11/22/2021
11/22/21 Fifty-eight Years later: I was in the 7th grade, and an announcement came over the PA system that the President, the first Catholic president, had been shot and killed. They sent us all home; they didn't know what else to do.
I remember we walked, and it was like there was a drape of sadness over everything. The TV never went off that weekend (24 hours news had not yet been invented) and my Father, always possessing a sense of the historic, got us up @ 2 a.m. to go down to the Capitol to walk by his casket. But, and I remember it clearly, when we reached Capitol Hill around 3 a.m. the line was still wrapped all around the building 3 lines deep. We never made it.
The day of the President's funeral, so cold a day, we rose early and made it to the corner of the street at St Matthew's Cathedral where the funeral cortege was to turn. I recall them so clearly coming up the street, walking behind the casket: de Gaulle, Haile Selassie, and of course the Kennedys, the First Lady, Robert, Ted and the children. They all walked right in front of us, since Daddy had secured us in the front of the line. And I was watching TV, getting ready to go to Church I think, when I saw Ruby shoot Oswald...I called upstairs for Daddy and Mother...I though the world had gone mad. Still do.
And then it was on into the 60's, civil rights, Vietnam, and another Kennedy and a King to die before it was done, Lord may it please be done!.
Whatever may be said about President Kennedy, it is true that he exuded possibilities, potential. We could reach the moon, we could beat back the Russians, but we needed to do it together, all of us.
With his death, a sense of cynicism began to grow that chokes our nation still. MY rights, MY taking offense, "we" has become "me". If we are to recover what we lost this day, it will only be when we recover "us".
"Ask not what your country can do for you..."
