The date of this performance is December 13th, 1963. Three weeks earlier, the young President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, TX. The nation was mourning even as the holidays approached. The ever-talented Judy Garland gave this remarkably powerful and passionate performance that garnered her a standing ovation in the studio, and to the audience nationwide.
Judy Garland could have performed this on November 21st, 1963, but she would not have been able to invoke the passion, the emotion, the reality that she did on December 13th. In our lifetime, the feeling of the nation at that time can be equated to our emotions that Tuesday morning on September 11, 2001 as more than 3000 of our fellow citizens, our neighbors, associates, perished in the battlefield that we refer to now as “Ground Zero”!