62-Years Since JFK this Week!
November 18, 2025
“When we stopped trusting the government.”
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This Saturday marks the anniversary of events that changed the world.
There is a public registry on the sixth floor. Shortly after exiting the elevator and stepping onto the wooden planks of the restored warehouse—now a national museum—you come across it as you almost slip back in time.
This November 22nd, in this hallowed location, you will be stepping back exactly 62 years. If you pause to read the remarks left by visitors—strangers from every walk of life—you can feel their pain, a quiet sorrow that lingers long after you close the book. People from all over the world have written their reflections here. It is a vestibule to a cathedral of horror: the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
I was five years old when President Kennedy was assassinated—too young to have perfect recall. My memories are a mixture of truth and the images reinforced by decades of film and retelling. What I do remember vividly is the black-and-white television on which we watched the funeral, a relic by today’s standards. Through that small screen came the haunting image of a riderless horse and the distant echo of muffled drums, forever etched into the American consciousness. Perhaps JFK was too complicated a man to be an idol—his imperfections have been well-documented—but I placed him on that pedestal anyway, and in some ways I still do. His vision, imagination, and ability to challenge us to be better had a profound effect on me, especially as an entrepreneur. His speeches had the rhythm of poetry.
November 22, 1963 lit a fuse that would shape not only the decade but the national psyche.
What followed—Vietnam, additional assassinations, political unrest, and the riots of the late 1960s—eroded a kind of innocence Americans once believed they possessed. More importantly, it marked the moment when many U.S. citizens began to lose faith in their government. Conspiracy theories flourished because the public sensed gaps, inconsistencies, and mysteries that were never fully resolved. Whether those doubts were justified or not, the result was a slow but undeniable shift: the pedestal on which America had placed itself began to crack. Tom Brokaw later described Kennedy’s generation as “The Greatest Generation.” Maybe that is true. Or perhaps the post–World War II era simply allowed the United States, for a brief window, to be seen as a beacon of freedom and possibility—an image that, like Kennedy himself, was more complex beneath the surface.
Since moving to the Greater Dallas area, we’ve noticed something consistent: whenever friends or family visit, one of the first places they ask to see is the Sixth Floor Museum. It is remarkably well preserved, with the dignity one hopes for in any memorial to a fallen president. Visitors always remark on how much smaller Dealey Plaza is than they imagined. They stand over the X marks in the asphalt of Elm Street where President Kennedy was mortally wounded, look up toward the infamous window, and take it all in. It is an undeniably eerie place—quiet, unsettling, heavy with history—and a reminder that a single moment in Dallas reshaped a nation’s trust, its trajectory, and, in many ways, its soul.
Conclusion
The aftermath of the JFK assassination didn’t just alter the political landscape—it transformed how American businesses viewed centralized authority and underscored the importance of global diversification. As public trust in government eroded, companies grew more cautious of federal oversight, long-term policy promises, and the reliability of regulatory fairness.
