textfiles-politics/pythonCode/personTestingOutput/art-07.xml

<xml><p>Volume : SIRS 1991 History, Article 02
Subject: Keyword(s) : <ent type='PERSON'>KENNEDY</ent> and ASSASSINATION
Title : A Remembrance of <ent type='PERSON'>Kennedy</ent>
Author : <ent type='PERSON'>Jim Henderson</ent>
Source : <ent type='ORG'>Dallas Times Herald</ent> (<ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent>, <ent type='GPE'>Texas</ent>)
Publication Date : Nov. 20, 1983
Page Number(s) : Special Sec. 1+
</p>
<p>
. . . Reprinted with permission from
<ent type='ORG'>DALLAS TIMES HERALD</ent>
(<ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent>, <ent type='GPE'>Texas</ent>)
Nov. 20, 1983, Special Section, pp. 1+
</p>
<p>
A REMEMBRANCE OF <ent type='PERSON'>KENNEDY</ent>
by <ent type='PERSON'>Jim Henderson</ent>
Staff Writer
</p>
<p>
'Let the word go forth from this time and place...that the torch
has been passed to a new generation of <ent type='NORP'>Americans</ent>--born in this
century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace,
proud of our ancient heritage.'
</p>
<p>
After 20 years, the events seem as compressed as a leanly
edited videotape.
</p>
<p>
A sunny day, a dark convertible, a steady din rebounding
from the canyon walls above a crowded street, three cracks from a
rifle in a sniper's nest, a scramble below, engines racing, a
sobbing black woman outside Parkland Memorial Hospital, a
policeman shot across town, a pronouncement of death, a scrawny,
handcuffed suspect in a corridor with <ent type='PERSON'>Jack Ruby</ent>'s .38 exploding
in his belly.
</p>
<p>
The nation was stunned by the images that were transmitted
from <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent>--hard images formed in terse, teletype prose and more
vivid ones fashioned from bits and pieces of celluloid.
</p>
<p>
<ent type='GPE'>America</ent> paused to watch the newsreel.
</p>
<p>
A new President quickly sworn in and airlifted into command,
a bloodstained widow never far from the coffin, a change to
black, a bewildered daughter kneeling before a flag-draped box in
the Capitol rotunda, the wintry streets of the capital, a dark
riderless horse with empty boots facing backward in the stirrups,
a slow-moving caisson, a young boy saluting the honor guard
carrying his father to <ent type='ORG'>Arlington National Cemetery</ent>, the lighting
of the eternal flame.
</p>
<p>
On the day John F. <ent type='PERSON'>Kennedy</ent> was buried, <ent type='PERSON'>Alistair Cooke</ent> wrote:
"He was snuffed out. In that moment, all the decent grief of a
nation was taunted and outraged. So along with the sorrow, there
is a desperate and howling note from over the land. We may pray
on our knees, but when we get up from them, we cry with the poet:
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the
dying of the light."
</p>
<p>
It is only in memory that the howling note from those four
days flits past. Behind the newsreel, the hours were agonizing
and interminable. For many, particularly in <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent>, time moved as
slowly as a motorcade or a horse-drawn caisson.
</p>
<p>
<ent type='PERSON'>Erik Jonsson</ent>, then-president of the <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent> Citizens Council,
would recall the anxiety he felt when the President did not show
up on schedule for a luncheon at the <ent type='ORG'>Trade Mart</ent>. What's going on?
he asked himself over and over as the wait, only a few moments in
duration, seemed endless.
</p>
<p>
After 12:33 p.m. Nov. 22, 1963, the time the first news
bulletin notified the republic that its President had been shot
in <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent>, the city stood motionless and helpless, waiting for
the firestorm of scorn. It came in searing, overlapping bursts.
"Are these human beings or are these animals?" <ent type='PERSON'>Adlai Stevenson</ent>
had asked moments after he escaped from a violent crowd in <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent>
a month earlier.
</p>
<p>
The world looked again at <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent> with the same question. It
would seem, in the slow-motion drift of events, that the answer
would never come. <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent> mourned the assassination as the rest of
the nation mourned it, as a deeply personal tragedy.
Schoolteachers wept as they broke the news to their classes. Men
cried in public. Rage and shame and guilt and dread melted into
one great immobilizing glob of emotional turmoil.
