ATLANTA — The day President John Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago, another would-be assassin was threatening Georgia’s governor because of his close ties to the president.
Then-Gov. Carl Sanders recalled this week how the fateful day affected him beyond the grief he felt for the loss of a friend.
“That was an awful event. Something I’ll never forget,” he said.
He was in his hometown of Augusta entertaining clients of the railroad when a pair of Georgia State Patrol cars arrived to return him to Atlanta. The troopers told him they believed that the president, the vice president and the Texas governor had all been killed and that his office had received a call threatening him, too.
“I said, ‘What are they going to kill me for?’ ” Sanders recalled.
That night, he slept peacefully despite his wife’s nervousness, only to be awakened at 2 a.m. by an officer reporting that the man making the threat had been arrested unarmed on the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion. It was a young man recently discharged from the Marines because of mental illness who had been driving through the state when he learned of Kennedy’s assassination and decided to follow suit.
Sanders and Kennedy, both active young Democrats half a century ago, had other connections.
via Former Georgia Gov. Carl Sanders recalls JFK loss | The Augusta Chronicle.
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