DEARBORN, Mich. – This year marks the 60th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Recently, I had the opportunity to see the limousine that the former president was in back in 1963 at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation.
Standing next to this haunting piece of history illustrates that 60 years really wasn’t that long ago, yet so much can happen within that gap of time. My grandmother was still a teenager when the awful twist in history occurred.
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In my high school history class, our teacher showed us the unsettling footage of the assassination in slow motion, which at the time didn’t seem real to me--I mean, this was the president of the United States! That footage began to play once more in my mind as I looked at the car in person, and it really helped me understand the true gravity of JFK’s demise.
The 1961 Lincoln Continental that JFK spent his last moments in is still in pristine condition along with a line of other presidential vehicles at the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. Even though a lifetime has passed since JFK’s death, this car that would just be a car if not for its passenger’s significance remains intact.
What I found most interesting during my visit at the museum, is that the same ‘61 Lincoln Continental JFK died in was still used by a handful of presidents after him. This included Richard Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon B. Johnson.
This is only after the car received various modifications, such as a permanent armored steel roof, bulletproof glass on fixed windows, an armored steel body and more. Some of these upgrades were protective measures and some were people pleasers, like Nixon’s trap door that was inserted into the roof so he could greet crowds.
The use of that limousine is somewhat perplexing to me because it is somewhat a totem of what the United States had lost on that fateful day, but in the same breath the use of the limousine could be a symbol of this nation’s resilience. It all depends on what angle you’d like to look at it from.
You may wonder how the infamous limousine ended up in Dearborn, Michigan.
According to the Henry Ford’s website, “Henry Ford’s presidential Lincolns were leased to the White House. As the leases ended, the cars returned to Ford Motor Company and the firm gifted them to the museum.”
Maybe that’s why so many presidents were so willing to use the limousine, they didn’t want to break the lease.
Incidentally, this same museum houses another presidential assassination artifact: the theater chair in which Abraham Lincoln was fatally shot.