JFK

I shook hands with JFK.  It was maybe just after he gave his "Peace Corps" speech at the University of Michigan.

He came through Lansing, Michigan on a train.  Got off to make some remarks but all I remember is the handshaking.  My mother and I went to the train station to greet him.  He actually took her hand in his.  I really only touched his hand but somehow I recall it being larger and of a stronger nature than  I might have imagined.  Like the hands of my own father.

JFK was, still is, my hero.  He was the hero of my uncle also.  My uncle had a framed picture of JFK on the wall next to the picture of Jesus.  Mom voted for JFK.  Not sure if dad did.

He proposed the idea of the Peace Corps in 1960.  It caught fire in the minds of my generation.  I was a junior in high school when I shook his hand.  In 1963 I was in my second year of college at Michigan State University.  Having caught the spark of the idea proposed by JFK we wanted to do something embodying and organized a summer trip to Peru to do it.

Service to country.  JFK had something to say about that too in his 1961 inaugural address.  That burned in me too.  I joined the local Naval Reserve unit.  Graduated, went to OCS then Vietnam as the first assignment in a navy career.  I thought it was the right thing to do.

Perhaps it can be said of all times in history:  You just had to be there to know it.  I will never forget it and how inspiration shaped my life.  Never forget where I was when I learned the news 50 years ago.  A man with magnificent faults as well as stature and contribution.  The faults I can forgive him.

JFK and Federal Budgetary Policy 

Yale University Commencement (June 11, 1962)John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

"For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” 

His ending paragraph:

Nearly 150 years ago Thomas Jefferson wrote, "The new circumstances under which we are placed call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects." New words, new phrases, the transfer of old words to new objects-that is truer today than it was in the time of Jefferson, because the role of this country is so vastly more significant. There is a show in England called "Stop the World, I Want to Get Off." You have not chosen to exercise that option. You are part of the world and you must participate in these days of our years in the solution of the problems that pour upon us, requiring the most sophisticated and technical judgment; and as we work in consonance to meet the authentic problems of our times, we will generate a vision and an energy which will demonstrate anew to the world the superior vitality and the strength of the free society.