“What if….”
I wanted my grandchildren
to hear about him; to experience, albeit vicariously, what it meant to their
grandfather and to millions across the world when he was assassinated.
Two of my grandchildren are
teenagers and would be ‘learning’ about this terrible event from TV and media
and, hopefully, from their parents. But fifty years is a long time and even their
parents were not alive in 1963.
Nevertheless, it is to
their children I address this letter. I expect with their parents help they can
understand of what I write. My youngest grandchild is but three and her mother
has promised to keep it until she is old enough to grasp what I intended to
portray.
My amour-propre hopes that all the letters will be preserved. Rousseau
would understand that. For they are my recollections and feelings about what happened
50 years ago and assuredly I will not be here fifty years from now.
I remind myself that 50
years before I was a teenager was still a full decade before what my father
termed Mr. Wilson’s War. I knew that my ability to understand those times
would be most difficult without hearing of the issues from someone who lived them.
That is my raison d’être. My Dear Grandchildren:
You’re probably wondering why I am writing a letter to you. Good question.
Our world today appears to thrive on instant communication but often what we text or post is fleeting: deleted from our phones or somehow lost in cyber space. Letters are different as they can be kept; tucked away in a safe place perhaps to be read at another time.
Maybe this letter will be one you keep. I hope so. That is why I wrote it.
There is an anniversary this week and no doubt you will hear a great deal about it. I wish there was a better word than anniversary as it denotes a yearly event and certainly this is more than that.
Fifty years ago President John Fitzgerald Kennedy died.
This simple declarative sentence will be re-stated innumerable times and like many other messages will likely pass from your minds over the course of days. That is not meant to be a criticism. It is difficult for any of us to “remember” persons and/or happenings that occurred long before our time. A song writer once called it “Living the moment”.
That is why I am writing to you today. For the majority of my peer group, the assassination of our President was a seminal occurrence; something that affected all of us and not just in America but across the globe.
Each generation has one, or occasionally more than one critical events. There are personal instances of course like marriage or the birth of a child but events that truly affect people across the world are few. By their very nature they are sudden and sadly, most often tragic. The do not wait for history to define them; they are burned into our consciousness.
They are the rejoinder to the question: Where were you when….?
For my parents, your great grand-parents, it was the day Pearl Harbor was attacked and the world as they knew it was propelled into a global war that took sixty million lives.
For those of your parents’ contemporaries, it is arguably the attacks in New York and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001. The world was stunned by the vision of collapsing buildings. Yes, there were some across the globe who celebrated. Such is not uncommon in global experiences. Your parents can better speak to you about that day and its aftermath.
Writing from my remembrances, let me try to describe for you what Friday, 22nd November meant to me. Surely the people of Africa and Asia would have different reactions but by definition the fact that they had any reaction defines the very nature of a critical happening.
A half century from now, the year 2063, President Kennedy will be remembered again; it will be called the centennial. You will be there; I will not. My confidence hopes that on that day you will remember this letter and tell your children and theirs what I now write.
Now it has been 50 years since that terrible day in Dallas. From my perspective those years have elapsed very fast. And so, I write to you about a unique man, a man who I hope you will come to know as more than a mere name in a history book; and much more than a name on a list of past Presidents.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was known by many names: Jack to his family and friends, Lieutenant to his crew on PT-109, Congressman to the people of Boston, Senator to the people of Massachusetts and ultimately, Mr. President, a title even his parents and siblings applied.
To the world and perhaps because of his long
name newspapers preferred the shortened sobriquet: JFK. It fit the headline
space. I suppose that compares to texting of “ur” or “bff” today.
Who was this man who we remember this week? He
was an Irish-Catholic, born into a privileged family. His mother’s father was
Mayor of Boston; his father an exceptionally successful son of a saloon
keeper. JFK was the second son in a
family of nine children.
