Going to the White House was always a big deal for Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He was 36 years old when he was working for the Kennedy Administration as the Assistant Secretary of Labor. On the afternoon of 22 November 1963, he was lunching with two friends when the telephone rang with the news. Disbelief. Shock. The television was turned on. The president was dead. Moynihan and the others rushed to the White House. Moynihan went to the Oval Office. Everything was in disorder. Mary McGrory, a legendary news columnist, was in tears. She remarked to Moynihan, “We’ll never laugh again.” He replied, “Heavens, Mary, we’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.”
I, like others, can recall where we were and what we were doing that November Day. We had stood at the edge of a New Frontier. What would follow? E. J. Dionne, a Washington Post columnist, wrote on the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination:
“The evidence points to a man who began his political career as something of a conservative and ended it as more of a liberal — cautious, skeptical, and pragmatic but a liberal nonetheless. His important speeches late in his presidency about civil rights and nuclear disarmament remain lodestars for American progressives.”
We remember, too. Jacqueline Kennedy’s grief-stricken face as she descended Air Force One in the blood-stained pink wool suit and low-heeled shoes. Days later, the black dress and the agony on her face beneath a black veil as she followed her husband’s coffin.
Five years later, on an April Day, we witnessed the black veiled Loretta Scott King follow her husband’s coffin: Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights activist. Then in June, Ethel Kennedy wore a black veil as she stood over Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s coffin. And those of us who witnessed them have inscribed in our memory the pain and grief that etched their faces, and the dignity they showed as they guided us through our mourning.
They neither espoused nor paraded their grief to call for the implementation of their husbands’ political agendas. These women did not blame the political violence on their husbands’ opponents. Neither they nor their husbands’ supporters called for a crackdown on their husbands’ critics. They did not call for revenge.
The “conservatives” mourning Charlie Kirk will laugh again, but like us, they will never be young again. As Moynihan lamented two days after President Kennedy’s murder, “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually. I guess we thought we had a little more time.” Moynihan paused, then said, “So did he.”
Charlie Kirk also thought he had more time. Whether you are Irish or not, the world breaks your heart eventually.
Kirk’s followers mourn a man who spoke to their need for a voice, just as we mourned three men who, with grace and dignity, inspired us. But, like the Kennedy brothers and Dr. King, Kirk was a complex, three-dimensional human being. Though Kirk defended free speech, he often made inflammatory remarks on immigration, civil rights, race, Jews, and Islam.
Hugh Sidey, a reporter for Time magazine, covered every president from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush. During one of our conversations, he commented that as a reporter, he and others in the press had turned a blind eye to President Kennedy’s character flaws. Kirk, too, had his imperfections. We all do. Those must be recognized.
I am disturbed by those who call out for revenge for Kirk’s murder. They hold him up as a martyr in a “spiritual battle.” They espouse inflammatory rhetoric against those who, in the court of public opinion, hold opposing views on diverse issues such as marriage and women, LGBTQ, and transgender rights, gun control, the role of the courts, economic policy, foreign policy, presidential power, and other areas of policy. They speak angrily against immigrants. They want a Christian nation, while ignoring the Founders’ belief in the separation of Church and State. Many shroud their grief in antisemitic rhetoric.
What did Kirk mean when using the term “conservative”? How exactly does the right-wing movement define conservative? Do they follow Russell Kirk’s 10 principles that define conservatism? Would William F. Buckley, the “prince of polysyllabism, a ‘hapax legomenon,” recognize the Trumpian-Kirk conservative movement?
What does it say about the people of the United States when grief becomes rage?
Image: The Mourning of Pallas
Artist: Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson (French, Montargis 1767-1894 Paris)
Credit Line
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Drawings and Prints
The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1996
Source: JStor https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.16005212
Charles van Heck's Woodhull Journal 
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