on Monday, November 18th, to speak there to a crowd of voters, rounded up mostly by local Democrats, and, a couple of hours later, to address a convention of the Inter-American Press Association at the Americana Hotel, with appearances at a couple of social-political gatherings squeezed in between-all this after Saturday at Cape Canaveral, Sunday at Palm Beach, and all day Monday at Tampa, there inspecting MacDill Air Force Base, lunching at Army-Air Force Strike Command Headquarters at the base, journeying by helicopter to Lopez Field, in downtown Tampa, and speaking there on the fiftieth anniversary of commercial aviation, addressing the Florida State Chamber of Commerce, addressing a meeting of the Steelworkers’ Union, and riding around the Tampa streets, shaking hands through it all with everybody he could reach. He was slated to arrive at Miami International Airport at 5 P.M. Our last glimpse of President Kennedy was in Miami, where, four days before his death, he was engaged in the same kind of mission that took him to Dallas. Speech, when it returned, was not at first commensurate with national disaster, being little more than the incoherent responses of private pain common to all who have lost a father, a brother, or a son. They say”), engulfed us, and moved on, until we were left in the silence of irrevocable fact, exchanging empty looks with our companions. The circle of knowledge, whose center was a weak transistor radio, expanded in murmurs (“They say. For us, it was a patch of crowded sidewalk. Tritely, one remembers the precise spot on which one stood, resisting acceptance and grief. No other public death produces so personal an alteration in one’s world. The death of a President enters the house and becomes a death in the family.
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