For those of us of a certain age, the assassination of Charlie Kirk brought back memories of other momentous assassinations -- the moment of disbelief and then stomach-turning horror on first hearing the news, the sense that events were tilting wildly out of kilter, the fear that more terrible things were in the offing.

I was a college sophomore visiting another school on that sunny Friday afternoon in November 1963 when I heard, and for a few seconds did not believe, that President John Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas. I had been intending to attend a Saturday football game, which, of course, was canceled, and somehow made it back home, dazed, on a bus.

In the days that followed, Kennedy's family and admirers, and much of the media, attributed his assassination to an atmosphere of right-wing hate in Dallas. It was solemnly asserted that America was fundamentally a violent nation.

But in the messier and not universally accepted reality, the assassin was a Communist who had lived and married in Russia and had been in touch with Soviet agents. In retrospect, I think political leaders were reluctant to blame the president's assassination on the Soviets, for fear the American people would clamor for war against a nuclear foe.

In the years that followed, I came to think that Americans had been especially shocked and shaken because this assassination was not consonant with the popular narrative of American history. In the nation's two bloodiest wars, the country was led by two commanders........

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