Half a Century

Thought for the day: Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.  [John F. Kennedy]

When this family picture was taken in Hyannis Port in August of 1962, no one realized how little future our American president had left. And it's hard to fathom that this day, November 22, 2013, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the day he was assassinated.

Fifty years. Half a century. Yet, those of us who are old enough to remember that day remember exactly what we were doing when we heard the news. Images of that day and the days that followed are indelibly etched into our minds. Jackie's chic pink suit, splattered with blood... young John-John saluting his father's coffin... the subsequent on-camera shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald... and so much more. But fifty years? Has it really been that long since the end of Camelot?

I wasn't planning to write about this today, but the fiftieth anniversary is hard to ignore. Especially when so many newspapers and television networks are commemorating it by highlighting every detail of those days. The images already residing in our minds and psyches are being shown on TV stations all over the world today, reinforcing them and threatening to break our hearts all over again.

But I don't want to relive that horrible day. Once was enough. Personally, I'd rather think about his life.

In the 1943 picture above, that's JFK on the far right, when he was serving as commander of  PT-109. After a Japanese vessel cut the PT in half, his actions to keep his crew alive were nothing short of amazing... the stuff of legends. Things like swimming three miles to shore... while towing an injured crew member by a strap, which he held in his teeth. A star-struck young boy asked him what it was like to be a war hero, and JFK responded, "It wasn't voluntary. They sunk my boat."

                                                     Anybody remember this song? [1962]

I think one of the things we found so intriguing about this good-looking president with the broad Boston accent and silver tongue was his role as a family man. It was endearing to see his young children scampering around the White House... to see pictures of him working at his desk in the Oval Office, with John-John playing beneath it... to see him walking beside his daughter Caroline while she sat on her pony Macaroni. Even though most of us couldn't identify with his wealthy background, when we saw pictures of him playing touch football with his brothers, or saw him walking and playing with his children, he seemed like one of us. And he seemed to care... about equal rights, about the poor, about the disenfranchised.

And, man, could he ever deliver a speech. Most of us remember his words, Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," but a whole book could be written about some of his other lesser-known utterances, too.

Like these:

*  Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

* Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

* Do not pray for easier lives. Pray to be stronger men.

*As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.

* When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.

* If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

*  Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the the discomfort of thought.

* The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

Then there was the famous speech he delivered in Berlin. He took quite a media hit over that one. Here's what I wrote about it in a 2011 post:

Do you remember (or have you heard about) the speech President Kennedy made in West Germany on June 26, 1963? That was just twenty-two months after the Berlin wall went up, and he attempted to express his solidarity with the people of West Germany that day. His exact words were: Ich bin ein Berliner.

Unfortunately, a Berliner happens to be a type of jelly donut made in Berlin, and following that speech, President Kennedy got a merciless ribbing in the media for allegedly making a linguistic faux pas by declaring to the German people: I am a jelly donut.  He took the worst ribbing from America's so-called liberal press, but he also made the news in other parts of the world, as well, and for years,  teachers all over America referenced this speech when instructing their German classes about the proper and improper use of the word ein. Check out what appeared as recently as 1988 in the New York Times:

It's worth recalling, again, President John F. Kennedy's use of a German phrase while standing before the Berlin Wall. It would be great, his wordsmiths thought, for him to declare himself a symbolic citizen of Berlin. Hence, Ich bin ein Berliner. What they did not know, but could easily have found out, was that such citizens never refer to themselves as 'Berliners.' They reserve that term for a favorite confection often munched at breakfast. So, while they understood and appreciated the sentiments behind the President's impassioned declaration, the residents tittered among themselves when he exclaimed, literally, "I am a jelly-filled doughnut."

— William J. Miller, I Am a Jelly-Filled Doughnut, The New York Times April 30, 1988[10]

So why bring it up now? Because I just discovered that, in fact, President Kennedy's words were absolutely correct, even if they were delivered with a Boston accent. If he had said, "Ich bin Berliner," as his critics insisted he should have, he would have sounded foolish. Obviously, with the way he mangled the German language, he was most certainly not a native of Berlin. According to multiple evaluations of the speech by Germans, the way he said it actually indicated, "I am one with the people of Berlin," which is exactly what he wanted to say. And which is exactly how the Germans received it. None of the ridicule leveled at him ever came from the Germans.

***

Yes, JFK died fifty years ago today. But I'd rather remember the smiling faces as his open-topped car crept past a cheering Dallas crowd. I don't want to remember what happened to wipe the smile off our collective face. I don't want to remember the end of our collective idealism. I don't want to remember the end of Camelot.

With thousands of other people, I was in Washington the day of the funeral procession. It was a cold clear day, and the crowd was enormous. What stands out in my mind, even after all these years, is that in spite of the crowd... made up of people of all ages... there was no idle chatter when the casket rolled past. No coughs. No sneezes. The only sound I remember was the slow clop-clop of horses' hooves.


 Ah, Johnny, we barely knew ye... 

Although his light was extinguished far too soon, the memorial flame at Arlington Cemetery for John Fitzpatrick Kennedy, thirty-fifth president of the United States... will burn forever. 

                                        Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.

What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.  [Robert Kennedy]