Political Quotes

“I thank our leader, and I thank him for his poignancy. I know how much it means to people listening to have a glimpse into history as it unfolded, and also the real-life experience of our great leader and President. David Brinkley described that moment. He said that the assassination was beyond understanding: The events of those days don't fit, you can't place them anywhere, they don't go in the intellectual luggage of the time. It was too big, too sudden, too overwhelming, and it meant too much. It has to be separate and apart. But we want to, as both our leaders have said, remember this President in the way that we viewed him in his heroic importance to this country and to generations then and now. Jacqueline Kennedy--as Ralph Martin, her biographer, said--talked about a person who had written to her about the President, and she said someone who had loved the President, but had never known him, wrote to me this past winter that: The hero comes when he is needed. When our belief gets pale and weak, there comes a man out of that need who is shining-- and everyone living reflects a little of that light--and stores up some against the time when he is gone. ``So now he is a legend,'' Mrs. Kennedy would conclude, ``when he would have preferred to be a man.'' And so it has been--Steinbeck said of Kennedy: This man who was the best of his people and who by his life and death, gave back the best of them for their own.…”