‘How many years,’ asks Murray Kempton ‘before anyone would want to read a book about the day Mr. Kennedy was shot?’. As it transpired, not many. Here we reprint his Spectator column, entitled ‘The Roman Way‘, written in the aftermath of Kennedy’s death:
Washington November 29, 1963
Mile television, trying as all of us have and 1 failing as all of use must, ceased to talk late on a Saturday night and gave itself over to photographs of various corners and columns of the White House while a voice recited ‘Oh captain, my captain, the fearful trip is done’, which is Walt Whitman on Abraham Lincoln and the grand style. But no time is like the time one endures oneself; one’s own time is personal not historical, one’s house and not a temple, the ship has not weathered every storm.
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