You can read about his time at Harvard, his
life in England, the books he published, including a Pulitzer Prize winner. No
other President has done that. You need to read of his war-time heroics and how
they left him with injuries that would last all his short lifetime. His life
was altered by this and further transformed by the death of his older brother
who was killed in combat.
They say politics comes easy to the Irish.
Maybe it does but carrying that to a national level was a first. Many men with
his family’s prestige and wealth would have chosen a life of luxury; he chose a
life of public service culminating with his election to the Presidency in 1960.
You can decide whether it was family pressure or self-absorbed fame that drove
him. I think it was probably both and if either one was not present, his
success could not have been attained.
It was a wondrous time. I was 18, just out of
prep school and now a freshman at Fordham. Just two months into my academic
year, the President was one of us. He was young, 42, with a wife only 31. The
Presidents we had known were of our parents and grand-parents’ experience. Good
men, yes, but they were of a past that for us was history. Here was a man who looked and acted like an
older brother. And importantly he was Catholic; and for some of us, that meant an
Irish Catholic. To others who opposed him he represented two minorities. He
knew that and relished what it meant.
No Catholic had ever been President. To you the
importance of that might be elusive. I understand that. But to Americans in
1960 it was wonderful for some and intimidating for others. President Kennedy
exposed and dispelled the widely-held misconceptions about Catholics and proved
that what Jesus said was indeed true: Give
to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. Let us pray that
legacy stays with us. Our religious freedom encompasses everyone and it is
precious.
It was a terribly cold day for the Inauguration
back in January 1961. Our Poet Laureate, 87 year old Robert Frost, had written
a poem for the occasion but the winds on the platform blew away his papers. No
Teleprompters then. He looked up, his white hair blowing, and began to recite verbatim
a verse he had penned 40 years before: The
Gift Outright. It fit the moment
perfectly. Look it up and read it.
And then, the swearing-in; the traditional
cannon fire; Hail to The Chief and
finally President Kennedy took to the podium. He stood there for a moment and
then began an address against which all subsequent inaugurals have been vetted
and found lacking.
It ranks with Lincoln’s Gettysburg address as
the two best presidential speeches. As with Mr. Lincoln’s it was short, a mere
14 minutes. JFK sought out input from many but wrote it himself and to the
amazement of President Eisenhower, made changes to it while riding in the
limousine to his swearing-in. The scribbled copy in his library in Boston
proves that.
The address resonates with prose and poetry;
with optimism and reality; and with hope. Read the address. Better still listen
to it on your computer and watch him as he speaks.
He praised and warned us: “For
man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty
and all forms of human life”. And admonished
us that: “the belief that the rights of
man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God”. Do we believe this today?
He paraphrased his former enemy, the commander
of the Imperial Japanese Navy, reminding us: “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended
up inside”.
He prophetically stated: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the
few who are rich.” Have we forgotten
that?
Think of the politics today and listen to him articulate
“civility is not a sign
of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof.” Simple
to write and hear but living by these words has become difficult.
All of us remember: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for
you--ask what you can do for your country”. I ask you to look at his
following entreaty: “My fellow citizens
of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do
for the freedom of man.”
My Grandchildren, I cannot even try to explain
how I felt hearing those words. He told
to the country and the world: “The torch
has been passed to a new generation”.
We knew it was us to whom he spoke and we
welcomed and grasped the torch and the obligations that meant. History will
tell you if we met what he asked of us. History shows us what he did.
He was our President during that week in
October 1962 when the very future of every species of life on our planet was at
risk. I was an ROTC cadet at the time and we were ordered to wear uniforms to
class and be ready to board buses should military action commence. He had listened to the advice of the generals
and admirals but then did the unexpected. He personally contacted the head of
the Soviet Union and together they formed an agreement to take us back from the
brink of total destruction.
He fought for the rights of our fellow citizens
in a way that had never been seen before. Governors of several states publicly
stated they would not abide by laws calling for racial integration of their
schools. They thought he would back down as he would need their votes in the
next election. They were wrong. The universities were integrated and we are a
better country for that.
