The Written Word
for July 18, 1999

For all who were old enough to remember, November 22, 1963, and what they were doing around 11:00 AM, will stay burned in their memory forever.

I was in my law office at 306-1030 West Georgia Street, the Burrard Building, when I got a call from my wife telling me that President John F Kennedy had been shot – oddly, fate would have me on air when Indira Gandhi, Anwer Sadat and Ronald Reagan were shot. I knew that the best place to watch developments would be from Shorty’s news stand at Georgia and Granville because he always had a radio blaring and I could also watch the news being flashed up on the side of the Hotel Vancouver where there was a moving news bulletin.

By the time I got there the radio and the flashing sign were telling of the assassination attempt on the president but within a quarter hour the flashing headline changed from "Kennedy shot" to "Kennedy assassinated".

It was a ghastly feeling such as I had only remembered once before when as a teenager in April 1945 I had seen our teacher, a stoic stone faced sort of man, come into the classroom, tears streaming down his face, to tell us that Franklin Roosevelt had died.

The events following Kennedy’s death stick in the consciousness as well – Jack Ruby, a petty gangster shooting to death Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin … the long lines filing past the bier in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington … the grief of Mrs Kennedy wearing the coat with her husband’s blood all over it … the flame at JFK’s gravesite at Arlington … and the little boy saluting as his father’s catafalque passed by. That was, of course, John-John … John Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior, now himself a victim of the strange curse on the Kennedy family.

And what a curse … Joe Jr killed in the war … Kathleen’s husband killed in the war … John F assassinated … Robert F victim of an assassin’s bullet just as he was poised to take the Democratic nomination in 1968 … Mary Jo Kopechnie, killed in Ted Kennedy’s car … one of Robert’s sons loses a leg to cancer … and now John-John … John Fitzgerald Kennedy II dead in a plane crash along with his wife and his wife’s sister. It’s a long, inexplicable losing streak.

But as I heard about John, Junior I couldn’t help but reflect upon his father. He is much maligned now, especially for his sexual proclivities which make Bill Clinton look like a monk. But John F Kennedy was a great man for all that and in my view, given a second term would have been a great president.

It’s so terribly easy to second guess what happened in October 1962 when Premier Kruschev of the Soviet Union was arming Cuba with missiles. There were plenty of naysayers at the time including our own Prime Minister Diefenbaker. But Kennedy felt that he had to stare Kruschev down and that’s what he did – as the world held it’s breath and shivered in fear for a week. I withdrew my meager savings from the bank and my wife and I were going to head for the interior – a fellow lawyer I know did just that … moved to Kamloops where he is now a judge. But from that moment on, I think, the Cold War turned in America’s favour.

There was a style about John Kennedy. He was the first president to be born in the 20^th century and you could feel the youthfulness. For my generation it meant an end of the old farts and the promise of something better.

Whether things would have been better had President Kennedy not been shot we’ll never know. What many of us sensed at the time, though, was that a man and an administration of new hope and vision had been wiped out.

And now his son, John F Kennedy II has been killed.

It has to make you think and wonder how so much grief could come to so many in one family. And it has to make those of us of a certain age think back to that little boy saluting his father’s coffin so many years ago.