"Some luck!" I replied. "All three of the men who meant the most to me in public life were killed."
Minutes later, realizing I didn't want those words to stand, I called her and said that of course I was lucky - we were all lucky to have had them even for such a short time.
John Kennedy was on his way to becoming a great president and might have ended the Vietnam War and given new leadership to the world. So I believed, but we will never know.
His assassination did not trigger a long national depression of the spirit. Lyndon Johnson was ready at Day One to pick up the fallen president's torch. In the tragic aftermath, the grace of Jacqueline Kennedy also helped, as did the words of Martin Luther King Jr. as he lifted sights to the unfinished work needed to fulfill the American dream.
The mid-'60s became an era of social invention and public action. "We the People," through our Congress, led by a president who promised "We shall overcome," enacted the legislation to achieve the two prime goals of the civil-rights movement: ending publicly enforced segregation and ensuring the right to vote for all Americans. And we went on to launch a war on poverty that Kennedy had talked about but had not had time to start.
By 1968, however, "We the People" were torn apart by Johnson's decision to go ever-deeper into a war many of us thought was a mistake. It drained resources from the War on Poverty, and also from the Peace Corps, a smaller endeavor in which I was engaged, which Kennedy hoped would make a substantial contribution to the world.
Young voters rallied in surprising numbers to Sen. Gene McCarthy's primary campaign challenging the wartime president. An agonized Lyndon Johnson decided not to run again. JFK's brother entered the race "to save the soul of the country." Then, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.