</p>
<p>
An eternity, two hours and 20 minutes, passed before the
truth would be known. <ent type='PERSON'>Kennedy</ent>'s assassin was not of <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent>, was
far removed from the nation's perception of the city and the
city's own worst fears of itself.
</p>
<p>
In time, the world, as well as <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent>, would believe the
city was merely caught in one of history's inscrutable warps,
that it was only by chance that the light passing through the
long prism of that era intersected in <ent type='LOC'>Dealey Plaza</ent>.
</p>
<p>
The howl that was heard through the dark night of those
times had the tone of a primal scream, a victim raging against a
felon. In truth, it was a cry of national doubt, of the sense
that <ent type='GPE'>America</ent> would not be the same. More than mere innocence was
lost that day in <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent>. With it went the cable that anchored the
nation to its sense of order.
</p>
<p>
To the historians who define eras in terms of events rather
than years, the decade of the '60s was born in <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent>.
</p>
<p>
In a great, shuddering spasm, the fragile floodgates that
had held back the reservoir of a restless social movement was
punctured by the bullets that rained down from the <ent type='GPE'>Texas</ent> School
Book Depository.
</p>
<p>
Within months, <ent type='GPE'>America</ent> would experience the first of her
long hot summers, just the beginning of another newsreel: the
dogs and fire hoses of <ent type='GPE'>Birmingham</ent>, the first smiling <ent type='NORP'>Marines</ent>
marching into <ent type='GPE'>Vietnam</ent> and returning in body bags, campus radicals
occupying the administration building at <ent type='ORG'>Columbia University</ent>,
rioting outside <ent type='ORG'>the Democratic National Convention</ent> in <ent type='GPE'>Chicago</ent>,
the fires of <ent type='GPE'>Watts</ent> and <ent type='GPE'>Newark</ent> and <ent type='GPE'>Detroit</ent>, Dr. Strangelove,
<ent type='ORG'>Apollo</ent> 11, <ent type='GPE'>Woodstock</ent>, <ent type='PERSON'>Charles Manson</ent>, the cultural revolution,
the counterculture revolution, the sexual revolution, the
yippies, the hippies, the peaceniks and the crazies.
</p>
<p>
In 1968, <ent type='PERSON'>Stuart Udall</ent>, secretary of interior for both
<ent type='PERSON'>Kennedy</ent> and <ent type='PERSON'>Johnson</ent>, was asked his opinion of the times, which
seemed to be reeling out of control. He offered a sober, but
startling, observation.
</p>
<p>
"This may be remembered," he said, "as the most creative
time in our history."
</p>
<p>
It did not seem such an outrageous judgment when the
hurricane had passed. A sorting out had occurred in the storm.
Not many years would pass before a black preacher from <ent type='GPE'>Chicago</ent>
would run for the presidency. Women would flood the work place
and supervise staffs of men. Men with an eye on <ent type='ORG'>the White House</ent>
could talk of a female running mate without risking ridicule.
Wars would be harder to make, nuclear waste harder to conceal,
books harder to burn, air harder to pollute, justice harder to
deny.
</p>
<p>
<ent type='GPE'>America</ent> was starkly different. <ent type='PERSON'>Kennedy</ent>'s presidency and his
assassination may have been essential to unlocking the passions
of the time, but what the land became was neither his legacy, nor
<ent type='PERSON'>Oswald</ent>'s nor <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent>.'
</p>
<p>
After the trauma and shame and guilt were gone, the judgment
of history would be that <ent type='PERSON'>Kennedy</ent> and <ent type='PERSON'>Oswald</ent>, <ent type='PERSON'>Edwin Walker</ent> and
<ent type='PERSON'>Martin Luther King</ent>, <ent type='PERSON'>George Wallace</ent> and <ent type='PERSON'>Stokely Carmichael</ent>, Angela
Davis and <ent type='PERSON'>George Lincoln Rockwell</ent>, <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent> and <ent type='GPE'>Los Angeles</ent>,
<ent type='GPE'>Memphis</ent> and <ent type='GPE'>Birmingham</ent>, <ent type='GPE'>Detroit</ent> and Da Nang were fragments of the
<ent type='GPE'>America</ent>n character, slivers of the dream and the nightmare.
</p>
<p>
The legacy of that sunlit moment in <ent type='GPE'>Dallas</ent> was a nation's
fretful and all-consuming search for itself, a long and howling
rage against the dying of the light.
</p>
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