Authors: Ellen Fitzpatrick
Letters to Jackie (10 page)
EL PASO, TEXAS DEC. 8, 1963
Dear Mrs. Kennedy:
I am but a humble postman and I realize the many letters you have received, which is but deserving to you, throughout this wide world. We at our house have continued to mourn the great loss to all of us, we are my wife and I and our four children, our youngest boy also three as yours. President Kennedy was adored in our house by all of us here and the small glimpse we saw of him in June when he visited here, shall always be remembered. We were still new here in El Paso and we saw the great love people here hath for him. We were both of the same age, I too having been born in 1917, we both were in the South Pacific area during the last war, but I was no hero as for him. We both married in 1953 and my wife is the same age as you are, we were married in Mexico City. We are also Catholics and had four children, two boys and two girls of which God was so good to us. I am not ashamed to say how terrible we all felt at this tragedy and even my five year old girl cried that day.
So our heart goes out to you and your very dear children for always. We will continue to admire your courage in the face of it all and continue to admire the great love President Kennedy had for the world. Please try to find it in your heart that we Texans of Mexican descent had a great love for all of you. We do hope that you will not think all of us Texans were bad, there is bad in every sort of people as you well know.
We will continue to pray for you and your family in the days and years to come.
May God bless all of you.
Yours most sincerely,
Henry Gonzales
P.S. Being a stamp collector, do sincerely hope the new stamp in memory of your husband will do him justice.
DALLAS, TEXAS
FEB. 7, 1964
MRS. JOHN F. KENNEDY
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Dear Mrs. Kennedy:
I have tried many times to put into words, my deep sorrow at the tragic passing of President John F. Kennedy. There are no adequate words, but I want to express my deep regret to you.
I feel sure, you have received many letters from Dallas. I know of the shock, horror, and following grief that took place here. We have not, and will never forget that he was cowardly and visciously taken from us here in our town. I know it is hard to understand in the rest of the nation, but I believe our grief is greater. It would have to be endured to be understood. God help us that it might never again happen to one so defenseless, but without fear.
Not all Dallas agrees politically. But many, many Dallasites were loyal and devoted supporters of President Kennedy. Those who did not agree
always, respected and admired his great intellect and courage. He was our President.
I, cannot now, visit his resting place, but I pass the place he left us often, and each time, I say a prayer of thanks for what he did for our Nation, and a prayer that you and your children may walk in the shelter of God’s love, and that time will stop the hurt, and bring you peace and happiness.
Most sincerely,
Mrs. J. M. Thornhill
BROOKLYN, N. Y. JAN. 14, 1964
Dear Mrs. Kennedy:
I have wanted somehow to express my heartfelt sympathy to you.
I realize that sheer words may not be sufficient, and yet, this is the very way your husband has endeared himself to all his people. Words, which while he lived expressed his deepest convictions. Words that now will always be remembered in all who heard them, and for the future generations, in history’s pages.
Your grief was shared wholely by myself and my family.
I am a patriotic person, but not until President Kennedy’s death, did I own a large flag to fly.
I burnt a candle in his memory when you lit the “Eternal Light.”
I admire you as a woman, mother and first lady of our land. I, fervently hope the future may possibly bring so fine and great a lady to your position again. I doubt though that two such gracious people could possibly live in my time.
My greatest dedication to your husband, is my personal keeping of all the events occurring from that infamous day on. Even though I have a son, I have begun a scrap book with a dedication to my young 6 year old daughter, Lorraine, for a peculiar event occurred on Nov. 22nd.
The dedication reads as follows:
“I dedicate this collection to my 6 year old daughter, Lorraine, for the ironic and coincidental question she posed to me on this day November 22nd, 1963.
On the way to school at 12:30 P.M., she looked up at the school flag and asked, “Mommy, when do we keep the flag at half mast?” I, in turn, explained when. She then said, “That means even when President Kennedy dies?…
I need not explain further, the eerie feeling that befell me later that day, when the news was out. Also the child’s reaction was terrible. She, poor thing, felt responsible because of her question.
Closing this letter will not close my memory or any good citizens’. Close it I must, with the hope that “God,” may smooth the future way for you and your children and keep you all from further personal grief.
My deepest Sentiments,
Sincerely,
Mrs. G. Katzberg
W
ith Saturday’s first dawn, newspapers published in bold headlines accounts of an event that virtually no sentient person in the United States was unaware of. “
KENNEDY IS KILLED BY SNIPER AS HE RIDES IN CAR IN DALLAS; JOHNSON SWORN IN ON PLANE
,” reported the
New York Times.
