A gallant man is dead.
It is a cruel paradox that a life devoted to — and risked for — America should be snuffed out summarily in the bright noonday sunlight of an American city.
Cruel paradox, that is, when one recalls that, but for the grace of God, John F. Kennedy would have died 20 years ago in the sea off the enemy-infested Solomons in the South Pacific.
A gallant man...
John F. Kennedy's adult life was dedicated to the service of his fellow man.
There were the war years — long ones in hazardous duty. Then the hard battle for Congress, and in 1952 the move up to the Senate. There was the near-miss try for the vice presidency when he felt the downward press of religious intolerance, and then, at last, attainment of the nation's highest office.
But that was just the beginning.
A gallant man...
We can now remember that John F. Kennedy was the first President ever to face up to the possibility of nuclear war.
And face up he did. It was the supposedly invincible Nikita Khrushchev who backed down when confronted with the fact that the United States knew there were Soviet missiles, aimed at the United States, just 90 miles off our shores.
And the free world breathed again.
A gallant man...
When John F. Kennedy became President on a freezing day in January 1961, he set himself two goals — liberty at home, and peace in a world "shivering in an uncertain balance of terror." His every thought, plan and effort were devoted to those ends.
Laboring against enormous odds, he encouraged the Communists to join in the quest for peace. "Let us never negotiate out of fear," he counselled, "and let us never fear to negotiate."
What is there to say when the life of the President is taken? That a madman is loose. There is not a sane person in the nation who would have translated his seeming differences into such violence.
But the effect of this terrible tragedy will be the reverse of what the assassin set forth to accomplish. It will draw a saddened America together as it never has been before — one nation, indivisibly strong against man's inhumanity to man.
But meanwhile ...
A gallant man is dead.
— Knickerbocker News, Nov. 23, 1963
