Welcome to the documentary and one and to the 18th new episode of our 20/20 season, some photos capture a moment, some can change lives. The photo in this story did both narrated by Pavel Bartter. This is the grief of a nation. In 2019, two strangers met on a cruise ship in the South China Sea. Hi, my name is Aymond Kennedy. I really I'm really speechless. And I I was speechless.

It was the most unlikely of chance encounters and the result of a series of events that were set in motion many decades beforehand in Dallas, Texas, everybody seemed to be stunned and shocked by the terrible news you flashed across the United States just over an hour ago.

But the horrible truth is that President Kennedy has the family. The shots fired in November 1963 shocked the world, but another shot was taken that day that transformed generations of a family. It was a camera shots taken by an Irish photographer of a young girl. And tearful prayer outside the hospital where the president lay dead. The photograph that Ayman took outside the emergency entrance at Parkland really encapsulates the deep and personal grief that people all over the world felt in the immediate aftermath of the assassination.

This photograph was at the epicenter of the remarkable meeting in the South China Sea almost 60 years later.

It's like a billion to one shot to separate lives unwittingly connected by a single photograph. It's enough to make you wonder, what are the chances? My name is Aymond Kennedy. And I'm a photographer originally from Limerick, Ireland, and now live in the USA.

This is Aimen Kennedy with his wife Louise at their home in Plano, a city not far from Dallas in Texas. I'm originally from Boston. Aimen is a retired photographer and occasional painter.

He met his wife through a chance encounter when met on a flight from San Francisco to New York. So if you had happened to sit two rows behind, two rows ahead of the other side of the plane, it's right. We wouldn't be talking to each other, right? Yeah. Aimen was born in Limerick City in 1934.

His family lived on Castle Street close to the Shannon River opposite King John's Castle.

My my parents are a what you call a green grocery store there. And we lived at the back and I never had the store.

What was your father's name? His name, strangely enough, was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I wasn't aware of that until he died. I didn't know he had a middle name, but my sister sent me the death certificate and I was surprised to see that he was the JFK. The grocery business fell into financial hardship.

So Almond's family emigrated to the UK just after the outbreak of World War Two. I remember getting on the boat to cross the channel and all the lights were out. And because I think the boat before that, the Germans had sunk the boat torpedo. That was pretty exciting.

After the war, as a teenager living in London, he bought his first camera. He took his national service with the Royal Air Force in the early 1950s, then worked as a photographer in a shipping line.

But opportunities were limited. So like many of his generation, he emigrated again, first to Canada, where he worked as a photojournalist, then to the U.S..

So I got on a bus on the Greyhound. I was heading for San Francisco and I thought, I'll see some of the country in between. But it was such a long ride. I asked the driver what the next big city and he said will be in Dallas in about three hours. And so I asked if the ticket was good, if I got off for a couple of days and got back on another bus, he said, oh yeah, no problem.

Aymond never did use the rest of his bus ticket.

During his stopover in Dallas, he found work at The Dallas Times Herald, a local newspaper. I want to talk to you about a newspaper, a great paper that is more news bureaus than any other Texas paper.

It's want to curate surprises. That's two more than a competition. It was just everything you can imagine.

The Women's Women's News page, fashion society, football, baseball. It was a big adventure.

In 1962, he photographed Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy's vice president, when his aircraft ran off the tracks at Dallas Love Field Airport.

I caught him coming up with his laundry. And you can tell he's looking at me and he's saying, no pictures. But I kept I kept shooting and we walked over to me because I'm still shooting. He walked over and said, What's your name? And I said, Aymond, Kennedy. And he said, and then he thought I was kidding him. And he said, you know, didn't I tell you no pictures? I said, Yeah, I think I think I heard something like that.

But he didn't want to be photographed, but he's never been photographed with glasses. And that's what that's what he didn't like.

Did he believe you when you told me your name was? Well, the reporter said he's not making it up. His name really is. Kennedy is not being smart. That was before the assassination. Before the assassination, exactly.

In June of 1963, John F. Kennedy visited Ireland.

So I must say that though other days may not be so bright as we look toward the future, that the brightest days will continue to be those in which we visited you here in Ireland.

Five months later, he was making a trip to Dallas, Texas. It was on Friday, November the 22nd, 1963.

