Today, upon learning of the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, I am thinking about this unique and tragic American political family.

The Kennedys have been part of the backdrop of my life since the very beginning of my adulthood.  I reached my majority just in time to vote for John.  During that campaign, he came to the campus of my small college, Lewis & Clark, in Portland, Oregon.  I stood out in the sunshine and shook his hand and it felt momentous even as it happened.  It still feels a little momentous after all these years.  My thoughts at the moment our hands touched and he smiled were not in any way political.  I thought about how utterly exhausted he looked, and about how Jackie should be taking better care of him.  (Well, you have to remember that I was a child of the forties and fifties and that’s how we thought back then.  I have since recovered!)

It’s hard to describe how the country felt after the election.  There was a light and a hopefulness, a sense that this president combined youth and wisdom, that we as a nation were on the right track.  We adored the little family that lived in the White House and shared glimpses of themselves with us.  I expect that we young voters felt much the same way that young voters today feel about the current man and his family who live in the White House.  Inevitably history went on to teach us that perhaps all wasn’t as rosy as we thought it was, maybe the man had human flaws, maybe the marriage wasn’t the beautiful thing we imagined it to be, maybe the politics were not always driven by pure motives.  I know this to be true now, but please don’t make me hear it.  Just let me have what I have.

Jackie Kennedy, just by existing in the national spotlight as she did, made life better for me personally.  She was tall and she had big feet.  I am tall and I have big feet.  Our similarities end there, as I am not a slender beauty as she was, but that is irrelevant.  She was not ashamed to publicly admit that she wore size 10 shoes.  Until then I struggled to keep my own size 10s a secret, feeling they were too grotesque.  I was freed from the shame by Jackie’s feet!  I loved her for that, and for her grace in public life.

The assassination in Dallas was the first time I experienced public grieving of such magnitude.  (I didn’t feel it again until 9/11.)  At that time Dallas was just a place I had never seen.  When we moved here fifteen years after the shots rang out by that grassy knoll, the city still suffered a collective guilt that you could feel.  It was like all the citizens felt a need to apologize for the fact that it happened here.

It seemed we had barely caught our breath when Bobby went down, again to an assassin’s bullet.  Years later, young John Kennedy Jr. and his wife were lost in a plane crash.  It was like, what? that darling little boy we knew was flying an airplane?  Time telescopes so oddly sometimes.

So now the four cornerstone brothers are gone, as well as sister Eunice, and something in the Universe has shifted  a little.  But I think the Kennedys will remain part of the American landscape, for there are generations rising, still taught within the family that for those to whom much is given, much is expected.  I predict that my grandchildren will be as aware of the service of the new Kennedys as I have been of the old.

Think about it.

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I have always liked the Kennedys as politicians.  They had such great hair. 

Pamela Anderson

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