Since I handed in my write on competition on Tuesday - I have been free. The weight that was lifted off my shoulders was indescribable - I had a smile on my face for hours after. Of course then I had to run home to pack and catch my flight to see the fam.
In a whirlwind four days I crossed six states (some very briefly, but crossed them nonetheless) and the District - meeting friends new and old. Hectic, but I'm beginning to accept that this is how it goes. However, in that time I began learning about a person that I've always had a deep admiration for, and about whom a question has lingered for years - John F. Kennedy. JFK has ranked up there with my top U.S. Presidents - Lincoln, JFK and Clinton - all for very different reasons that will undoubtably be discussed at some point or another.
His death was shrouded in mystery, and until now I knew little of his short Presidency, but even less about his life. So, I picked up "
An Unfinished Life" from the library before I set off on my multi-state travels, hoping to get into it and learn more about a man that I have admired from afar. 67-pages in, and I think I'm getting somewhere.
Some of what I've learned in the few pages that I've read have made me doubt my admiration for him, but I've only begun to scratch the surface. Of course biographies are meant to glorify their subjects, but I think that Robert Dallek has done a good job of showing us the man behind the image.
So far - here's what I think:
He was a thinker, an observer - and very intelligent. He was compassionate, and well-liked by many - polite and considerate (for the most part). He was aware of his surroundings, absorbed everything around him - and had fantastic fore-sight. I have to wonder - and this is a question that I have asked myself many times in the past - what would this country have been like if JFK had lived? Would Vietnam have become the war that it did if JFK had served two terms? Was the cold war inevitable - or could masterful dipolomacy have saved years wasted?
Would the world be the same if JFK had lived? Of course this is a question that one could ask about many greats that died pre-maturely - Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X ...
Of course, at the end of the day - everyone has a purpose, and our destiny is predetermined - and while I remain intrigued with the big question of who killed JFK - I am more intrigued with what could have been had they failed. This narration from
An Unfinished Life is what makes me wonder, all the more, what could have been -
"More than anything, Jack's travels encouraged an intellectual's skepticism about the limits of human understanding and beliefs. When he returned to America in September, he asked a Catholic Priest: "I saw the rock where our Lord ascended into Heaven in a cloud, and [in] the same area, I saw the place where Mohammed was carried up to Heaven on a white horse, and Mohammed has a big following and Christ has a big following, and why do you think we should believe Christ any more that Mohammed?""
---- ROBERT DALLEK, An Unfinished Life, p. 59
Labels: Pictures
ma'shaAllah she's sooooo cute!