I was 28, and Kennedy woke up in the morning of the presidential visit in his duplex apartment in Lakewood, close to downtown Dallas. It was raining.

Well, you know, you can't really carry an umbrella because you need both hands to work the camera. So I had my raincoat on and I had the cameras under the raincoat to keep them dry. I had a canon rangefinder camera and a Nikon single Lens Reflex.

So he began his short journey to Dallas Love Field Airport. At the same time, a young girl, her mother and sister were traveling to the same airport. The girl's name was Kathy Atkinson.

She was 12. This is K.K Robbins, Kathy Atkinson's daughter, a cruise director for the Holland America shipping line when she was growing up.

Kay heard her mother's story over and over again to the point that, I mean, I could recite it and it never really wavered. That was what was so fantastic about it. On that day, my grandmother, my mother's mother, decided that this was such a monumental thing that she was going to take Cathy and Jan out of school and take them to to see the president.

And I remember sitting there in school thinking, oh, please, please let me go see the president.

Mrs. Kennedy, this is Cathy Atkinson, Kay's mother, talking about how that day began in a telephone interview with the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas in 2011.

All of a sudden, over the loudspeaker, Mr. Chairman, our principal said, you know, please let Cathy Atkinson out of the class. And I went down there and the principal said, you are a representative of Oleksander Elementary. And I thought, oh, my gosh, what is that? You know, and that's how we ended up getting to go, you know, all the way out to the airport. We talked about what it was like to elect a president.

And, you know, it was it we were singing high hopes, you know, and it was just a glorious time. You know, we were so excited.

Aimen arrived early awaiting the arrival of Air Force One beside the runway. But it was mid-morning, I want to say, around 10, 15 to ten thirty. I was there's a lot of excitement now.

Air Force number one taxiing in. I remember just the excitement of the crowd. You could feel the excitement within everyone as those doors opened up. Kathy Atkinson, they pulled up the staircase up to the door. And when that door opened up, it was like the sun came out. And it's shown on President Kennedy as he stood out. And it was just it was magical. It was just unbelievable to see a little girl of 12, you know, here with my president, you know, in all its glory who allowed to to go wherever you want.

You know, the crowd was fenced off, but the press was allowed to roam, whatever, wherever exist. And you had a special pass. The president is up to the fence now, shaking hands with people. The president and his wife are right up on the bed. The press is standing up by getting a lot of this. Is that as he has done in several places, he's broken away from his planned plan and gone right up to the fence to shake hands with people.

At one point during the television coverage of the event, we can see a man in his raincoat taking photographs of the president with later graced the front page of The Dallas Times Herald. The crowds were just overjoyed to get a look at the president to touch his hand, and they were all fighting for position. He was tanned. He had sparkling night. His eyes sparkled. I don't know. I mean, it was like, hey, Jen, you genuinely felt like he was sincerely happy that we were there, you know, that he really appreciated us being there for him and Jackie.

And and it wasn't a political thing. It was more of, you know, thank you so much. I mean, I know he was there campaigning and stuff, but what I felt in my soul was that he had a genuine appreciation for us taking the time to be in there.

I headed away from the mob and I headed towards the limo. A minute later, they turned and walked towards the limo. And as they as they came to it, I asked him to hold it. I said, hold on, Mr. President. And he stopped for just a little while when I was able to get that shot.

This photograph shows a close up of Kennedy smiling and squinting in the sunlight. That's probably the last close up of John F. Kennedy. It was like 35 minutes after this. He got shot.

And then we'll be back here again, of course, as we told you. What about 215 while the president departed?

A.M. Bob Feneley, a reporter for The Dallas Times Herald. We're planning on staying at Love Field to cover Kennedy's departure. They headed to an airport restaurant, a Polynesian restaurant, and it was Neum and try to so we went we sat down because I. All these cameras on the table and we're trying to order some lunch, we understand is coming up now, we know it's going to see Mrs. Kennedy lot of a lot about the guy we got in the car when I heard about it.

We can't say who has the hit if anybody's there, but apparently something is wrong here. Something is terribly wrong.

The waitress informed us that she just heard the Kennedy got shot. So we jumped up. And this is before cell phones. We had to find a phone, finally call the newspaper. And sure enough, it wasn't.

The rumor was true that going to Parkland Hospital and the first unconfirmed reports say the president was hit in the head.

