The assassination of JFK: a plastic surgery perspective 50 years later.

All of us know where we were on September 11, 2001. I was in the operating room at our university hospital at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in disbelief of the events in New York City, the Pentagon, and aboard Flight 93 over southwestern Pennsylvania. Similarly, I will never forget November 22, 1963: I was a 10-year-old in school in a small, rural North Dakota town when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I remember both events as if they had happened yesterday. They changed me—and all of us in the United States and the world—forever. Although we may not all be students of history, we are all its children. Directly or indirectly, the events of the past ripple through time and shape our collective futures and destinies. There are just a few historic moments that have changed the modern world and civilization: 1066; 1492; 1776; December 7, 1941; September 11, 2001. This month, we remember November 22, 1963. As you can tell by the image on the cover and the special content within this month’s issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the significance of the 22nd day of November is not lost on anyone in the world of plastic surgery, our Journal’s staff, or our editorial board; frankly, I feel that everyone in the United States is aware of the day’s meaning. Fifty years have passed since the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States of America. We have chosen to celebrate Kennedy’s life and commemorate and comment on his death in the pages of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, as you’ll read in the special topics and editorial pieces in this issue. There are several links between the Journal and that pivotal moment in history. First of all, ever since I took over as Editor-in-Chief of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in 2004, the Journal editorial office has been based in Dallas, Texas, the city in which JFK drew his last breath. The University of Texas Southwestern, the university and hospital at which I serve as Chair of the Plastic Surgery Department, is an affiliate of Parkland Hospital— the same hospital in which JFK was pronounced dead. Furthermore, I was honored to work and converse with some of the doctors who held the president’s hand and his head as they tried to save his life 50 years ago. The Journal’s editorial office is less than a mile from the ambulance bay where JFK was delivered to the emergency physicians at Parkland. My staff at the editorial office is made up of native or transplanted Texans and Dallasites; I am one of them. When you live in Dallas, it is impossible to escape the shadow cast from Dealey Plaza, where Lee Harvey Oswald perched in a sixth-floor window of the Texas Book Depository with a rifle on November 22, 1963 (Fig. 1). Of all the millions of stories that make up the book of Dallas’ rich fictional and factual history, which include the Dallas Cowboys and Texas Instruments, Ross Perot and Stevie Ray Vaughan, Neiman Marcus, Mary Kay—and even J. R. Ewing—none has struck such a chord with the global memory and imagination as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Aaron Weinstein, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery’s managing editor, once described Dealey Plaza to me as a “mythical landscape.” I find this to be true as well. Even 50 years after the assassination, the site of the death