Where were you OTD in 1963? John Bartlow Martin, the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, had been recalled to Washington, DC, following a military coup in the Republic. 
On November 22 Martin went to work in his temporary office at the “antiseptic [State] Department—with its clean desks and locked files it always looked deserted.”
On that day he met with a young Harvard student writing a paper on the Republic and handled several telephone calls about a secret trip he was planning to meet with former Dominican president Rafael Bonnelly to discuss a new constitutional scheme for the Republic.
At about 1:50 p.m. Martin heard from Bob Sayre, a young Foreign Service official, that Kennedy had been shot while visiting Dallas, Texas. Later that afternoon Martin learned that the president had died.
As he sat, staring out of the window of his office, watching as the flags around the city were lowered to half-mast, Martin remembered thinking: “One shit-head with a squirrel rifle can change the fate of mankind.”
He later joined a State Department staff meeting in which there was a discussion about preparing lists of what problems were most urgent and what ones could be delayed to pass along to President Johnson—“how strange it sounded!” said Martin.
Someone remarked that Latin American officials were already talking about making the Alliance for Progress a monument to the fallen president. “I got up and almost ran from the room,” said Martin. “It was the first time I had wept.”
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