On Friday November 22nd, I was sitting in my sixth grade classroom, looking forward to the weekend. Shortly after 1:30 pm EST, the intercom phone underneath the PA speaker rang. My teacher, Miss Pease, answered it. She burst into tears as she hung up the phone and then told us the President had been shot. Then she ran crying from the classroom.

Very soon thereafter it was announced over the PA system. President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas and was being rushed to the hospital. After about 10-15 minutes, we were sent home early.

The great crime fiction writer James Ellroy starts American Tabloid, the first book in his underworld trilogy, with the lines, "America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and never looked back." But he makes the point that this was the day we figured it out. I believe he was right.

The JFK assassination was a tipping point in 20th century history. This was the day the average citizen started to realize that the government was often, if not nearly always, full of shit. Watergate merely cemented the notion. Hell, even the 1979 House Investigation concluded there must have been more than one shooter. The majority of Americans still believe the lone gunman explanation from the Warren Commission was total bullshit and that some combination of the Mob, the CIA, the FBI, Texas oil interests, and the military-industrial complex were involved. Think about that. 60 years later, most Americans believe the government, or at least parts thereof, were complicit in assassinating a President. This event marked the beginning of the end of trust.

America lost its perception of innocence, and righteousness, 60 years ago today, and has never retrieved it. Those of us alive at the time will never forget exactly where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news. I have lived through the Sputnik launch, Vietnam, the first man on the moon, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the Soviet Union, and 9/11. All were seminal moments. But for my money, Friday November 22, 1963 had the most profound impact.