The assassination of John F. Kennedy rocked virtually every American old enough to be conscious of it. It touched the lives of these metro Atlantans in unique and improbable ways.
Love and death
It was supposed to be the happiest day in the young couple’s lives.
Ron and Carol Giusti’s wedding was scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963, in Chicago, where they lived then. (They live in Kennesaw now, with summers in Chicago.)
That Friday, Carol was where many future brides find themselves: in a department store doing some last-minute shopping.
“An announcement was made over the loudspeaker,” she said. “Everybody stood stunned. You could hear a pin drop.”
Shoppers gravitated to the second floor, where the floor-model televisions were, and watched the national drama unfold.
By the time the 23-year-old returned to her parents’ home, her 28-year-old fiancé, a high school teacher and coach, had made his way there as well.
“People were crying in the streets,” Ron said.
They sat in the dining room, struggling, like many millions of Americans, to come to grips with an event that defied comprehension.
“He was a loved president, and we were believers,” Carol said. “But we were a naive, trusting generation. This couldn’t happen here.”
They debated what they should do. Should they postpone the wedding? Was it wrong to have it during a national time of mourning?
In the end, they decided to proceed as planned.
“We had people coming in from all over,” Carol said. “We had to go on.”
That Saturday was a typical November day in the Windy City, cold and blustery. The wedding, held in a little Catholic church in an Italian neighborhood, was warm. Carol wore a white dress with veil. Ron, a black tuxedo.
“I think it picked people up a little bit,” Ron said, “the joy of being at a wedding.”
But joy tempered by grief. “We would laugh, and then it would hit us,” Carol said. The conversation kept swinging back to Kennedy. “That was all we talked about.” Carol said.
For their honeymoon, the couple drove Ron’s blue Chevy Impala to the Pocono Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania. They listened to the radio: Oswald’s shooting, Ruby’s arrest.
Carol cried most of the way, asking herself all the while: “Why I am crying like this?”
“It was kind of scary,” Ron said. “We were driving toward the future. The rest of our lives was something we were looking forward to. But this set you back on your heels a little bit. It was a big thing to go through at the time.”
On Saturday, the couple, who have two sons and three grandchildren, will celebrate 50 years of marriage at their home in Kennesaw.
“You know, one thing about this, it is easy to mark our wedding anniversary,” Carol said. “When someone asks, we say we were married Nov. 23, 1963, the day after Kennedy was assassinated.”
Bitter medicine
Kenneth Braunstein was just an adolescent, living in South Carolina, when Kennedy was shot. “But I have been interested in him since he was assassinated,” he said.
In 1976, young Dr. Braunstein found himself assigned to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas for his internal medicine internship.
Many of the doctors who had worked in vain to save Kennedy were still at Parkland. Some of those same doctors treated Lee Harvey Oswald a few days later. In 1967, some of those same doctors treated Jack Ruby before he died at Parkland of lung cancer.
But nobody talked about their deaths.
“They squashed Parkland people from talking about it,” said Braunstein, now an Atlanta-based hematologist. “My chief of medicine never mentioned that he was the guy who was transfusing Kennedy. … The chief of hematology at the time took care of Ruby’s lung cancer.
“The people involved were very tight-lipped. The way doctors gossip? There was nothing.”
He came to believe there was a reason. After 1963, Parkland suddenly started getting millions in research dollars to expand trauma care. “I think they were told to go along with the government, and research funding would be extended.”
Still, during his three years there, Braunstein did hear rumors and whispers: that the blast to Kennedy’s neck was an entry, not an exit, wound; that Kennedy’s body was stolen from Parkland; that the Warren Commission report was inaccurate; that Texas Gov. John Connally’s wounds were far worse than reported.
So Braunstein wrote a book, a novel actually.
“Autopsy in the Oval Office,” took all those stories and wrapped them into a thriller replete with antique vases, Fidel Castro, the CIA, Paris, code names and pretty, mysterious women.
“I thought it was very important to demonstrate to the American people, in a novel form, so they don’t get bogged down, how for 50 years the government has lied to us,” Braunstein said.
He admits that his thriller has not gotten much attention. But he hopes the assassination anniversary will rip the veil off matters that, in his view, have remained secret.
“I think the anniversary means that it is time for our country to ask why we were never told the truth about Kennedy’s assassination,” he said.
A Marine’s salute
At the age of 70, Ronald Aadil Muwakkil is still every bit the U.S. Marine he was 50 years ago. He is still slim, tall and fit, and his hair, while now gray, is still cropped tight around his square jaw.
Don’t refer to him as a “retired” Atlanta police officer.
“I am a reserve officer,” he said. “I am not retired. I can still put you in jail.”
But 50 years ago this week, Muwakkil — Ronald Wilson then — was a 20-year-old kid out of Atlanta’s Herndon Homes and Turner High School who suddenly found himself escorting the body of a slain president.
Fresh out of basic training, Muwakkil was selected as a member of the elite Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon. That Washington-based unit performed precision drills to show off the Corps’ discipline and professionalism.
He arrived in Washington May 9, 1963. One Saturday soon thereafter, a platoon sergeant stormed through the barracks, looking for Catholics who knew how to serve Mass.
“The Old Man is going to the hill with his family,” the sergeant said. “They need two altar boys.”
Muwakkil raised his hand. Soon, he was at Camp David, face-to-face with the president.
“Two things came at me,” he recalled. “He was not an imposing man. He wasn’t framed like I thought he would be. And he had this ruddy complexion.”
After the Mass, Kennedy spoke with him briefly. Small talk. “Just enough to be able to tell my grandchildren about,” Muwakkil said.
In the following months, there were a couple more masses with the Kennedys. In early November, there was a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
“That was the last time I saw him alive,” Muwakkil said.
Two weeks later, Muwakkil was sitting in the mess hall when word came down that Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas.
The drill team sprang into action. Some went to Andrew Air Force Base to meet the body. Muwakkil was assigned to the White House. When Kennedy’s body arrived, he escorted it into the mansion.
The next day, he was on a courtesy detail, escorting dignitaries in the rain from their cars into the White House. “I was standing there pinching myself. A year ago I was a civilian in Atlanta, now I am about to bury an assassinated president. “At that point the stitching of a world was torn apart.”
This weekend, he and some Marine buddies will meet in Texas for a reunion to mark the work they did for a fallen president
“I really didn’t really realize the significance of my being involved until about 15 years ago,” Muwakkil said. “I was watching a documentary about the assassination and a Marine popped up on the television. I said, ‘That’s me.’
“Then it clicked. I was there.”
