The Nations: Sympathy & Scrutiny

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On and on went the extraordinary outpouring of grief for John Kennedy. No American, not even Franklin Roosevelt, had been so deeply mourned abroad. The great churches echoed the requiems — Paris' Notre Dame, Rome's St. John Lateran, London's St. Paul's. In smaller London churches, too, there were so many services that the U.S. embassy nearly ran out of American flags to lend. In Kenya, the Communist-leaning Minister for Home Affairs prayed before 5,000 people to Mungu (God) to give Kennedy a good place in heaven.

Throughout Europe and Africa, cit ies were renaming buildings, bridges, streets in honor of the dead President. Hamburg now has a John F. Kennedy Bridge, Algiers a Place John F. Kennedy. In West Berlin, 300,000 people gathered before the city hall to pray, and to hear a band play Ich hatt' einen Kameraden — the dirge of the fallen soldier. In East Berlin, a Chinese Commu nist was hissed at a political meeting when he criticized Kennedy's policies.

Irish Playwright Sean O'Casey, nearly blind at 83, painfully scrawled a note to a New York friend: "Peace, who was becoming bright-eyed, now sits in the shadow of death: her handsome champion has been killed. Her gallant boy is dead. We mourn here with you, poor sad American People." And BBC's famed satirical TV program, That Was The Week That Was, turned sentimental, broadcast a memorial to Kennedy that included a synthetic folk song:

A young man rode with his head held high

Under the Texas sun.

And no one guessed that a man so blessed

Would perish by the gun.

Lord, would perish by the gun.

The Plot Theory. Amid the mourning for Kennedy, the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald brought an image of U.S. lawlessness to millions abroad. A West German government spokesman, usually friendly to the U.S., said: "It was in credible. How can you announce you are going to transfer a man and have the cameras there waiting? Do the TV networks run the United States today?"

Most people simply could not or would not believe that the two murders were isolated events. It seemed impossible, as one Beirut paper put it, that "the craziest of crazy fools destroyed Kennedy with the ease of one swatting a fly" — and did so unaided. Communists everywhere presented it as a carefully conceived "rightist" plot, tied up with the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society. In this version, Oswald had somehow been a tool of the rightists, and Jack Ruby had shot Oswald, with police connivance, to silence him. A headline in a Warsaw paper called it BAD WESTERN.

Communist propaganda aside, millions held the plot theory on their own, mostly because it is easier to accept evil than meaninglessness in life, to see in the two murders a wicked plan rather than wicked pointlessness. Out of the bitter need to give the event some meaning, men cast their own enemies in the villain's role.