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Four Days by United Press International & American Heritage Magazine Hard Cover
Four Days by United Press International & American Heritage Magazine
The historical record of the death of President Kennedy
Hard Cover Damaged spine. First page has marker. See photos.
143 pages
Copyright 1964
CONTENTS
Introduction
Friday 22 Nov 1963
A Cheerful Morning in Fort Worth
Welcome in Dallas
The Motorcade
Snipers Post
Three Shots
Flash from Dallas
To the Hospital
My God What are we Coming To?
The Manhunt Begins
A Suspect is Captured
Eyewitness Account
The 36th President
Arrival in Washington
A new President Speaks to the Nation
Home to the White House
Saturday 23 Nov 1963
Saturday Vigil
World Reaction
The Worlds Grief
A Proclamation
The Line of Succession
The Public Manner
Departure from the White House
Town in Torment
Dallas: Saturday
Lee Harvey Oswald
The Was the Week That Was
Sunday 24 Nov 1963
Last Departure
To the Capitol In the Rotunda
A Time to Remember
Her Tears Never Fell
Another Act of Violence
A Death Heavy with Irony
One-Man Vigilante
The Homeage of the People
Monday 25 Nov 1963
Hail to the Chief
The Caisson Rolls
Marche Funebre
Captains and Kings
Requiem
A Little Soldiers Salute
In the Presence of Lincoln
Haven of Heroes
Dust to Dust
The Watchers
Folding the Colors
For the Record
The Eulogies in the Rotunda
Resolutions of the Congress
Comments in the World Press
A Selection of Personal Statements
Words to Remember
Reflections on the Man
The Order of the Funeral March
List of Foreign Dignitaries Who Attended the Funeral
The Funeral Eulogy
The Prayer at the Grave
INTRODUCTION
What John F. Kennedy left us was most of all an attitude. To put it in the simplest terms, he looked ahead. He knew no more than anyone else what the future was going to be like, but he did know that that was where we ought to be looking. Only to a limited extent are we prisoners of the past. The future sets us free. It is our escape hatch. We can shape it to our liking, and we had better start thinking about how we would like it.
It was time for us to take that attitude, because we thought we were growing old. We had lived through hard experiences and we were tired, and out of our weariness came caution, suspicion, and the crippling desire to play it safe. We became so worried about what we had to lose that we never began to think about what was still to be gained, and sometimes it looked as if we were becoming a nation of fuddy-duddies. The world was moving faster than ever before and we were beginning to regret that it was moving at all because we wafraid where it might take us.
But President Kennedy personified youth and vigor-and perhaps it was symbolic that both his friends and his foes picked up his Boston accent and began to say "vigah." He went about hatless, he liked to mingle with crowds and shake the hands of all and sundry, for recreation he played touch football, and for rest he sat in an old-fashioned rocking chair as if in sly mockery of his own exuberance. He seemed to think that things like music and painting and literature were essential parts of American life and that it was worthwhile to know what the musicians and artists and writers were doing. Whatever he did was done with zest, as if youth were for the first time touching life and finding it exciting.
With all of this there was a cool maturity of outlook. By itself, vigor is not enough. Courage is needed also, and when youth has courage it acquires composure. In the most perilous moments President Kennedy kept his poise. He challenged the power of darkness at least once, and during the hours when his hand had to stay close to the fateful trigger he was composed and unafraid. Once in a great while a nation, like a man, has to be ready to spend itself utterly for some value that means more than survival itself means. President Kennedy led us through such a time, and we began to see that the power of darkness is perhaps not quite as strong as we had supposed-and that even if it were, there is something else that matters much more.
It was his attitude that made the difference. Performance can be adjudged in various ways, and we have plenty of time to appraise the value or the lack of value of the concrete achievements of the Kennedy Administration. The President who called on us to stop thinking about what our country could do for us and to think instead about what we could do for our country may or may not have given us specific programs that would embody that ideal in actual practice; the point is that he wrenched us out of ourselves and compelled us to meditate about the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. From the beginning, the whole of our American experiment has been made up of an infinite number of aspirations and unremembered bits of heroism, devotion, and hope, lodged in the hearts of innumerable separate Americans. When all of these are brought together, the nation goes forward.
That, in the last analysis, is the faith America has wanted to live by. We are always uneasy when we find ourselves keeping our noblest ideals in mothballs, carefully shielded from contact with the workaday world; deep in our hearts we know that we are supposed to take them out and work for them even if contact with harsh reality occasionally knocks chips off of them here and there. Whether this man knew the best ways to put our ideals into practical use is a secondary consideration now. He did think that we ought to try our best to do something about them, and that belief his death did not take away from us, because we came to share in it.
We turned some sort of corner in the last few years. Almost without our knowing it, one era came to an end and a new one began. The change had little to do with formal acts of government-with specific programs, bits of legislation, or exercises of presidential power. It reflected a change in the times themselves. For a whole generation we had had to face terrible immediate problems-depression, war, cold war, the infinite destructive power of the nuclear mystery that we knew how to release but did not quite know how to control. Then came a breathing spell, a faint but definite easing of the tensions. Almost for the first moment in our lifetimes we began to look ahead once more and to realize that it was not only possible but imperative to think about the limitless future rather than about the mere problem of warding off disaster.
President Kennedy came to symbolize that moment of change, not because he caused it but because he fitted into it; not because of what he did but simply because of what he was. He might almost have been speaking from Shakespeare's text, telling us that being ready is what really matters-being ready to meet any challenge, to assume any responsibility, to lose fear for ourselves in an abiding concern for the common good. The four harrowing days that began on November 22, 1963, brought us face to face with the future. What happens next is up to us. The readiness is all.
That is why those four days are worth re-examining. We relive that time of tragedy less to commemorate a departed President than to dedicate ourselves. When the army bugler sent the haunting notes of "Taps" across that grave in Arlington Cemetery he sounded a long goodbye and a commitment to eternal rest for John F. Kennedy. For all the rest of us, that was the trumpet of dawn itself.
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