With a stroke of his pen, he issued an
executive order prohibiting discrimination in the sale or lease of housing that
was financed by federally guaranteed loans or owned by the federal government.
Why? Because the immorality of segregation was everywhere and change needs a
starting point.
You cannot imagine today what segregation was
like. It was not only in the south; our very national capital, Washington DC
was segregated. Too many people of color were disenfranchised from voting by
state legislation that today you would find hard to believe. President Kennedy
put forth the Civil Rights Act and The Voting Rights Act. They became the law
of the land but he did not live to see that.
He told us we would go to the moon and
successfully return two years before we had even sent a man into orbit around
our planet. In 1969 America did go to the moon and back but he did not live to see
it.
He started the Peace Corps and to-date, a
quarter of a million Americans of all ages have served in over 130 countries.
It remains a beacon for democracy and a helping hand for those who need it
most.
At the peak of the Cold War, he secured a
limited nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, a first step in mutual
dismantling the nuclear arsenals that so threatened the world the year
previous.
It ended a mere thousand days after it began.
It ended in Dallas in a place called Dealey Plaza with a single deranged man
firing three shots with a cheap rifle and taking away the life of the President
of the United States and the hopes and dreams of millions around the world. We
ask ourselves: What if President Kennedy
had lived? To that there can be hope
and dreams but objectivity, no.
Everyone in my generation knows exactly where
they were the moment they heard the terrible news. I was walking across campus and saw a man
with a bull horn near the Victory Bell shouting something I could not
understand. Entering the dining hall all was silent but for a radio broadcaster
relating what had occurred. For a long moment there was silence and then the
dreaded news. He was gone from us.
Walking back to the Pharmacy School Building, I
met the Dean and told him what had occurred. He broke down in tears and asked
me to go tell the classes that were in progress. One of the Professors told me
that if that was a joke I would be expelled. I think the look on my face proved
it was true.
Like many that day I walked around the campus
and without a conscious thought of direction found myself outside the
University Church. It was full of students and faculty. It was silent. It was
not an organized vigil; it was young men (no women at Fordham in those days)
kneeling in silent prayer.
On the Sunday after the assassination, I was in
Washington for the procession from the White House to the Capitol for his lying
in state. I remember the slow beat of the drums, no music, just the drums and
not a sound from the thousands gathered to watch, no sound but for their
sobbing.
The leaders of the world came to Washington, Kings,
Queens, Emperors, Prime Ministers and Presidents. They came to pay their respects and to mourn.
They walked as a singular group following Mrs. Kennedy and the horse drawn
coffin. They returned home; lives resumed.
But in America, it did not. Thanksgiving was
soon upon us as it is this year. We tried to be thankful but we had just lost
much more than just a single man. We had lost our innocence and with it a
degree of the hope that he had given us.
That loss is still with those of us who
remember those days. We try to recollect the happiness of young children in the
White House and then we remember a little boy saluting the casket of his
Father.
So, I ask you to look at who and what this man
was. Did he have flaws? Of course; we all do. I ask you to look at those and
measure them against what he did in just those short thousand days. This is not
the place to do that and nor can I be impartial on the matter. You make the
decision.
Mrs. Kennedy called her time in the White
House: Camelot. In our memories it was as echoed by the words of King Arthur: Don't let it be forgot, That once there was
a spot, For one brief shining moment, That was known as Camelot!
Our world, our country and for sure the
Presidency is very different today. Maybe we should ask our leaders of today to
remember what he said that cold January day: “Civility is not a sign of weakness”
Sometime in your life,
a person or an incident will be your answer to “Where were you..?”
Mine was 50 years ago.
I still seek the response to the un-answerable: ‘What if he had lived”
God Bless the memory of
John Fitzgerald Kennedy. God Bless all of you.Your Grandfather