So we had the director of the Parkland Hospital. It's not that far from the field to the hospital to Parkland. And we drove very fast. And I probably made it in record time, just four or five minutes, probably one of the first people to get there. Around the same time, Kathy Atkinson and her mother heard the news on their car radio. We were leaving the airport and we heard on the radio that the president had been shot and all of the sudden mother rolls down the window and asked the car next to us if they heard and they had their radio went on.

So they turned their radio on. And my mother just she we were right at the entrance of Bluffdale and she just shot out of there like a speeding bullet. And I had never seen my mother drive like this. She was driving like a race car driver.

The crowd got bigger and bigger very fast. But we were all waiting to hear what happened to the president and began taking photographs of the expectant crowd that had gathered outside the emergency room. Then the news came through from Dallas, Texas. The Flash apparently official. President Kennedy died at 1:00 p.m. Central Standard Time, 2:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago. Vice President Lyndon Johnson has left the hospital in Dallas, but we do not know to where he has proceeded.

Presumably, he will be taking the oath of office shortly and become the 36 the president of the United States. And it went from the scene at the airport, which was everyone was Delina, to when they announced the news that the president had died. The crowd went frantic and there was a lot of crying and emotion involved in those Secret Service men standing by the emergency room and streaming down their face.

There's only one word to describe the picture here, and that's grief. And much of it it's official as of just a few moments ago, the president of the United States is dead. Almond's photographs outside Parkland capture this pandamonium, two African-American girls weeping, a father cradling his children, a state senator grimacing. It was total chaos, the situation like that, to try and capture the essence of it and the mood of what was going on.

A priest walked out, Kathy Atkinson and I'm sorry, and teary eyed. A priest walked out and he stood there at one p.m. the president died. And I. I just I couldn't believe it. It was like, God, no, please. No, no, no, no, no, no. All I can remember, like, this isn't happening.

You know, at that moment, Almond's eyes fell upon a young girl weeping. Kathy Atkinson.

She's clasping her hands like they're in prayer and some tears, tears on her cheek and her hair looks a little rough and windblown. Her fingernails are not clean. I can tell you that much. I was just trying to capture the essence of this tragedy. And, you know, and the way to do that as a journalist is through the reaction of the people that were there that I chose in their faces.

I didn't even know my picture had been taken until the next day. I remember crying.

That evening, Aymond returned to the news office to develop his photographs. The image of the young girl outside Parkland Hospital slowly emerged within the darkroom, actually shot this picture and he shot one frame. And it was it was a horizontal. But when I went back and developed the film and then started printing it, I printed it as a vertical because it seemed to work a lot better. It sort of came to life in the darkroom. And I, when I read, dropped it.

And I think that's a pretty powerful picture. So the eye stops right on our face and it's a very sad face. She's feeling the the agony and the the depth to the event that just happened. And it does show in her face.

The next day, the photograph ran on the front page of The Dallas Times Herald.

My mother's image was captured by a photographer, K.K. Robbins. The image is such that she is standing there with her hands, looking almost like they're in prayer and then tears coming down her face.

If you see the photo that the depth that that's in her eyes. And it it's funny because we have the same eyes. And so when I look at this, I really can see and see myself in it.

And, yeah, it's definitely someone someone that's that's that's sensing, you know, the magnitude of this. And then it was picked up by, you know, Associated Press and other news outlets and then went around the world, as with the title Grief of a Nation, kind of that that this symbol of this 12 year old girl, the grief of a nation.

Most newspapers of the world used it and went everywhere and became the sort of the image of the Dallas event.

I think it captured the mood of Dallas, the country and maybe the world, a mood that was captured on the streets of Dublin following the assassination.

What's your reaction to the news? It was so cold and he he was good for everyone. I went to an even chocolate ice screen to see when he was coming here. I thought he was oh, he was so good and it was in his face, but he was smart.

Heyman's photograph of Cathy Atkinson was now appearing in newspapers around the world, but no newspaper mentioned the girl's name. Aymen didn't know it. Besides, in the days that followed, there was more work to be done. Shortly after midnight, the following day, Dallas police detectives presented Lee Harvey Oswald chief suspect in the assassination of Kennedy to the press.

People have given me a hearing without legal representation or anything, but I didn't shoot anybody.

