On J.F.K.

Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., upon speaking to the Assembly 4 days after JFK was killed:

“My dear colleagues, my priviledge in this sad hour is to convey to you Mr. President, to you Mr. Secretary General, and to you the assembled delegates of the world community the profound gratitude of the people of my country for what has been done and for what has been said here today. Our grief is the more bearable because it is so widely and so genuinely shared, and for this we can only say, simply, but from the depths of our full hearts, thank you.”

“President Kennedy was so contemporary a man, so involved in our world, so immersed in our times, so responsive to its challenges, so intense a participant in the great events and the great decisions of our day that he seemed very simple - of the vitality and the exhuberance that is the essence of life itself. Never once did he lose his way in the maze, never once did he falter in the storm of spears, never once was he intimidated. Like the ancient profets, he loved the people enough to warn them of their errors, and the man who loves his country best, will hold it to its highest standards. He made us proud to be Americans.”

“We shall not soon forget that he held fast to the vision of a world in which the peace is secure, in which inevitable conflicts are reconciled by pacific means, in which nations devote their energies to the welfare of all their citizens, and in which the vast and colorful diversity of human society can flourish in a restless competitive search for a better society.”

“And we shall never forget, these ambitions, these visions, these convictions that so inspired this remarkable young man and so quickened the quality and the tempo of our times in these fleeting past 3 years, and our grief is compounded by the bitter irony that he who gave his all to contain violence, lost his all to violence, now he is gone, today we mourn him, tomorrow and tomorrow we shall miss him, and so we shall never know how different the world might have been had fate permitted this blazing talent to live and labor longer at man’s unfinished agenda for peace and progress for all.”