Lincoln and Kennedy
Media
Part of Panorama
- Title
- Lincoln and Kennedy
- Creator
- The New York Times
- Language
- English
- Year
- 1963
- Rights
-
- Abstract
- A commentary from “Topic of the Times.”
- Fulltext
- ■ A commentary from “Topic of the Times.” LINCOLN AND KENNEDY ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ A bereaved country reach ed in vain for words until a great poet, Walt Whitman, wrote: "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,/ And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,/ I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-return ing spring.” So a singer of America wrote of President Lincoln, whose fearful trip was done that terrible day in April* of 1865. Norih and South The printers of 1865 took the one-point column rules and turned them downside up into six-point shrouds of black. Historians and jour nalists groped in the lan guage that he had used with such deceptive simplicity and found that simple words could not fully explain him. The preachers and the poli ticians, North and South, spoke mightily. And the people who didn’t speak and couldn’t find the proper ex pressions sought some mean ing. In the good columns of The Springfield Journal, the home-town paper that Lin coln called his "friend,” they remembered that as Pres ident-elect the had told his neighbors, leaving: "To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my child ren have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return . . . Four years after a second American Revolution called the Civil War, he returned to Springfield. Hatred in Texas Newspaper Of his life, Lincoln had once told a contemporary that it was but one thing: "the short and simple annals of the poor.” But along the edges of the Confederacy December 1963 23 that was, in The Frankfort Commonwealth, they spoke this way about a native son who was born near Hodgen ville, Kentucky: “When Ab raham Lincoln fell, the South lost its best and truest friend.” Such was the sympathetic reaction in most parts of the South. But from Texas came a horrible statement in the pages of The Dallas Herald which said, “God Almighty ordered this event or it could never have taken place.” And in The Tri-Weekly Telegraph, in Houston, ten days after the assassination, these shocking words appear ed: "From now until God’s judgment day, the minds of men will not cease to thrill at the killing of Abraham Lincoln. < . . We saw succes sively in his public docu ments how super-ruling be came his purpose, and how callous to all the usual motives of humanity he grew. . . . Whoever would impose the fate of servitude and slavery on these Confederate States, whatever fatal Provid ence of God shall lay him low, we say, and say it gladly, God’s will be done.” ‘The Gift Outright* When President Kennedy took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 1961, another great poet sang of America in words that echoed Walt Whitman’s. Robert Frost’s vast television audience en abled him to be seen by more people than had ever in the history of mankind heard a poet recite. The de dication of his poem, “The Gift Outright,” was: "For John F. Kennedy.” The land was ours be fore we were the lands’s. She was our land than a hundred years Before we were her people. . . Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found out that it was our selves We were withholding from our land of living. And forthwith found salvation in surren der. . . 24 Panorama To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become. It was, at the same time, a tribute to a still-young country personified by the new President. — The New York Times. MARTYR TO A CAUSE President Kennedy lies dead, a martyr in the cause of democratic government. His countrymen weep in sorrow and in anger. The immensity of the crime can hardly be grasped in these hours of con fusion. The deed in Dallas was different only in degree of importance from such acts; of violence as the bombing of houses of worship, racial murders and only last month, in the same city, the degrading assault on U. N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. — Chicago Sun-Times. December 1963 25