I photographed him quite a bit because he was acting very sullen and defiant and and he was looked a little beaten up. I think he was I'd say five foot eight, slightly built and a very defiant. You kill the president.

No, I've not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet.

The first thing I heard about was when the newspaper reporters in the hall asked me that question the following day, Sunday, two days after the assassination, Oswald was being escorted from the Dallas police station to the courthouse when that incident erupted anew in Dallas as President Kennedy's accused assassin is shot down himself during a jail transfer.

There's an ominous symbol in Lee Harvey Oswald to by. As he has taken to the city jail basement where an armored car is to move him to a maximum security cell, Oswald walks his last mile is the assailant moves in from the right. Shot. He's been shot. Bob Jackson, one of Ammon's fellow photographers at the Dallas Times Herald, took a picture at the moment of the shooting.

Strangely enough, I was supposed to be at that scene. Jackson was supposed to be the courthouse. And I called him the night before and I talked to him the swopping when I was waiting at the courthouse for us show up. But he never did, of course, because he he was shot. Jackson got the Pulitzer Prize. That's not what you call the luck of the Irish. When Aymen heard the news from the courthouse, he moved into action.

Yeah, I was at Park back at part of the game where he took photographs of Oswald being carted off on a stretcher dying.

Oswald is rushed to the same hospital where President Kennedy died. Doctors work to save his life. But 48 hours and seven minutes after the president's death is accused, Slager is dead.

Did you get swept up in the emotions of the event? I certainly did. I was so affected by it. And in fact, I. I used to paint every weekend. That was some other thing I'd done. And for about a year after this happened, I quit painting. Yeah, I think it was an emotional event for me, definitely. I was a big fan of President Kennedy and and it came it came as a total shock.

As Aymond dealt with the shock of the shooting, Cathy was now dealing with a shot that had thrust her onto the front page.

The mother ran out the front door, grabbed the newspaper and brought it in. And she said, oh, my God, oh, my God, you're on the front page. Kathy Atkinson, you know, she's just took a picture in front of me. And I'm like, you know, seeing myself on the front page was like, oh, my gosh. That was, you know, that was the most horrible moment of my life. And I was a little taken aback by the first time I saw it.

But the world still had no idea who this girl was. Kathy Atkinson's mother was collecting copies of the paper from the Dallas Times Herald offices when by chance, one of Alan's colleagues asked who she was. She said she was the mother of Kathy Atkinson, the subject of a woman's photograph.

And that's that's how we came up with a name. And that's how close Kathy Atkinson came to being lost to history.

Life is full of strange coincidences.

Following the assassination, Kathy Atkinson became something of a minor celebrity in Dallas due to the grief of a nation photograph.

She immediately began making plans for some charity events. So she became very involved in fundraising for the Kennedy Library in Boston. K. Robbins, Kathy's daughter.

We say that that it was this photo, the front page of the paper that was laminated. John F. Kennedy has his portrait and then the portrait of Christ. It was those three things. And no matter where we moved, they all three went up right away. And so the Holy Trinity.

Right. The Holy Trinity. And my younger sister jokes that she said that she is certain that she was at least eight or 10 before she knew that we weren't actually related to the Kennedys.

What sort of emotions does that picture make you feel now?

Um. Well, I well, that's that's that's a loaded question, but I will I will say that. I love the photo and I love what it represents because I do think that it was her at her most pure. My mother and I.

Throughout her well, throughout our life, we we struggled in our relationship, the photograph, though, gave her a glimpse into the heart of a person she'd had such a fraught relationship with.

Whenever I looked here, it was and I was able to see someone that was not the the woman that I had in my life.

I saw someone more, in a sense, although the picture of her weeping mother was a constant in her life, K.K had never dwelled on the identity of the person behind the camera. I never really thought of who actually took that photo.

Heyman's ran a front page and syndicated photos did not end after the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. He took a portrait of the widow and children of a police officer who Oswald murdered. He also spent time with Marina Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald's widow. That's what I did. I spent a good part of a day with her, took pictures of her and her child and giving them baths and all that stuff. And then the next day, in a Russian Orthodox church, it was the christening of her baby.

I was the only photographer there that, by the way, ran in Life magazine. Aimen also covered the trial of Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who shot Oswald.

