The murder of John F. Kennedy twenty years ago last month occasioned an overwhelming sense of grief that may be without parallel in our history. When the news first was announced, people wept openly in the streets, and during the painful weekend that followed, as the mesmerizing images of the youthful President and his family were flashed again and again on the television screens, the feeling of deprivation deepened. A San Francisco columnist reported: “It is less than 72 hours since the shots rang out in Dallas, yet it seems a lifetime—a lifetime of weeping skies, wet eyes and streets. … Over the endless weekend, San Francisco looked like a city that was only slowly emerging from a terrible bombardment. Downtown, on what would normally have been a bustling Saturday, the people walked slowly, as in shock, their faces pale and drawn, their mood as somber as the dark clothes they wore under the gray skies.”

To the slain President’s admirers and associates, his death signified not merely a cruel personal loss but the end of an era. “For all of us, life goes on—but brightness has fallen from the air,” observed his special counsel Theodore Sorensen. “A Golden age is over and it will never be again.” One of Kennedy’s earliest biographers, William Manchester, had jotted down on the morning of Kennedy’s Inauguration the words of the sixteenth-century martyr, Hugh Latimer. “We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace … as I trust shall never be put out.” “Now,” Manchester wrote, “the light was gone from our lives, and I was left to grope in the darkness of the dead past. ” At the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson rose to say, “We will bear the grief of his death to the day of ours.”

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