Editor’s Note: This column was originally published in the Daily Bruin on Nov. 27, 1963 under the headline “Embodies America”
One man, by the simple and seemingly meaningless act of pulling the trigger on a rifle, has thrown the entire world into a state of mourning for the man he killed.
Why?
Is it simply that one man has killed another? No, that happens every day with scarcely a passing notice. Is it that one man has murdered a head of state? Hardly. The killing of other national leaders in modern history has left us with no precedent for the scope and depth of the reaction to the death of the late President. Is it that the President of the United States has been killed? Not likely, for John F. Kennedy’s record in the White House has at best been average.
The answer, then, lies in the fact that the man who was killed was John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States and representative of everything the almost-mystic American ideal has to offer. Only two generations removed from what was one of America’s most despised minority groups, Kennedy had not only reached the pinnacle of American life, but he had been able to embody all that is best in the heritage handed down to Americans at mid-twentieth century. He possessed the scholar’s intellect but the politician’s practicality. He held a passionate desire for world peace, but the strength to risk war in search of that peace. He was wealthy and glamorous, yet he devoted his total being to the welfare of his country. Peace, freedom, equality, democracy – words that have been in the mainstream of American history since 1776, but which only began to bear significant fruits in the last few decades – were his most cherished ideals.
In this short, infinite weekend of tragedy and grief, America has learned more about itself than perhaps in the entire two centuries of its existence. Only in losing its cherished leader did it learn why he was so endeared. Only in the baptism of his death did the nation come to a realization of the full spiritual meaning of its existence.
A swift act of hate killed him but in response to that act the world united in love for the ideal, the symbol that was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was a symbol – more forceful than a thousand libraries full of philosophical treatises – of the love for humanity, belief in the dignity of the individual and the devotion to principle that has always characterized the highest ideals of American life.
The strength of his personality can be illustrated in no way better than by the fact that the most eloquent eulogies – at his funeral, at memorial services across the country and in the nation’s press – have been selections from his own speeches.
Pollard was the city editor for the Daily Bruin when this column was published.