They're taking him out around the lunchtime. I went down there not expecting to get much out of it, but they had him out on a loading dock to put him in a van and take him out for psychiatric testing. And I was a low angle and I was using the flash, of course, but I got the shot with a hairy hands and the cuffs on in the picture.

Ruby is glaring down the lens, looking demented. The photograph ran nationally in Life magazine and was syndicated all over the world and left journalism in the late 1960s to work in corporate photography.

Only in recent years have his photos of the events surrounding JFK's assassination become recognized. I believe that's true. At the time, it didn't seem significant. I think in perspective, historically, it was significant.

Kathy Atkinson, meanwhile, became a young mother having cake when she was 19 and Katrina K.K sister a few years later, and so here she was, early 20s, mid 20s, K.K Robbins, Kathy's daughter, and she was no longer with my father.

She married several times and she wasn't there as often as she should have been. And so then that responsibility fell on me and it really was much more that I was the mother. Yeah. So I just stepped up and did what needed to be done.

At the age of 11, K.K left her mother and went to live permanently with her grandparents.

Both of them started to become ill, one with Parkinson's disease, another with Alzheimer's. And it became apparent that I really couldn't stay in the home much longer. But also I was a bit restless. And so I at about.

Fifteen decided to just be on my own, and it was not long after that, but within that year that it became necessary to take in Katrina.

And so I raised her. And then she was 11 at the time. And then I.

When you were 50, yet you were still a child?

Well, I didn't really get an option to be a child. Kathy Atkinson experienced something few of us ever will when even photographed her as an ordinary 12 year old child. That photo catapulted her into newspapers across the world. What effect did that have on Kathy?

I don't know if this event, perhaps like a child actor, can struggle later in life, that perhaps that bit of fame, even if it was short lived, affected what she needed later on. Because she seemed to always be searching for something bigger and unfortunately. We as children kind of got in the way of that sometimes, K.K eventually became estranged from her mother. In 2013, she received the news that Carthy have been diagnosed with cancer.

We each took our time in the in the hospital room and. It was nice, I remember it. I wish I'd recorded it, actually, but. I think if there's any time that you have the opportunity to to kind of give forgiveness, you know, you should take it. And I definitely did.

You've got to say goodbye to her than I did. She did not. I don't know if she knew that I was there.

She was she was you know, they were essentially keeping her comfortable for our arrival. But but I think I think she knew she was pretty strong woman. So I think she knew. And I remember.

You know, of course, she looks so much older when you're in that those last few moments and but I polished her nails, I painted her nails a nice color so that she would have that I knew that she would like that.

Cathy's death in 2013 was reported in the local media in Dallas.

The woman whose grief stricken face would come to symbolize the nation's mourning in the wake of the Kennedy assassination has died. Dallas native Cathy Atkinson passed away earlier this month after a battle with cancer. A picture of her crying was printed on the front page of the Dallas Times Herald in November of 1963. The title of that article, The Grief of a Nation.

Kathie Atkinson was 61 years old.

The wonderful thing about her is that I know for a fact that she touched a lot of people's lives in a very positive way.

I can't judge her as a person or as a human because I can promise you that her transgressions weren't any worse than mine. I just I have a lot of gratitude for all that he was and what he stood for. Here's Casey Atkinson telling the sixth floor museum about the impact that JFK had on her life and given me a vision.

You know, she wanted to make a difference in the world because I think that it was, you know, sometimes the best, most, worst things that happen in life give us the greatest strength. And I think that that is the worst thing that I could take, is that. It's helped me in my own life and in the trials and tribulations to try to make a difference, you know, try to find the good able McCarthys.

Shortly after he took our photo and in 1977, when Cathy was in her 20s, life moved on for the both and they moved to other parts of America, but they occasionally corresponded. And in the early 2010s, they arranged to meet up again. When Avon was returning from his travels to live in the Dallas area.

We were moving from North Carolina to here and Cathy and I had a lunch date. We're going to have lunch. But unfortunately, she passed away before I got here.

I never knew Cathy had a daughter, but all that was about to change. I am pleased to meet you. Hello, you too. This is Maria Falkiner and Paul Hill, two professional photographers. Together they hold photography seminars. Yes, it was in early 2019. They were given an opportunity. They couldn't turn down.

