet away when it happened.