“…my old friend John…”*

            Fifty years after John Kennedy was killed, the memory still brings tears.  Yes, I remember when I heard the news I was on my way to class at UNL.  And I remember it took a while to sink in.  It was 1963.  We didn’t shoot presidents in America in the middle of the twentieth century.

            But it sank in, and brought along some emotional depression to keep us company.  I remember thinking, ‘We finally got a good one and some moron kills him!’  Of course, the story wasn’t nearly as simple as my thinking.  Revelations in the intervening years have clouded the clear Camelot sky, and there has been a bumper crop of buskers with the one true tale of who and what and why.

            We know that Lyndon Johnson accomplished many things under the aegis of JFK’s martyrdom, things that his predecessor wouldn’t have walked to fruition.  In the shadow of Kennedy, it is easy to forget that LBJ was a good one too.  He showed us that Texas wasn’t as reprehensible as it seemed to us in 1963.

            Kennedy’s assassination took away America’s childhood.  It scattered some cherished hopes into shards and hurled us toward the way things really work.  Who among us cannot grieve that?

            “Anybody here seen my old friend John?”*                                                                            *–“Abraham, Martin and John” –Dick Holler, 1968