Commentary : This is fabulous writing, bringing the reader to the scene in the nation, in the world, with broad strokes and then the small details, painting a heart rendering picture of the JFK assassination and immediate aftermath!
CHAPTER "AFTER DALLAS" (Last Chapter)
Pages 347 - 362
Jackie wept first, and from her and from Dallas a tidal wave of tears rolled across the nation and around the world. In New York, there was a murmur and then a rising wail as the news jumped between tables at a midtown restaurant. Advertising men in tailored suits hurried into St. Patrick's Cathedral and fell onto their knees. Outside, drivers hunched over steering wheels, sobbing as dashboard radios broadcast the news. A crowd gathered at the Magnavox showroom on Fifth Avenue, watching on television sets piled two stories high as Walter Cronkite chocked back tears before announcing that the President was dead. Chorus girls rehearsing for an evening television show at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway kicked in unison, arms linked around waists and tears streamed down their cheeks.
In Washington, a rookie police officer wept as he lowered the flag on the Capitol dome to half mast and looked down to see that drivers had abandoned their cars and stood in the street, staring up at the flag and crying... At Harvard, a girl wept on the steps of the Widener Library and a boy hit a tree in time to a tolling church bell... President Truman cried so much when he called on Jackie before the funeral that he had to be put to bed in the White House. A poem by the columnist Art Buchwald began each line, "We weep for, " and conclude, "We weep because there is nothing else we can do." The cartoonist Bill Mauldin drew the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, sitting with his head in his hands... November 22 would be the first time many children saw an adult cry, and after hearing the news from sobbing teachers they went home to find their mothers in tears. A girl remembered her mother doing the ironing as she watched television, her tears sizzling a they hit the hot iron...
Soviet interest in maintaining the atmosphere of détente created by the nuclear test ban treaty was demonstrated by the appointment of First Deputy Premier Anastas Mikolya, the most powerful Soviet official after Khrushchev, to represent the USSR at President Kennedy's funeral. Khrushchev instructed his wife to write Jackie a personal note, an unprecedented gesture for a Soviet leader that his son believed was meant to stress "the sincerity and personal nature of his sympathy." ... (Yevgeny) Yevtushenko would tell the actor Kirk Douglas, "People cried in the street... They sensed that, in him (Kennedy). there might be a chance for our two countries to get together."
... Big Ben tolled every minute for an hour, lights dimmed in Piccadilly Circus, and Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home reported that distraught British teenagers were "openly crying in the street." ...
Danes carried bouquet to the U.s Embassy and left behind a six foot high wall of flowers. ...
Sixty thousand West Berliners held an impromptu torchlight procession and gathered in the square where Kennedy had said "Ich bein ein Berliner." ...
President Charles de Gaulle told a friend, "I am stunned. They are crying all over France. It is as if he were a Frenchman, a member of their own family."
EXCERPTS FROM : JFK'S LAST HUNDRED DAYS by THURSTON CLARKE C 2013
The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President.
Penguin Press New York 2013 Publisher