It's not something that we ever thought we'd ever do. But we have a friend and he was setting up this new business of having photographers go along to do some teaching on on cruise ships on a particular line, the Holland America line.

And then he rang us up and said, Do you fancy going to Southeast Asia?

You might recall that K.K. Robbins worked for Holland America. Well, K.K happened to be a cruise director on the same ship, the Ms. Maasdam, 1100 passengers.

We were over in the Far East and doing a run that started in Singapore. It went to Cambodia, to Malaysia, Vietnam, and then and then back to Singapore.

K.K had nearly quit her job before this trip. I mean, I've been I've been at it.

I've been at it for eight years or seven years at the time and was really just saying, I'm not sure if this is, you know, fitting the bill.

Every evening, a storytelling session was held for passengers on the ship the Paul and Maria were on.

It's a series called Travellers Tales, and it's a very, very informal thing. And it was held in the crow's nest, which is a bar at the top of the ship. And on this particular day, because we were new, we hadn't done a tribalist child. We've no idea what it was we had to do.

So we thought, let's go along and listen to one of the others and just see how it works. So was completely coincidental that we happened to go along to that one.

So one evening when the ship was docked to the port in Cambodia, K.K decided to tell a small group of people the story of her mother and the grief of a nation photograph.

She told the story very. It was a beautiful, emotive expression of the whole the whole event. She really opened up her own personal experience, which I find very moving. And when we got to the end of it, when when she'd finished, I think not only us, but everybody in the audience was just was just blown away.

Little did they know it was about to get a lot more fascinating. Two or three days later, the Maasdam was in Halong Bay in Vietnam.

We we went for dinner and there's this huge, huge dining room on the mast on in the ship.

Around 300 people were dining at the time while Paula Maria were eating a couple at the table next to them, complimented them on their photography workshops. The man told them he was a retired photographer from Dallas.

But we had this amazing story about Alice. Yeah, and you were a newspaper photographer. Maybe you might remember the story. So we started to tell him about. Yeah. And the story that we had. And and I said, well, you know, do you any idea who the photographer was? And and he just looked at history, the eyes, and he said, yeah, I have.

I said, you're talking to him.

It was Aymond Kennedy with his wife, Louise.

I don't know why I wanted to go on this cruise that we we talked about it for quite a while. And I think three weeks before I suddenly had the urge, I got to go on this cruise. One morning when I came into the office and he was in here, he looked at me and he said, we're going to take that trip to Southeast Asia and we're leaving in three weeks. And I looked at him and I thought, has he lost his mind?

I said, you've got to be kidding me. There's no way we can do this. But he really there was something in him.

And this is what's so amazing that there's something in him that for some reason he was going to go on that trip during that week. And now I know why the chance meeting and and time stopped to be so shocked.

But then the more I kind of processed this information, I thought, yes, we must arrange a meeting now. Yeah.

Yeah, right now. What are you waiting for? You know, we're not going to do this tomorrow or next week. We will go. Let's go and get her now.

Yeah. And Maria jumps up off of a chair and she said, I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe it's just I'm going to find Kay.

Kay was in her office in the ship and the door was closed. And then there's this massive banging on the door. Open it up. And it's the two guests, photographers, Paul and Maria.

K.K, have you got a minute? And she said, Well, yeah, okay. And will you come with us? There's someone we'd like you to meet.

And I said and I first of all, looked down at my clothes and I'm like, wear then to the dining room. I'm like, yeah, I really know you have to come right now. You. You have to come right now, there's someone you have to meet. There was an energy about them that they had, like, broken the biggest news story that's it was the energy was you could feel it in the electricity coming off of them.

So they walk into the dining room. All of a sudden, he walks up and introduces himself and he says, hi, my name is Eamon Kennedy.

And I said, Oh, hi. And then the Kennedy. I'm like, oh, OK, this is definitely connected. And he said, I knew your mother. I said, wow, OK.

But when I heard Kennedy, I thought he was like some relative of the Kennedys. Right. A distant Kennedy or something that happened to meet her. I don't know. And so I said, oh, wow, OK. And then comes the bombshell.

And I'm the photographer that took the picture of your mother that made her famous.

I really I'm rarely speechless. And I, I was speechless. I mean, I, I think in that moment I recognized the magnitude of this situation. It was not lost on me. It's not like it took me a while to figure out that how improbable it would be that I'm standing in this dining room.

