November: Lincoln's Elegy at Gettysburg

November 25: Unfinished Work (JFK)

[ ≤∞≥ ] n o v e m b e r 2 5 Unfinished Work (JFK) Monday, November 25. The streets of Washington are black and gray. All the world is black and gray through the small television in 1963. Mu∆ed drums beat the death march slowly and incessantly. A man has been killed, and the world mourns: this was the president, this was our president there on the caisson. Its slow wheels rumble along the pavement. On the co≈n a flag covers the dead, sti√ and rectangular, not like a flag in the wind—it is a flag in the cold, a flag in the mind: all the waxen horror under it, all the mystery, all the fragile, blasted hopes of dark faces along Pennsylvania Avenue; these go into the young mind and will never come out again. ‘‘Why?’’ Bobby Kennedy sobs that night, and a friend outside his door overhears. ‘‘Why, God? Why? Why?’’ * * * Our grief and horror have become essential to us. In one way or another we will certainly pass them on, but not as we know them, for only to our generation are they immediate. The death of our president is something this generation has in common with the generation of the 1860s, the n o v e m b e r 2 5 [ ≤∞∂ ] generation of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln, but it also shows how we most di√er. Our di√erent griefs divide us. People have noted without quite knowing what to think, that there appear to be several striking coincidences, or parallels, between Abraham Lincoln’s death and John F. Kennedy’s. For example, Kennedy’s secretary, whose name was Lincoln, suggested that he not go to Dallas, just as a man named Kennedy warned Abraham Lincoln not to go to the theater. It is even more striking when one discovers that it was not Evelyn Lincoln who had strong misgivings about the president going to Dallas; it was her husband, ‘‘Abe.’’ Evelyn Lincoln reports having more than once a ‘‘strange, unexplainable feeling’’ as the President prepared for the trip to Dallas. Coincidences, premonitions, and the like have always interested primitive peoples because they seem to show that a higher power controls human events. This is reassuring, and it implies that events make sense. We can abide not knowing all the answers to our questions, just as long as we believe there are answers somewhere. Interest in coincidences and premonitions is alien to the modern world, to the world of the Enlightenment in which we were raised. John F. Kennedy certainly would have scorned it. We associate such popparanormal stu√ with California. Furthermore, many people reject the Lincoln-Kennedy coincidences because they suggest a kind of equality, or parity, between the two. It is agreed that Abraham Lincoln was a great man, but there is no such agreement with regard to John F. Kennedy. Kennedy possessed great abilities and great weaknesses; his character contained at least one great virtue and one great vice. If courage, as Robert Kennedy said, is the primary virtue because it enables all the others, then John F. Kennedy had a great share of the primary virtue. Receiving the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church at least four times, and living more than half his days in great unacknowledged pain, according to his brother, John Kennedy dashed ahead with ‘‘the full exercise of his powers along the lines of excellence’’ nevertheless. Even Richard Nixon, back in the fifties, lamented when it seemed that ‘‘brave Jack Kennedy’’ was going to die—again. The courageous do not collect cowards around them. One could hardly think of a scene in ancient or modern history equal in tragic nobility to Jacqueline Kennedy walking between the surviving Kennedy brothers behind the caisson carrying her husband’s body. Her veiled face shows a Greek-like beauty: elevated dignity and sorrow. This was the young woman who three days before had stood with her husband’s blood and brain matter on her suit watching a new president taking his oath of u n f i n i s h e d w o r k ( j f k ) [ ≤∞∑ ] o≈ce on Air Force One. In the car with her husband falling against her she had exclaimed, ‘‘Oh Jack, Jack! What have they done to you?’’ At the funeral she was neither indi√erent about a philandering husband nor too sedated to...