November 22nd, 2023.

Today marks a terrible anniversary in the United States that deserves commemoration and remembrance.

This is the day 60 years ago that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

He was the youngest man ever elected to the office of President of the United States,

a hero of the Second World War, a congressman, a United States senator, a keen observer of the world.

The first volume of a two-volume biography of the life of President Kennedy was recently

published by the historian Frederick Lagoval.

The opening of the book is dramatic and remarkable.

It has a young John Kennedy, a keen observer of whatever was happening around him,

looking out on the streets from above Berlin,

from the Hotel Adlon near the Brandenburg Gate.

He sees the Nazi swastikas. He sees the jackbooted SS, the uniforms,

the menace. Yet he sits there wondering, will there be war? Certainly Europe was teetering

on the edge, but it seemed improbable, unbelievable, that the world could soon

be in flames. That war would forever change John Kennedy's life. He was a lieutenant junior

grade in the United States Navy in the Pacific, commanding PT109 when it was sliced in half at night on a

moonless, dark Pacific night by a Japanese destroyer. John Kennedy swam with an injured crewman

towing him for miles in open water, shark-infested seas until they made landfall.

He was a bona fide hero, as was his brother Joseph, his older brother, killed on what could

aptly be described as a suicide mission over the skies of Europe early in the war. The death of his older brother

changed the destiny of John Kennedy. He was elected to Congress in 1946, and then the United

States Senate in 1952. In 1960, he was at 43 years old, the youngest man ever elected to the office of President of the United States.

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