“
KENNEDY SLAIN ON DALLAS STREET
,” read the banner in the
Dallas Morning News
the day after the assassination. Mrs. Kennedy had returned at 4:30 Saturday morning to the White House with President Kennedy’s coffin. It now lay on a catafalque, a replica of the one used after Lincoln’s assassination, in the East Room. Preparations for a historic state funeral had already begun. Contrary to subsequently published accounts, Mrs. Kennedy did not singlehandedly direct these arrange
ments but made decisions that needed to be made along with Robert Kennedy, close advisers to the President, White House staff, and military personnel.
On Sunday, President Kennedy’s body was to be moved to the Capitol Rotunda by a horse-drawn caisson. Americans who watched their televisions that morning, awaiting the solemn journey, first witnessed Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby murder Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. The event seemed utterly surreal and almost too much to absorb for those still reeling from Kennedy’s assassination less than forty-eight hours earlier.
Meanwhile, many other Americans had embarked on a pilgrimage to the nation’s capital. Huge crowds stood alongside Pennsylvania Avenue watching in near silence on Sunday afternoon as the caisson bearing President Kennedy’s body moved down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House toward the Capitol. Followed by a riderless horse, and a procession of cars bearing the Kennedy family, President Johnson, and other officials, the caisson commanded the attention of onlookers who stared at the flag-draped coffin. Only the sound of mu?ed drums pierced the solemn quiet of the moment. For the rest of the day and into the early hours of the following morning, thousands stood in line, some for ten hours, waiting to file through the Capitol Rotunda to pay their respects to the slain President. All through the night, the slow procession continued until the doors were closed at 9:00 a.m. in preparation for the state funeral. Monday was a national day of mourning. Most Americans observed it by watching on television the funeral procession from the Capitol to St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Walking behind the horse-drawn caisson that carried President Kennedy’s body now from the Capitol to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Jacqueline Kennedy and the President’s two brothers led a delegation of mourners that included heads of states and dignitaries from around the globe. Their exposure as they marched seemed an act of defiance, given the reason for their gathering.
The terrible circumstances of John Kennedy’s death, the thirty-four-yearold widow he left behind, the two fatherless children—one celebrating his third birthday the day of his father’s funeral, the other just six years old—made these ceremonies extremely wrenching for many witnesses. Letter writers commented on Mrs. Kennedy’s extraordinary stoicism throughout her husband’s funeral
rites, admiring in her a strength they sought and felt they lacked. Her dignity saved the country, some wrote, from the degradation the assassination visited upon it. Her composure and that of her children amazed those who found it difficult to collect themselves. Many described being deeply moved by Caroline Kennedy’s visit to the Rotunda Sunday afternoon with her mother when the President’s daughter knelt by her father’s casket and placed her hand under the flag that covered it. They were likewise touched by John F. Kennedy Jr.’s salute to his father, as the President’s body was removed from St. Matthew’s while a band played “Hail to the Chief” for the thirty-fifth President for the last time. During the burial rite in Arlington Cemetery, Mrs. Kennedy and the Kennedy brothers lit the eternal flame that would mark the President’s grave. The graveside ceremony riveted the nation, carving deep memories into the consciousness of millions who watched these events on television. Some later gathered in their own communities and places of worship to memorialize the President.
In their letters to Mrs. Kennedy, a few families and neighbors of soldiers who participated in Kennedy’s state funeral described their special pride in being part of the solemn and historic occasion. Ironically, one of JFK’s most vexing problems as a candidate—his Roman Catholicism—became a virtue in his death as Americans of all faiths observed the rituals of his church, admiring their sacred splendor. “I have been taught all my life,” one young North Carolinian later wrote to Mrs. Kennedy, “that Catholics were ‘doomed.’ I felt we needed a Christian leader. I realized by watching the funeral over television that our church and people who have judged without really knowing are very wrong. I want you to know that was all I had against him and now that’s gone.”
