Kennedy's assassination was before my time (I turn 30 on Fri) but I do want to chime in with a memory of mine from high school. It was my (I think) sophmore or junior year in HS when we studied it, and the history books at the time just didn't have much information on what happened. I told Mom this and she said, "Wait a minute" She goes to the hallway closet and pulls out this stack of newspapers that had to be damn near a foot thick, from the assassination itself to the funeral. She also had a book entitled Four Days: The Historical Record of the Death of President Kennedy'. Thanks to Mom, our class had a treasure trove of information on this subject.
But my Irish Catholic community was still deeply scarred by it when I was a teen.
There was a woman in my parish whose brain snapped the day Kennedy died.
She would attend Mass every Sunday and holyday and hold a prayerbook with a laminated pictorial JFK memorial card sticking out of it over her head with her arm stretched to the sky for the entire hour of Mass without moving or tiring.
She was not a big woman and in her late 50s when I first started noticing her.
Try holding a 600+ page book fully extended over your head, thumb in front fingers in back, for an hour without twitching, without moving, without adjusting in any way.
To anyone other than a lunatic it's impossible.
It got even weirder than that.