>We knew there was going to be a lot of attention paid to the "anniversary" of JFK's assassination but doesn't it seem like it's gotten out of hand? I half expect a commemorative Wheaties box. And I say that as an admirer. We lost some of our postwar sense of hope and optimism that day in Dallas.

I don't want to hear about it.
When his son died, it brought back those memories and it was painful.

Yes, an era ended that day and another began... the 60's.
A large portion of an entire generation dropped out after that day and never came back.

As a youngster, after I had read Profiles in Courage, I saw someone make what I thought was a courageous speech.
JFK was in the senate then, and I sent him a copy of the speech.
He graciously sent me a letter thanking me for sending the speech, saying that the had read it with a good deal of interest.
I often wondered whether he had actually read the speech, until he made a speech in Massachusetts several years later that used many of the themes from the speech that I had sent him.
After his death, I wrote Ted Sorensen, his lead speech writer, and asked who had worked on that speech and Ted replied that JFK had written it himself.

When he was nominated in LA in 1960, there was no TV and my entire family was huddled around a radio all night till the final vote giving him the nomination was cast around 2AM EDT.
Just about every Irish catholic in the world went bananas that night!

Some of my relatives think that his mother (nee Rose Fitzgerald) was distantly related to us.

That's Irish blarney, I think, but he'll always be my #1 hero.

That's what I want to remember, not Dallas.