November 20, 2013
Those of us who were alive at the time generally remember where we were when President Kennedy was killed. I was at St. Paul’s College in Washington, D.C., the Paulist Fathers seminary. The tolling bell started ringing from the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, which was just up the street from us. It was afternoon on a weekday, and that bell never tolled at that time, so I knew something was up. It didn’t take long for a gaggle of us seminarians to get together and try to figure out what was going on. Those were the days in a seminary when we did not have ready access to radios or television. But somehow we got the news that the president had been shot, and then began days of watching television and all the drama that went with trying to deal with an assassination of a president.
The day of President Kennedy’s funeral I went downtown because I figured I would never witness so much history in my life. I found a place on the route to the cathedral where Kennedy’s funeral Mass would be celebrated. I was rewarded by seeing the President’s wife, her brothers-in-law Ted and Bobby as well as the international leaders I could identify – Presidents Charles deGaulle and Halie Salasie. I then moved on to a place near the Lincoln Memorial where I could see the cortege go by with the unmanned horse, its boot in the stirrup the wrong way and the catafalque carrying the President’s body trailing behind. It was the first time I had seen the amazing young people who make up the Old Guard from Arlington National Cemetery carrying out a ritual that is ancient but always new when you see it for the first time.
Those are the memories of one day. This week we will commemorate the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s death. President Kennedy shared our common faith.
Because of his assassination we will never know what history might have said about President Kennedy as a full-term President. But Kennedy made history as the first Catholic president of the United States. Today young people who have lived in a much freer and less prejudicial society than was prevalent in 1960 at the time of Kennedy’s election will perhaps wonder, “What’s the big deal?” But it was an extraordinary turn of events for the country and for President Kennedy. Kennedy was the youngest elected president, the only Catholic and the first born in the twentieth century. He won a large majority of the Electoral College, but only beat Richard M. Nixon by just over 100,000 votes out of millions cast.
While he was the first Catholic president it was also during his presidency that the Civil Rights Movement for African Americans took a turn in the right direction. President Johnson was more vigorous in his determination to change things for Black people in the United States, but the Kennedy Presidency made major moves to assist the civil rights of the group who had given Kennedy so many of their votes during the election of 1960.