Honor to John Kennedy: On the 62nd Anniversary of his Death
By Johnny Cairns
On November 22nd — a date etched into the conscience of a nation — John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was slain beneath a Texan sky.
He had miles to go and promises to keep.
But on Elm Street, the best of America was struck down by the worst of it.
From that moment to this, a sea of words has been written about him. Men and women far greater than I have eulogised him in language that spans from Aeschylus to Shakespeare.
What, then, can I possibly add to that sea? What right have I to offer my own eulogy for a man I never met, a man whose world and time stand generations apart from mine? And yet, despite that distance, the legacy of John Kennedy burns brightly in my heart.
It is the values he embodied -- the courage, compassion, and belief in the dignity of all humanity -- that bind me to his life and compel me to write. This is not a historian’s analysis, nor a scholar’s account. It is simply one man’s tribute to a President who still speaks to his conscience.
On reflection of his life, it is easy to gravitate toward the great accomplishments: the promise of his presidency, and the words that could summon nations—the Ask Nots, the Ich bin ein Berliner, We choose to go to the Moon.
But the measure of the man was revealed earlier. Not in ovation, but in fire, salt water, and the black chaos of the Pacific night.
After PT-109 was torn in two and slipped beneath the waves, Jack Kennedy and the surviving crew were left stranded in the open ocean. Engineer Patrick McMahon, burned and barely conscious, drifted in fuel-slicked water and was close to death. Kennedy, with his own back and health shattered, swam to him, took the belt strap of McMahon’s life jacket between his teeth, and began towing him through the darkness. Hour after hour, stroke after stroke, mile after mile, he refused to let go until they finally reached land.
Only then, utterly spent, did Jack Kennedy collapse into the sand.
Years later, when a boy in Ashland, Wisconsin, asked how he became a hero, Kennedy simply replied, “It was easy — they sank my boat.”
But the truth is, Kennedy’s courage did not begin in the Pacific.
It had been forged long before, across an ocean, in the narrow streets of Boston, where his grandparents arrived with little more than their faith and their name.
His father grew up in a city where shop windows still carried the sign: “No Irish Need Apply.” And yet, two generations later, that same name — carried on that same faith — was spoken on the steps of the Capitol by the first Irish Catholic President of the United States.
He did not seek office for wealth or comfort. Every salary he earned as a Congressman, Senator, and President, the equivalent of over five million dollars today, he donated to charity.
He liked to quote Lord Tweedsmuir, one of his favourite authors: “Politics is still the greatest and most honourable adventure.” And he believed that adventure carried a cost. “Of those to whom much is given,” he would say, “much is required.”
Nowhere was that truth tested more than in the West Virginia primary. Jack Kennedy was not a man unmoved by suffering, and here he saw its American face. He encountered the deprivation of his own country: miners thrown on the scrap heap, families who had lost all hope, children thin from hunger and living on surplus lard and cornmeal, towns where dignity had collapsed into despair. It humbled him. It angered him. And it convinced him that, “if a free society cannot save the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
There is an old saying: I complained that I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet. In these hills, Jack Kennedy met the America that had no feet — and he carried them with him for the rest of his life. He would say to an aide, shaken, “Just imagine — imagine kids who never drink milk.”
Nothing on his road to the presidency changed him more as a man than the despair of those valleys. And so, in his first act as President, he signed an executive order doubling surplus food for the hungry — a national measure born from the memories of West Virginia, and a promise kept to the state that had first revealed to him the quiet anguish of his own country.
From that same conviction flowed the Peace Corps, the Food for Peace program, and the Alliance for Progress.
Jack Kennedy did not stand apart from the struggles of ordinary people. He was one of them. Like any of us, he was not free from sin or imperfection, and he never claimed to be. But by battling immense physical pain throughout his life, he became a symbol of resilience.
Robert Kennedy once wrote of his brother: “At least one-half of the days that he spent on this earth were days of intense physical pain. He had scarlet fever when he was very young, and serious back trouble when he was older. In between, he had almost every other conceivable ailment. When we were growing up together, we used to laugh about the great risk a mosquito took in biting Jack Kennedy — with some of his blood the mosquito was almost sure to die. And yet, he never complained. He never suggested that God had dealt with him unjustly.”
By the time of his inauguration, John Kennedy had been given the last rites of the Holy Roman Catholic Church on four occasions. Because he had suffered so much, he loved life intensely. That suffering deepened his compassion, and it guided his conscience in moments of moral and political crisis.
“Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan,” he said of the Cuban disaster of April 1961. And though it would have been easy to blame the architects of that catastrophe, he chose instead to shoulder the blame in public himself.
That pain, that sense of failure, stayed with him. So when the second Cuba came in October 1962, and the world stood closer to the edge than ever before or since, he faced it differently. Failure had taught him caution. But conscience guided what he did next. Beyond the accusations of appeasement and the cries for war, one vision tormented John Kennedy — the children who would inherit the ashes.
As Robert Kennedy wrote, “the thought that disturbed him the most was the specter of the death of the children of this country and all the world — the young people who had no role, who had no say, but whose lives would be snuffed out like everyone else’s.”
