Free Letters to Jackie by Ellen Fitzpatrick Page A

had wisdom, control, maturity, decisiveness
    He had love, for God and men
    He took over the helm of the nation
    He challenged the people for their responsibility
    He led them all in accepting it
    He stood for justice, truth, and liberty
    He resisted ignorance, hate, and apathy
    He astounded with patience and courage
    He spoke and was heard
    He commanded and was obeyed
    He loved and was loved
    He did what he knew was right
    He was hailed by a hopeful world shouting cries of “Kennedy! Kennedy!”
    His life was precious to all
    And so they shot him.
    Again, why? The whole thing is too horrible and shocking to believe. I’m not angry—I’m sick. I don’t want blood—I want an answer. I don’t want to kill—I just want to cry.
    This is my hope. That Kennedy, like Christ, is love struck down by hate; and that, in a way like Christ, he will rise again from the coldness of death to which the forces of hate seem to have damned him. His spirit will live on with his followers to defeat these enemies of humanity, tearing them down from their pedestal of petty triumph and hate and injustice, but I hope that this great sacrifice succeeds in somehow lessening their effects on us. We cannot make him into a martyr because that’s just what he is. Bewilderedly, we ask the question “Why?” Let’s hope that there is an answer. Let’s hope he did not die without cause. Such a thought is unbearable.
    College students are not without feelings. Their interests were pretty apparent today. One hour after the news of his death, the chapel was packed with an unprecedented amount of students for noon Mass. Stunned silence reigned over the campus and people walked around with glazed looks. Red eyes were not infrequent. The flag flew at half-mast while the SMC on the hillside was reverently changed to the letters JFK. The announcement at an unusually quiet lunch that classes were cancelled for the rest of the day drew no cheers. This was not empty sentimentality, it was really deep feeling.
    I am looking forward to coming home and seeing you all, hoping that these expectations will clear away the depressed mood I’m in. It’s raining now; I know that it’s silly and it’s been raining on and off for the past few weeks, but I can’t help feeling the world is crying.
    Love,
Larry
    ----
    S ome who received news of JFK’s assassination were old enough to remember the assassination of other Presidents. Three previous American Presidents had died in office from an assassin’s bullet—Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), and William McKinley (1901)—tragedies that fell within the life experience of several elderly Americans in 1963. As one ninety-year-old Californian wrote to John F. Kennedy Jr., “I was born the first day of April 1873 and your father is the third president of the U.S.A. that has been killed in my time. I was around 6 years old when Garfield was killed and about 21 when McKinley was killed and I was 90 years and 8 months old when your father was torn from us.”
    Kennedy’s death likewise evoked memories of the last President to die in office—Franklin Roosevelt. Letter writers recalled how shocked they were on April 12, 1945, when word came of FDR’s death. The most common point of historical reference in the condolence letters, however, was the assassination—or the “martyrdom,” as many put it—of Lincoln. No previous assassination of a President took place, however, in a period when mass communication permitted such rapid and wide access to news, images, and analysis of the event.
    Many stressed that Kennedy’s youth and vitality, as well as the assassination’s ghastly circumstances, made his death especially harrowing. “I am old enough,” one retired navy captain wrote to Mrs Kennedy, “to have heard the moan of the nation upon the death of President McKinley and I remember well the angry, mournful growl which rose from its throat following disastrous Pearl Harbor, but never have I seen nor