President Kennedy

When John Fitzgerald Kennedy took the oath of the President of the United States on a snowy Spring day in 1961, he knew that the long, twilight struggle against tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself would not be finished in the first one hundred days, nor in the first one thousand days, It is not' yet one thousand days since he informed the world of the energy with which he would prosecute that struggle. But his part in it, though incomplete, is tragically done.

The shock of mourning for his brutal death cannot conceal his successes in that struggle. The old men dreamed dreams; the young men had visions. His vivid image of a peaceful revolution of hope animated his most active and effective role in the politics of this hemisphere. Knowing that a free society which cannot help the many who are poor, cannot save the few who are rich, he created the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps. He led the way to freer international trade for the United States and a greater economic unity for Europe. And in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, he concluded an historic treaty that remits the slow, agonizing enervation of mankind by the atom, that postpones a little longer man's destruction of himself.

His struggle was not complete. None knew it better than he did; he was in Dallas suing for the mandate of the people to carry it forward. Suddenly that mandate was denied, not by the people, who gave it once; and there remain the unsigned contract and the unanswered questions; what becomes of the Executive impulse for civil rights for all the Nation, for better medical care, for more aid to higher education, for the planning of cities, and for a better system of taxation? What of the personal bonds, strong ties for peace all severed at a blow; he had with world leaders?

The monstrous discontinuity offends. The abrupt end of the life of a young man who made a young and mighty country feel its age again; who made it feel a youthful strength adequate to undo the heavy burden and let the oppressed go free; the end of such a man now stuns a country grateful for his leadership, his energy, his vision. It stuns a Nation for which he once offered up his life in service, and in whose service he has now given it.