Those of us whose memories trace back to the afternoon of November 22, 1963, remember exactly where we were, to the moment, when we learned President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Sister Justicia, the Principal of Cleveland’s St. John Cantius Catholic High School called me from the study hall I was monitoring and shared the shocking news that President Kennedy had been shot. I suggested we link the school’s public address system to a network radio broadcast, so that the entire student body would know.
It had been a little more than a week since I had joined my senior classmates on a trip to Washington, D.C., where we excitedly witnessed, on November 11, 1963, President Kennedy laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown soldier.
It was the closest I had come to the President who spoke to my soul , and I am sure to the soul of many young Americans when, in his Inaugural Speech he said:
“Let the word go forth, from this time and place, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans…”.
President John F. Kennedy ignited my passion for public service on his first day in office, January 20, 1961. I was certainly not the only young person who felt that the President was talking to me, directly, and I reached for that torch.
President Kennedy’s call, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” was a call for national unity, for collective participation, for putting the interests of all of us above the concerns of any one of us.
Those of us who heard that call to service so many years ago, those of us who answered it, those of us who have put service to nation above service to self, those of us who know what we lost on November 22, 1963, even now, are dedicated to repairing that ship of state, placing our hands on its wheel and setting sail for home, to return and to reclaim what is good, what is just, what is right and what is beautiful about our beloved America.
Time is an illusion in matters of the heart. Love of country is timeless, it summons us to come to the aid of our country. Some of us still hold resolutely the torch which was passed to us sixty-four years ago and are prepared and determined to use its flame to relight the flickering torch of freedom in our nation’s citadel.
We remember and still hear the strains of liberty, however faint. We remember and can still envision red, white and blue hues of the American mosaic of many races, colors and creeds, illuminated by Emma Lazarus’ ‘lamp lifted beside the Golden Door.’
We know that America, woven from myth and magic, worn by civil strife and foreign wars, is always ours to restore, to realign with a higher calling, a higher purpose of nationhood, the UNITED states, fulfilling the call for, the promise of, national unity which presages human unity, “out of many, we are one.”
Our remembrance of the man and the myth of President John F. Kennedy, like the myths of America’s Founders, merges fact and fiction with the alchemy of human imagination. Shakespeare in The Tempest wrote: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.”
President Kennedy’s was a call to an American Altruism, a belief in America and in each other, a knowingness that our lives belonged not only to ourselves, but achieved greater meaning when devoted to a higher cause. A call to a mystic and mighty faith in our America.
If faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains, the faith of a people in their nation and in each other could move the world!
Then the announcement: November 22, 1963 , at 2:00 pm Eastern, President Kennedy was dead.
Disbelief, a sense of deep, unutterable loss swept through the student body. Amidst free-flowing tears and spontaneous cries of bereavement, Sister Justicia asked that we go to the adjacent St. John Cantius Church to pray, for our late President and for our country.
A dream-like cloud of deep grief enveloped us. We filed into the halls in silence. We opened our lockers. We took our coats and went immediately to kneel before the altar to pray for America.
Sixty-two years later, we are still praying.
America has never recovered from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Our generation experienced a psychic dismemberment profound, faith in goodness severed, trust, severed; hope, severed; in the words of Yeat’s “everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
In the ensuing years, in a flood of articles, books and even movies, we experienced a type of post-traumatic stress, pitched into endless questions of who assassinated President Kennedy…and why?
The endless speculation: What would have America become had not death’s accomplices intervened? What would have we Americans become if inspired to be more than we were, better than we were, by a President who sensed the deep potential of arousing the conscience and the consciousness of a nation?
We may never know the answers, but we do know his assassination changed our lives forever. It ripped away the moorings of predictability, the notions of continuity in time, of governance, of leadership, the mental infrastructure of our social reality disintegrated. It left many of us with a feeling that the world was less solid, more liquid.
No one can compete with the mythic dimensions of a martyred president, whose portrait had been placed, in tens of millions of homes, sometimes next to that of Christ, a constant reminder of what we had, of what had we lost, of the seemingly irretrievable.
Yet, handed down, generation to generation, was the hope that somehow, in some way, we could reclaim the myth and the promise of President Kennedy’s America and turn it into reality: The America of service, the America of education, the America of wisdom, the America of fitness, the America of goodwill, the America of daring, the America reaching for the stars, in peace.
And today, in our journey from November 22, 1963, that America appears as the distant shore of a land from which our ship of state has departed, rudderless, drifting away in waves of destructive partisanship, self -interest, greed, and invocations of violence.
We Americans are the heirs and heiresses of more than 250 years of dreams, including those of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and of generations of Americans who built this nation.
What shall we the dreamers of today do with our dreams? Let them vanish upon waking up in the harsh reality of a nation tempting the forces of destruction?
No. Poet Langston Hughes’ Depression-era meditation on freedom and equality, “Let America Be America Again,” demands dreamers awake to the challenge of matching our dreams to action:
…. [we] must bring back our mighty dream again….
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain.
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath –
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster
Death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and
Lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states.
And make America again”
Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again, 1935
Let us arise, America. Let us rendezvous with the powerful spirits of patriots, matriots, poets and Presidents, our Native Americans, and centuries of voyagers from around the world, the searchers, the seekers of freedom, the sentinels, the believers in what America can be, will be, at last, and make the America of which we dream.