“Three shots were fired today at the president’s motorcade in downtown Dallas,” said the first international bulletin 60 years ago today.

Today marks the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event that wrenched the hearts of Americans.

“On Nov. 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was shot to death during a motorcade in Dallas; Texas Gov. John B. Connally, riding in the same car as Kennedy, was seriously wounded. Suspected gunman Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president,” read a brief from the Associated Press.

Those few sentences say so much and so little.

The heart-wrenching emotion of a nation watching the loss of its leader unfold on television is but a distant memory today, a black-and-white newscast of Walter Cronkite, overcome with emotion and wiping his eyes as he announced the death of a president.

“There’s a whole millennial generation and Generation X who don’t feel affected by it,” said Dr. Richard Frederick, retired history professor, University of Pittsburgh at Bradford. “As further as time gets along, the less people remember the notion of the ’60s, the change.

“You go from (President Dwight) Eisenhower in the White House who was a grandfather to Kennedy who was the youngest president ever elected,” Frederick said. “It was the changing over to something brand new, that was the whole ‘Camelot’ idea. Things during the Kennedy administration were a time of optimism and hope.”

Bob Longnecker, retired Otto-Eldred High School history teacher, was in high school himself when Kennedy was elected, and assassinated.

“There was a great deal of optimism when he was elected,” he said. “Kennedy was a war hero.”

He was dynamic, good looking, well educated, a reformer. He believed in getting young people involved, he created the Peace Corps and Project Apollo.

“He hated communism. He was a cold warrior,” Longnecker said. He described the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Kennedy bringing it to a peaceful conclusion.

“When you look at it, he was a reformer. He wanted to reform the FBI and CIA, he thought they were out of control,” Longnecker continued. “He also wanted to curb the power of the Federal Reserve to control the power of money in circulation. He saw the Federal Reserve as creating some instability. He wanted to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam in the early ’60s.

“We might never have had the Vietnam War if he wasn’t assassinated,” he said. “Kennedy was a great independent thinker. A lot of his ideas appealed to the young people.”

In Kennedy’s inaugural address, he spoke those famous words imploring people to act for the greater good: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Longnecker took that to heart. He was drafted into the Marine Corps.

“I went to Vietnam without a whimper,” he said. “I was very optimistic we were going to stop communism.”

He was surprised to find out that residents of Vietnam were not thrilled to see American troops. “You are driving through the streets of Da Nang and people are sticking up their middle fingers.”

Under Kennedy’s administration, people were happy and optimistic. The assassination “could have laid the foundation for cynicism for government. There’s been a mistrust of government ever since,” he added.

Frederick agreed.

“What did it mean to America,” said Frederick. “We think of the ’60s as a time when things really changed a lot. In morality, we became a more open society. There were all these hippies and a different kind of youth. There were African Americans for Civil Rights and fire in the streets.”

That, however, came later in the decade, more as a reaction to Vietnam.

“The sixties didn’t really start in that sense until after the Kennedy assassination,” he said.

At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, television networks stayed with the events through the day it happened, and through the weekend. It was the first presidential assassination with televised coverage.

“We old timers, of course, everybody knew where they were (when it happened) because it was such a big event,” Frederick said.

Longnecker shared his memory of the day.

“I was just 17 and we were on a half-day session at senior high,” he said. “I’d just gotten home from school. We just got a TV that year.

“Around 12:20 or so it came over the television that President Kennedy was assassinated. I was crushed. I loved the man. When he was elected I had a lot of hope for the country and a lot of optimism.”

Images from the assassination and aftermath are cemented into the minds of those who watched it then. Jackie Kennedy, in her pink suit, held her dying husband, his blood soaking into her clothes.

She refused to change for the rest of the day, reminding everyone of the slain president. She stood next to Lyndon Johnson as he took the oath of office on Air Force One — still coated in his blood, a chilling and heart-wrenching image still remembered by many.

“We went through that whole weekend of the Kennedy assassination and the funeral and following Mrs. Kennedy,” Frederick remembered, “and it was an event.”