Nation: In Remembrance

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The U.S. Information Agency last week issued for public showing in 114 countries (but not the U.S.) a 90-minute documentary film, narrated by Gregory Peck, called John F. Kennedy: Years of Lightning, Day of Drums. Among selected U.S. audiences who were allowed to see the film, some persons who had been close to Kennedy felt that it reflected too much Hollywood gaucherie. But to most it brought unabashed tears.

At Kennedy's tomb in Arlington National Cemetery, where a $2,000,000 monument is planned, thousands marched by each day. Cemetery authorities had received so many requests to lay wreaths at the graveside on Nov. 22 that they closed reservations months ago, granted permission for 21 such ceremonies; among the privileged few were West German Foreign Minister Gerhard Schroder and Juanita Castro, anti-Castro sister of the Cuban dictator. Last week Miss Castro said that her brother was in part responsible for Kennedy's assassination because he "must have influenced" Lee Oswald by constantly calling the President "the illiterate millionaire" and a "murderer."

The family planned no special observance. Mother Rose and Father Joe were to stay at Hyannis Port. Jackie, as her official year of mourning came to an end, planned to remain pretty much in seclusion. Bobby was to attend Mass in Washington's St. Matthew's Cathedral, where the President's funeral was held. Teddy is still hospitalized, but was about to take his first steps since his back was broken in June, and now hopes to walk under his own power into the Senate when it convenes in January.

"Essence of Potentiality." The outpouring of memorials was new testimony to the well-established fact that John F. Kennedy's style had caught the imagination of people around the world.

The best of the memorials were, correctly, a tribute to his spirit rather than an attempt to overstate his accomplishments. Amid all the words written or spoken or sung, none put the tragedy and the truth of Kennedy's death into better perspective than the first two sentences in the script of An Essay on Death, a National Education Television documentary. "This is a program about death. It is also a commemoration of a man who was among us a short while ago, and one who, having been the essence of potentiality, stirred in us a deep and perplexing grief because that potentiality was shattered in an instant."