Of course he was extremely controversial and vilified before his assassination; in fact, Dallas was a hot-bed of the emerging anti-Kennedy sentiment, so that kind of thing is not new-just a million times more media saturation now.
I have always thought his standoff with Kruschev during the Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the ballsiest things any American prez ever pulled off, though. God knows how close we came to an actual MAD scenario-scary times, the Cold War.
Gad... I feel old...<sigh> I was sitting in the living room, watching when it happened!
I was in High School at the time. Smoking a cigarette with friends in the Boys Room, when someone came in and said the President had been shot.
My buddy O'Brien and me were walking down the halls changing classes. A kid had been in the office and heard it over a radio in there. he came running down the hall and told us the president had been shot. He threw him against the lockers on the side of the hall and began punching him in the arms, O'Brien on one side and me on the other. He began to cry and told us it was really true, he wasn't lying.
We left him and went to math class. Eventually it came over the loudspeaker. Some kids, I remember one girl in particular, began to cry. I raised my hand and asked permission to use the rest room. Miss Keisch, my teacher, gave me a sympathetic look and nodded her head. I guess she may have thought I didn't want to be overcome with emotion in the classroom. I went into the rest room and smoked a couple of Camels thinking about how impossible it seemed. IIRC they let school out shortly thereafter.
Two days later I watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV. In front of a gang of Dallas police and FBI. My mom said something like 'they shut him up.' I was incredulous. She thought there was more to it from the beginning. Took me a few years to figure it out. Anyway ..... coup d'etat in the United States Of America.
I was in my 11th grade chemistry class. Everyone was stunned, and quietly went home to be with family.