Today is Nov. 22, a date which once caused Americans of all ages to shudder as they contemplated the tragedy and lost promise of John F. Kennedy’s life and presidency. And as Friday is the day of the week on which I reprise a quote intended to be educational or uplifting, I’ll use this occasion to highlight a quote from one of JFK’s biographers.
As new generations of Americans are born and immigrate to these shores, the horror of Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, recedes each year into the mists of our national memory. This is as it should be. Grief is not a permanent emotion, and besides, new tragedies and crises replace the old.
New possibilities, too. Although young generations of Americans only know the 35th U.S. president from history books and news reels, there are many here among us who remember him personally – and remember how that election spoke to America’s limitless possibilities.
Bill Clinton was a 16-year-old boy who never knew his father growing up in humble circumstances in Hope, Arkansas, when he met President Kennedy in the White House. It changed his life.
Nancy Pelosi, was born into an Italian-Catholic political family in Baltimore, but no Roman Catholic had ever been president until Jan. 20, 1961. On a cold winter day in Washington, she attended JFK’s inauguration – and met the new president at an inaugural ball that night.
High school senior Joe Biden was a football star at Archmere Academy who was more interested in sports than studies in 1960. But Kennedy’s victory validated his pride in Catholicism – and in America. “We’re a nation that attracts people because of the possibilities that exist,” he told Esquire magazine on the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination. “I was a Catholic schoolboy, Irish Catholic, Jean Finnegan’s son, going to an all-boys Catholic school. I had two reactions. The first reaction was: My God, this may be the final validation of us Irish Catholics, that we’re totally accepted.”
In going to Texas in November 1963, President Kennedy was seeking to make peace between the feuding factions within the Lone Star State’s Democratic Party. He took Lyndon Johnson with him in the vain hope that the once-powerful vice president could ameliorate the rivalry between conservative Gov. John Connally and liberal Sen. Ralph Yarborough.
Those strains still exist in Southern politics, although the emergence of the Republican Party in Dixie made the battle lines clearer. JFK’s concern was more short-term: carrying Texas in his reelection campaign.
Republicans were thinking along the same lines. The day Kennedy left for Texas, Richard Nixon was there. The man Kennedy had narrowly defeated in 1960 gave a speech criticizing the administration's Cuba policy while stoking rumors that Lyndon Johnson would be dumped by the Democrats in 1964.
Kennedy wasn’t overly concerned with what Nixon thought. JFK assumed he’d be running against Barry Goldwater, hoped to face Nelson Rockefeller instead, and was a bit worried about the man he thought might be the strongest GOP candidate: Michigan Gov. George Romney.
First, Kennedy was intent on smoothing things over between Connally and Yarborough and was counting on his Irish charm to do it.
Kennedy’s first stop was the dedication of the Aerospace Medical Health Center in San Antonio. After acknowledging both Connally and Yarborough, he spoke in a spirit of inclusiveness and used a subject dear to his heart to do it.
“For more than three years I have spoken about the New Frontier,” Kennedy said. “This is not a partisan term, and it is not the exclusive property of Republicans or Democrats. It refers, instead, to this nation’s place in history … and for the best efforts of all those who would test the unknown and the uncertain in every phase of human endeavor. It is a time for pathfinders and pioneers.”
Kennedy’s next stop was the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston, where he briefly addressed the League of United Latin American Citizens before introducing his wife, who spoke to the LULAC representatives in Spanish. From there, it was on to Sam Houston Coliseum (with Connally and Yarborough still in tow) for a birthday dinner in honor of Texas congressman Albert Thomas.
“When I came to the House of Representatives in 1947 as a fairly young congressman from Massachusetts,” he said, “I heard the old saying that you spend the first six months in the House of Representatives wondering how you got there, and the next six months wondering how everybody else got there!”
The crowd laughed appreciatively, anticipating what was coming next: the president’s assertion that he never wondered how Albert Thomas got to Washington. Thomas was 65 years old then; Kennedy, who was 46, wrapped up his remarks by referring to a passage from the Old Testament Book of Joel:
“‘Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,’ the Bible tells us, and ‘where there is no vision, the people perish.’ Albert Thomas is old enough to dream dreams, and young enough to see visions. He sees an America of the future, in the lifetime of us all, with 300 million people living in this country with a $2 trillion economy, which will happen in this century.”
Rep. Thomas would not live to see all that. He died two and a half years later, his unexpired term in the House served out by his widow, Lera Thomas. President Kennedy would not live even another full day and his widow would also strive to keep his legacy alive.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, liberal political journalist Murray Kempton had written that neither Jack Kennedy nor Richard Nixon “seems to be a man at whose funeral strangers would cry.”
This prediction proved false. Millions of strangers cried at the news of Kennedy’s death, as did the president’s father, who once said of his second son: “I know nothing can happen to him. I’ve stood by his death bed four times. Each time, I said goodbye to him, and he always came back.”
There was no coming back alive from Dallas, except that at this time of year John Fitzgerald Kennedy comes back to those of us old enough to remember him. I’ll give the last word to Kennedy speechwriter and confidant Ted Sorensen, who wrote only briefly about the assassination in his 1965 Kennedy biography, but who offered this conclusion for the tragedy of Nov. 22, 1963:
“Some blame leftists, some blame rightists, some blame Dallas or the security forces, some blame us all,” he wrote. “John Kennedy would have said it is too late to be blaming anyone – and he would have had compassion for his assassin and compassion for us all.”
And that is our quote of the week.