NOVEMBER 25, 1963
Dear Mrs. Kennedy:
Yesterday my wife and I went to Washington to pay our respects to the President. We didn’t know what else to do. We stood on Pennsylvania Avenue bathed in sunshine and trying to believe what was happening. We couldn’t do it. It was still unimaginable that a man so much alive
could be being borne on a caisson over the same route that he had traveled so triumphantly for his inauguration only two years, ten months, and two days before. The drum beats were so slow, the honor guard so stiff, the change so obvious; it was not real. My mind went back to the 1960 election and I remembered with pleasure how unpopular I was, as one of the four registered Democrats in the town of Essex, Massachusetts, when I went to the polls wearing my oversize Kennedy button and voted for the first time. Among many other things, I will always associate him with the first election in which I was old enough to vote—a moment I had anticipated eagerly for a long, long time. Thinking these thoughts and watching the caisson roll by produced emotions in me that I never knew I had. I remembered him saying in the 1960 campaign: “…The American Presidency demands that the President place himself in the thick of the fight, that he care passionately about the fate of the people he leads, that he be willing to serve them at the risk of incurring their momentary displeasure.” It was a Jeffersonian remark. And it was what the President was doing when he incurred the momentary displeasure of a madman with a mail-order rifle.
For us, the President’s otherwise meaningless death has filled us with a sense of duty—a feeling that when the standard-bearer falls, it behooves everyone to help get the flag up off the ground. Perhaps this is what his death will ultimately prove: that good men still die for their countries, and that we must learn from their deaths to save other good men from the same fate. “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” They are good words in a fine tradition. Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke in the same tradition in his third inaugural address, and his words would have made a fitting scripture lesson in the funeral today:
It is not enough to clothe and feed the body of the Nation, and instruct and inform its mind. For there is also the spirit. That spirit speaks to us in our daily lives in ways often unnoticed, because they seem so obvious. It speaks to us here in the
capital of the Nation. It speaks to us through the processes of governing in the sovereignties of forty-eight states. It speaks to us in our counties, in our cities, in our towns, and in our villages. It speaks to us from the other nations of the hemisphere, and from those across the seas—the enslaved, as well as the free. Sometimes we fail to hear or heed these voices of freedom because to us the privilege of our freedom is such an old, old story.
A gruesome new chapter in the old, old story was written on November 22. Much of the future depends on what voices we hear and how we choose to hear them. One of the voices we should have listened to more was marked with a broad Boston accent that lent itself to frequent parody rather than rapt attention. Perhaps if we all listen very hard, we can still hear it for awhile.
Blessings on him, and on you and on your children.
Sincerely,
Thomas N. Bethell
SIGMA PHI EPSILON
LEXINGTON, VIRGINIA
MONDAY
25 NOVEMBER 1963
Dear Mrs. Kennedy,
I know that you will never read this letter personally, but I feel that I must write it anyway. Countless thousands of letters will doubtless be pouring into Washington in the next week expressing the nation’s sympathy and condolences, so this will constitute but an insignificant fraction of this country’s conveyance of an inexpressible feeling of loss.
I am a student at Washington and Lee University, which has a history almost as long as the United States. Two of the university’s past
presidents, George Washington and General Robert E. Lee, left in the school an indelible tradition of respect and of honor—respect for men who have contributed to the development of this country and the American way of life, and honor through an unwavering application of a special brand of honesty to one’s own life, coupled with a genuine desire to find the same quality in others.
Having had ingrained in me such a background of personal conduct and reverence for the men who shape American history, I came to Washington to pay my respects to the President this past week-end. Though I have been in Washington several times before, never had I seen such a soletude and feeling of extensive sadness. When the President’s caisson passed before me, there was not a sound to be heard except for the drums and the horses’ hoofs. The smallest children assumed a composure of sobriety I have never before seen in the faces of children, and which I pray I may never have to see again. When I arrived at the Capitol, it seemed as if half the world were waiting in front to pass before their President. When the portable radios in the crowd announced that the President’s asassin had died, no one appeared either happy or unhappy—they remained pensive, for they had thoughts of only one man that afternoon, and he wasn’t in Dallas.
When I saw you and little John and Caroline emerge from the Capitol, I realized that never, Mrs. Kennedy, have I seen a person display such strength and courage as you did that afternoon. After returning to school, I watched television until well into the morning as thousands of Americans filed past their President, and I saw the same looks of disbelieving grief that I had seen in person that afternoon. I said a prayer before going to bed that night, Mrs. Kennedy. That’s something I haven’t done for a long, long time. And I can’t help wondering whether if more Americans had said theirs before, I wouldn’t have had to then…
Most sincerely yours,
Jim Legg, Jr.