She got very emotional and she was hugging me for several minutes. And you were hugging her tears.

And as much as this photo, this photograph and that the that day became such a part of my life through my mother's life, I can tell you that I, I now know what a massive part of Aman's life it was, you know? And I think we were both realized we maybe didn't realize that at that moment. But here was this person that clearly had lived like a parallel life.

In a way, this picture has defined both your lives.

It has that that would be an absolute fair statement. Mm hmm.

The two of them, their lives pasts have been interconnected for decades, and yet neither of them knew the other one was on the same ship.

In fact, neither of them knew the other even existed.

I didn't even know there was a daughter or daughters involved and it was a daughter of Kathy. And the last thing I was thinking about when we were cruising off the coast of the South China Sea was was the Kennedy assassination. But it came back in a rush in Ireland.

I think you see something of what is so great about the United States. And I must say that in the United States, through millions of your sons and daughters and cousins, 25 million, in fact, something of what is great about Ireland. As the decades have passed, John F. Kennedy's legacy and the repercussions of his assassination continue to capture the world's imagination. Aymond Kennedy donated his photographic negatives of the event to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, which is located inside the former Texas School Book Depository Building at the site of the assassination.

I was afraid, you know, after I'm gone, that just probably gets thrown out anyway. But they found them fascinating and it adds to the history of the event out of all his photographs.

It is perhaps the image of Kathy Atkinson lost in grief outside Parkland Hospital that resonates the most.

The picture is symbolic in many ways.

Stephen Fagan, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum, because it is such a young girl pictured there, Kathy Atkinson. It does kind of symbolize this transition in the United States. Most people characterize the assassination as a loss of innocence, as a watershed moment that in many ways ushered in so much of the violence and skepticism and social upheaval that we now associate with the latter half of the 1960s. And you can kind of see all of that in Aymond Kennedy's photograph.

I mean, if there ever was a photo worth a thousand words, it is that photo of Kathy Atkinson in tearful prayer outside of Parkland, Eyman is holding a book Kathy Atkinson wrote about her experiences titled The Grief of a Nation.

Here's this little note she put on here. I'll read it here, says Aimen. Thank you, my friend, for your ability to see into the true soul of your subjects and capture the beauty, their love. Kathy Atkinson.

The series of coincidences that led to her encounter with Aimen felt like a new beginning for K.K.

You know, when I first met him, he had such a such a joy about him when he spoke about my mother. And it was really quite lovely and. I've said it gave me a sense of closure because it was really nice to see someone that had seen her in a different light than I had seen her. I think it was fate.

Louise Raymond's wife. I'm a firm believer that people are put in your life for a reason and you either. Get a sense and react to that meeting and move forward with that, or you move on to something else, and I think that this was the same thing as meeting him on a plane. I think that was Faye.

Aymen and Kaka's lives were entwined, but if neither had joined the Holland America cruise, if K.K hadn't told the story of the assassination, if Paul and Maria had not attended that storytelling session or sat at a different table for dinner, then Aimen and K.K may have never met.

You said coincidence.

I don't think there's any coincidence about this. I think that serendipity at its finest with two people, you know, colliding, their worlds colliding.

On Wednesday, June the 6th, 1962, a ship dropped anchor in Cork Harbor in Ireland on its way from Rotterdam to New York, it was one of two liner's that visited Cove that day. The ship took on another 20 passengers, a car and a thousand sacks of mail. But the inhabitants of Cabin 473, a man, his wife, an infant child, stayed put. He was Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959.

Marina, his wife, cared for their daughter while he wrote angry political diatribes and ship stationery.

He was making his way back to Dallas, where he had a date with history. The name of the shipping line, Holland America, the name of the ship, Ms maasdam, the same shipping line and a ship with the same name as the one Aymond, Kennedy and K.K Robbins' would meet on almost 60 years later.

It's enough to make you wonder what are the chances? You've been listening to the grief of a nation from the documentary and one narrated by Pavel Baatar, it was produced by Pavel and Donal O'Herlihy with additional recordings by Derek Kennedy to Kathy Atkinson.

Interview came courtesy of oral history collection, the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. And the documentary has been funded through the Bay Sound and Vision Scheme. Until next time, thanks for listening.