by Neil Stout
I was teaching in the history department at Texas A&M. I emerged from the university library stacks to find the reading room deserted.
The attendants told me that the president, the vice president, and the governor had been shot in Dallas. I rushed to my office in Nagel Hall, where
I listened to my radio with a colleague and a couple of students and learned that President Kennedy was dead and Vice President Johnson was unhurt. We were shocked, but not completely surprised–the anti JFK feeling in Texas was poisonous then. The students in my office were fairly right wing; they certainly didn’t gloat, but, like the rest of us, assumed that the shooter was somebody from the right. (I did hear a horn honk, but can’t say if it
was in celebration.) Most of the Aggies behaved completely appropriately.
The administration, led by President Earl Rudder, did not: the Thanksgiving Game with the University of Texas went on as scheduled, and the Aggies were given the next day off in celebration of their almost upsetting No. 1 Texas.
I moved to Vermont.