For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous.
—1 John 3:11–12
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. I was twelve years old and share with all who remember that tragic moment. Like everyone else, I remember exactly where I was: in Mr. Odo’s seventh-grade class taking a dreaded spelling quiz.
While I was trying unsuccessfully to pass the quiz, the principal quietly entered the room that early afternoon, walked up to Mr. Odo, leaned over, and whispered in his left ear, just loud enough for me to hear: “The president has been shot.”
In 1963, I didn’t know that George C. Wallace became governor of Alabama and proclaimed loudly, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!” I caught fireflies in the backyard with a mayonnaise jar.
I didn’t know that the poet Sylvia Plath committed suicide in England. In 1963, I saw the movie Lawrence of Arabia.
I didn’t know in 1963 that Medgar Evers was murdered in Jackson, Mississippi. I had my first crush on a girl: Loretta.
I didn’t even know that on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. I watched The Flintstones on television and My Three Sons, and The Wonderful World of Disney. (Yes, I owned a Davy Crockett coonskin hat.)
In the movie Lawrence of Arabia, a club secretary says to Lawrence, “I say, Lawrence. You are a clown!” To which he answers, “Ah, well, we can’t all be lion tamers.”
In 1963, I wasn’t a clown; I was just a boy. I was naive to the world’s events and more interested in Loretta’s giggles than I was in anything that Walter Cronkite had to say. But then on Friday, November 22, 1963, I walked home from school and saw my father cry for the first time, and I watched as Mr. Cronkite slipped off his glasses on national television and announced to the world that President Kennedy had died.
On Monday, November 25, I watched the funeral procession with the rest of the nation as President Kennedy’s coffin was carried through the streets of Washington, D.C., on a caisson drawn by beautiful white horses. I watched a little boy salute his father’s flag-draped casket. That was the weekend my childhood came to an end.
Many years later, President Kennedy’s sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, invited me to her home outside Washington, D.C., to help her write a speech she was to give at the fortieth anniversary of the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation.
Before we sat at her kitchen table to draft the speech together, she walked me into the living room and to a large piece of furniture. On the flat, polished surface were many, many photographs of the entire Kennedy family: John, Bobby, Ted, Joseph, Eunice, Rosemary, Kathleen, Patricia, Jean. There was Sargent Shriver with his children, and Eunice with her parents. They all looked young and happy and at ease in their sweaters and sneakers and on their sailboats and on their lawns playing touch football.
I said to Mrs. Kennedy, “I am so sorry for the suffering your family endured.” She looked at the wide collection of pictures, and with a broad sweep of her confident hand she said, “Faith and prayer.”
At a special message to Congress in 1962, President Kennedy said:
Our deep spiritual confidence that this nation will survive the perils of today—which may well be with us for decades to come—compels us to invest in our nation’s future, to consider and meet our obligations to our children and the numberless generations that will follow.
“Faith and prayer” Eunice Kennedy said. “Spiritual confidence,” her brother reminded us.
They say that the baby boomer generation created for our nation a time of both rejection and redemption. Many of us, like the Kennedy family, chose redemption and still struggle with faith and prayer.
May all of us baby boomers wrap ourselves in a Woodstock blanket, sing some Beatle songs together, and instruct our children and grandchildren to ask not what their country can do for them, but ask them what they can do for their country.
Let us live in celebration of gratitude, stillness, and laughter. Let us baby boomers teach the numberless generations that will follow us to trust in faith and prayer and to be lion tamers.
God, help me that I too may be a lion tamer.
Copyright Chicago Tribune, used under license.