SHE TOOK A RING FROM HER FINGER

Watched the documentary again today. It's on YouTube. Love the epilogue. The kids running up to him, can't pick them up with his bad back. But smiling. His desk was open in the middle. I can remember shot of John Jr. playing under the desk while his dad worked. And got curious. Jackie was coming off a C Section less than four months before. They lost a son five and half weeks premature to a syndrome they could probably handle now. 

She didn't often go on those political junkets with Kennedy. Makes me wonder if they saw the trip as a chance to just get out of Washington. And for the most part it was a good trip. Crowds were welcoming. People smiling. Then the shots rang out. And it reverberated around the world. And I will hear those damn, muffled, one hundred beats per minute drums for the rest of my life. 

 Mom and I stayed up last night and watched the documentary Four Days in November on TCM. As the story unfolded I recognized something that I was probably too young to realize fifty years ago. How much we owed Jackie Kennedy. By Monday she was done crying, at least for a few hours. Veiled in black and straight as a blade she led that procession from the Capitol to the Cathedral.

He wasn't perfect. Neither was she. He had flaws that probably would have kept him from running in our "we have to know every last secret of your life" era. And what does it say about us?

Their marriage had bent, but it hadn't broken. Air Force One was waiting. The casket was still open when she took off her wedding ring. Then the casket was closed and the journey back to Washington and a waiting country began. The ring was returned to her later but the image caught and held. When senator Mike Mansfield delivered the eulogy under the Capitol Rotunda on Sunday November 24 it became a refrain.

There was a sound of laughter; in a moment, it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.

There was a wit in a man neither young nor old, but a wit full of an old man's wisdom and of a child's wisdom, and then, in a moment it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.

There was a man marked with the scars of his love of country, a body active with the surge of a life far, far from spent and, in a moment, it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.

There was a father with a little boy, a little girl and a joy of each in the other. In a moment it was no more, and so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.

There was a husband who asked much and gave much, and out of the giving and the asking wove with a woman what could not be broken in life, and in a moment it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands, and kissed him and closed the lid of a coffin.

A piece of each of us died at that moment. Yet, in death he gave of himself to us. He gave us of a good heart from which the laughter came. He gave us of a profound wit, from which a great leadership emerged. He gave us of a kindness and a strength fused into a human courage to seek peace without fear.

He gave us of his love that we, too, in turn, might give. He gave that we might give of ourselves, that we might give to one another until there would be no room, no room at all, for the bigotry, the hatred, prejudice, and the arrogance which converged in that moment of horror to strike him down.

In leaving us -- these gifts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States, leaves with us. Will we take them, Mr. President? Will we have, now, the sense and the responsibility and the courage to take them?

I pray to God that we shall and under God we will.