Rembering that fateful day 50 years ago
Pat Williams
Following the Nov. 24, 1963, funeral of our assassinated president, John F. Kennedy, the mourners’ cars were leaving Arlington National Cemetery. A Kennedy aide, Pat Moynihan, and a newspaper columnist, Mary McGrory, riding in the same car, were exchanging sorrowful looks when Moynihan said, “Mary, we’ll never laugh again.”
She wisely responded, “No Pat, we will laugh, but we will never be young again.”
Two days earlier, the principal of the Blaine School in Butte, Jim O’Dell, came into the classroom where I was teaching sixth graders and with great sorrow said to me, “They shot Kennedy.”
“Where,” I asked, meaning where on his body had he been shot.
“In Dallas,” he responded.
On my drive home for lunch, I stopped at my grandmother’s house. I rushed to the television set and heard the horrible news that Jack Kennedy, our youngest president, was, unbelievably, dead.
The effect upon millions of people in America and around the world was palpable. Small knots of people gathered on the streets, people shuffled, heads bent. We watched television news for days.
We were suffering the loss of a vigorous, graceful young man whose very presence promised a change of direction in America and, as Cardinal Cushing pronounced at the funeral, “Kennedy became the voice of mankind to interpret the issues of the day and to help our generations to higher levels.”
As a college student, I met Kennedy at a political rally in Denver and will forever recall him looking at me like a man looking through a pipe as he said, “Oh, Montana. Your Senators Mansfield and Metcalf have invited me to visit the state and I will.” That brief exchange has remained vivid with me for more than 50 years.
I suppose it’s called charisma, but whatever it is, Kennedy exuded likability. I watched as he greeted many dozens of the hundreds who attended that Denver campaign speech. He was enjoying the moment as much as were those crowding around him. In his speech, as with most of his public statements, he proclaimed — not said but proclaimed — that America “can do better” and encouraged each of us to commit ourselves to make a difference in assuring that this nation chart a new direction of caring, fairness and justice.
An earlier presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, spoke of Kennedy’s ability to enthuse people to action: “When Cicero finished an oration, the people would say, ‘How well he spoke.’ Ah, but when Demosthenes finished speaking, the people would say, ‘Let us march.’”
Millions of us who remember the assassination believe the public life of the nation was changed — war, domestic violence including mass murders, distrust not only of our government but also, in too many cases, of our neighbors, partisan anger, loss of civility.
The killing of President Kennedy was history’s exclamation point denoting all that came before and much of what has happened since that hideous day 50 years ago.
Pat Williams served nine terms as a U.S. Representative from Montana. After his retirement, he returned to Montana and taught at the University of Montana.