These precious days I’ll spend with you!

This piece takes its title from the old pop standard “September Song� which was supposedly sung by John F. Kennedy at a private party during his administration. Some of the words go like this:

“Oh, it's a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach September
When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame One hasn't got time for the waiting game.
Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few September, November And these few precious days I'll spend with you
These precious days I'll spend with you.

We use the term “supposedly� to refer to whether Kennedy actually sang that song because there are still many who state that September Song, like so much of his Camelot, was simply contrived after the president died to make his time among us appear more than it actually was. In point of fact, it has been said also that Kennedy used to like to sit in his old Boston rocking chair and listen to the words from the Broadway musical Camelot, which was new and very popular at that time. He liked these words particularly:

“And let it never be forgot, that for one brief shining moment there was Camelot.�

John F. Kennedy faced a particular thing when he assumed the presidency on January twentieth, 1961. Every even year president elected from 1840 forward had died in office. In effect, if the presidential election year ended in a zero, every president elected that year had passed away while in office, often violently. To say that Jack Kennedy didn’t know this or was not aware of it would be a mistake. When asked about his death, he replied that he hoped that it “was quick.� Kennedy authored the book “Profiles in Courage� and we still think to this day that it took a special kind of courage to serve in the presidency during those times and with that curse hanging over you. When Richard Nixon learned of Kennedy’s death he was reportedly very upset because he realized that it might very well have been him had the election turned out differently.

We were fourteen years old on November 22 and we were a freshman in high school sitting in a biology class dissecting an earthworm when we learned of John F. Kennedy’s death. Although we did not like it when Kennedy was elected in November of 1960, we had come to love the man and to care deeply about he and his family, his presidency and our country. We were at an impressionable age and Kennedy had made a deep impression on us! As we stood in front of the high school awaiting a ride home through a rainstorm that fateful Friday, we still remember the lonely feeling that we had as we confronted the day and its enormous ramifications for us and our life and the nation’s course as a whole.

We grew up way too fast on that rainy Friday afternoon.

We went home and watched the non stop television coverage of the passage of a person who defined what the presidency could mean in the hands of a man who knew what to do with it. And Kennedy, with his Irish wit and presence, had always known what to do when in front of a television camera. He was our first telegenic presidential presence. They don’t speak of the term charisma much any longer but the word came to prominence when used to define the presence that Jack Kennedy had when speaking or in front of a television camera. People were drawn to him and that is absolutely no lie. When we look back at his lone run for the presidency, all odds were stacked against him with his opponent, Richard Nixon, holding the advantages of incumbency as vice president following the mostly successful and positive presidency of Dwight David Eisenhower.

It was those televised presidential debates seen by much of the country that seemed to turn the tide in Kennedy’s favor. Those who listened to the debates via radio thought Nixon won. Those who watched on television thought Kennedy won. In the end it was one of the tightest elections in American political history. John Kennedy’s father Joe, a man of some wealth, stated that if he was going to buy an election, it wasn’t going to be a landslide!

It has been said that a story cannot be complete without an ending and November 22 was that ending for the Kennedy presidency. The Kennedy detractors said there was never any Camelot and that it was nothing more than a contraption set up to glorify the now slain president. That was probably the early beginnings of the hate that we currently see for the first black president of the United States. We think that John F. Kennedy would have been so proud to see a black man elected president of the United States. There are those who say that Kennedy was tardy on the civil rights issue and perhaps they were right. But John Kennedy grew each and every day that he inhabited the White House and he was coming around on civil rights just as he was on so many other issues of his day. There were, however, issues at the time just as important as civil rights. Kennedy had small children and he wanted them to grow up in a nuclear free world. When Barack Obama was elected president, he made the statement that he would like for his children to live to see the twenty second century. For Kennedy, he just wanted to see everyone’s children live outside of the threat of annihilation posed by the bomb.

In this time fifty years later we tend to forget that the Cold War was raging against communism and that John Kennedy had a great deal on his plate. And then there was the looming issue of southeast Asia and Vietnam. Kennedy was postponing making any big decisions about Vietnam until after the 1964 election and there are those who have long felt that he would have chosen a different path than Lyndon Johnson did on Vietnam. As it was, it was about nine months after Kennedy’s death that Johnson committed the country to a full blown defense of South Vietnam. We need not forget that John Kennedy was a cold warrior at the height of the Cold War. But John Kennedy had seen the staggering effects of the greatest war that had ever been fought and had come the closest to death in the Pacific theater than probably any president who has ever held the office who was not assassinated had faced with the possible exception of George Washington who was constantly shot at but never hit. His assassination was a body blow to many who had seen what Kennedy had survived with his P.T. 109 experience and the medical problems with his back that had caused him to be given the last rites of the Catholic church in the early 1950’s. When John Kennedy rode in that open car this day fifty years ago he did so in part because he believed that no one would ever want to harm him in the country that he so loved. He had been warned about Dallas but had replied that there could not be any part of this nation that he would have to be afraid to travel to and be publicly seen. No American president has ever ridden in an open car since that time.

It is perhaps the mark of the Kennedy presidency that it changed America in ways that we are still discovering, setting in motion a chain reaction of events that still cascades over us today. If one does not believe that Kennedy’s death changed America one must believe that the war in Vietnam most certainly did. And, John Kennedy might have altered the outcome in Vietnam. Like so much of the unfulfilled promise of the Kennedy presidency, we will simply never know. But the facts are clear on a few things. John Kennedy did send us full bore into space and he did give us the Peace Corps and those, with their actuality and their potential promise, are not small accomplishments. The debate has raged for decades about what America and the world might have looked like if John Kennedy had not died on this date fifty years ago. In addition to that, we lost decades of the sage advice of what would have been a very respected political elder statesman. John Kennedy was only forty six years old when he died. It was said that John Kennedy, like his son, wanted to publish a newspaper or a magazine of influence after his presidency was finished.

I was but a child on the morning of November 22, secure in my world and confident about the future. By that evening, I was a man full of doubts that have plagued me ever since that time. It was a hard transition from a future full of hope to a time far away from that promise. John Kennedy had said that “to those that much is given, much is required.� We and the greatest generation before us from whose ranks he sprang, were prepared to give as much as we could, but few have come forward since then to ask very much of us. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,� seems a very distant statement now.

I will not be alive to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Kennedy death so this date is something special for me. In just a couple of years we will be commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the death of Abraham Lincoln. We saw Lincoln brought back to life in theaters just last year and we wonder who, as yet unborn, some one hundred years from now, might bring John Kennedy back to life, if for just a little while. But he is gone now and we are in the autumn of a life that has gone so swiftly by. And, we suppose that it is perhaps not such a long, long way from May to December after all. But this day fifty years ago remains as one of the two tallest mile markers of our life.

John Kennedy has been gone for fifty years and much has transpired since his passage from the scene. We were, and still are, deeply affected by September eleventh, 2001 and the words of September Song concerning the days growing short when you reach September also mean a great deal to us. “September, November, and these few precious days I’ll spend with you.�

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe

To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.