Months after her husband was assassinated, Jacqueline Kennedy said to me, “It’s so sad he’s being remembered more for how he died than what he lived for.”
A
half-century later, her rueful remark is more apt than ever. Last October on
its fiftieth anniversary, JFK’s greatest accomplishment, averting nuclear war
during the Cuban Missile Crisis, passed with barely a public ripple.
This
month as November 22nd nears, the media are filling up for the anniversary of
his killing, once again focusing on a violent death rather than his remarkable
life. As someone who was privileged to see him up close, admire and at times be
at odds with him, I want to bear witness this month to the man of whom I wrote
back then:
“He
was a leader who was still growing—-in understanding, in skill, in compassion,
in commitment. There is profound sorrow when the world is deprived of those who
have given it much—-a Lincoln, a Roosevelt or a Gandhi--but the memory of their
accomplishments offers us solace. In the case of John F. Kennedy, we have lost
not only the man but all that we sense he would have given us in future years.”
My
words echoed his own in a family memoir about his older brother who died in
World War II:
“It
is the realization that the future held the promise of great accomplishment for
Joe that has made his death so particularly hard for those who knew him. His
worldly success was so assured and inevitable that his death seems to have cut
into the natural order of things.”
John
F. Kennedy’s death was indeed hard “for those who knew him,” but what follows
is a personal account, most of it never published before, of life with the
Kennedys, warts and all.
Next: Our first meeting under
testy circumstances.
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