That same deep conscience drove him to seek a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty — the first break in the nuclear arms race. He had learned that the ash of nuclear tests does not stay in the atmosphere; it falls with the rain, seeps into the soil, and enters the bones of children born and yet to be.
“The loss of even one human life, or the malformation of even one baby — who may be born long after we are gone — should be of concern to us all,” John Kennedy said. He could imagine no greater failure of humanity. Against every cynic and every obstacle, he made that belief the law of nations.
President Kennedy loved the story of Marshal Lyautey, who once asked his gardener to plant a tree that would not bloom for a hundred years. When the gardener objected — saying he’d never live to see it — Lyautey simply replied, “Then plant it this afternoon.”
In many ways, the address at American University was Kennedy’s tree. He knew he might never see its branches stretch into the future, but he planted it anyway — a vision of peace rooted deeply in the American conscience. At its heart was a simple truth: that beyond borders and ideologies, beyond race or creed, we are bound together by our most basic common link, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future, and we are all mortal.
It was the voice of a man who understood the price of war but dared to speak of peace. But peace abroad meant little if injustice endured at home. President Kennedy’s address on civil rights was one of the defining moments of his presidency. It was not without cost.
To speak so directly about civil rights was a political risk very few presidents would ever take. His advisers warned him he would lose the South — some even feared he might lose the White House itself. But Kennedy spoke out anyway, because he believed that “the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.”
It became the first major televised address on civil rights in American history. Not a speech of politics, but of conscience. Not since Lincoln had a President spoken of civil rights in such moral terms.
He did not speak in abstractions. He spoke of the American who could fight for his country but not sit at a lunch counter; who could pay taxes but not send his child to a decent public school; who could be governed by laws, but not vote for the lawmakers. And then he asked:
“Who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that thunderous moral force, wrote to him afterward: “It was one of the most eloquent, profound, and unequivocal pleas for justice and freedom of all men ever made by any President.”
Pierre Salinger wrote that Jack “loved people and did not view the world and its problems in an abstract way. The campesino in Latin America, the small boy starving to death in an Indian village, the child born retarded — they were not statistics to him. They were people — to be helped, to be loved, and not to be forgotten.”
It was this same compassion that led him, in the midst of his own anguish, to pause in a Boston hospital and write to the mother of a severely burned child. His own son, Patrick, was fighting for his life, yet he found the grace to comfort another, signing simply: “Keep up your courage. John F. Kennedy.”
Hours later, that same man — the President of the United States — stood in a hospital boiler room, his face buried in his hands, inconsolable after Patrick’s death. Grief had walked beside John Kennedy for most of his forty-six years. It stitched itself into the fabric of his life. Joe Jr, Kathleen, Rosemary, Arabella, and now little Patrick were lost to him. Yet, his faith did not falter.
“I know there is a God”, he once wrote, “and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe I am ready.” But he could not know that its eye would fixate on Dallas.
William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet:
There's special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”
And then, on Elm Street, it came.
As Ted Sorensen once wrote, “They wept on the streets of Moscow. They prayed in the villages of Asia. They brought candles to the Wall in West Berlin. And those of us who knew him and served and loved him felt, as the Irish felt on the death of Owen Roe O’Neill, that we were lost and alone, we felt that the brightness has fallen from the air.
And so they came from every corner of the earth on that solemn Monday, November 25th, to bear him to Arlington, where he shall rest forever beneath the watch of his flame. John Kennedy was gone, and with him went the America he had tried to shape. Vietnam became an American war, its turmoil reaching into the nation’s streets and deepening the divisions he had worked so hard to heal. Yet even in his absence, the people still believed in him.
“In Watts, I didn’t see pictures of Malcolm X or Ron Karenga on the walls,” Pete Hamill wrote to Bobby Kennedy in 1968. “I saw pictures of JFK. It is your obligation to stay true to whatever it was that put those pictures on those walls.”
Hamill was asking RFK to pick up the baton. He did, much to the chagrin of Jackie Kennedy, who thought he would be cut down like her husband.
“I run for the presidency because I want the United States of America to stand for hope instead of despair, for reconciliation among men instead of the growing risk of world war.” Robert Kennedy said on March 16th, 1968.
With that announcement, the grotesqueness of America would once again fall upon a Kennedy — this time in Los Angeles. As Paul Schrade told me some years ago, “We all lost again.”
How could this have been allowed to happen again? America was stunned — shattered by grief, caught in a nightmarish loop that had begun in Dallas.
Through the horror of November 1963, John Kennedy became legend — history and myth, memory and sacrifice, hope and tragedy, idealism and pain.
Language, no matter how carefully we shape it, is always smaller than the thing it tries to hold. But that does not make the effort meaningless.
In the end, it is because we fall short that the effort matters. We do not write to capture him perfectly; we write to keep something of his spirit alive in this world. To remind ourselves — and anyone still listening — that once in our history there stood a leader — an idealist without illusions, who believed that public life was a noble adventure.
Words will always fall short of the man we are trying to honour.
But silence would fall even shorter.
“Men may die. Nations may rise and fall. But an ideal lives on.”
Always.
