Reflections: Included, “The Kennedys”

I cite, without editorial, that yesterday I reflected on the passage of 155 years since slavery ended in Texas, the last of the “United” states to enact, that 67 years had passed since Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were killed by the state and the implications of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s landslide victory over Adlai E. Stevenson in the 1956 presidential election, which was the theme of a “Happy Days” episode, shown yesterday on MeTV.

I will editorialize and say that the next presidential election (1960) in this potential unfulfilled, country, yielded hope with the narrow and perhaps “helped along” election, of John F. Kennedy.

Senseless violence, so horrible, since as Mr. Kennedy once said “We are all mortal,” took away much of what the idealism and in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King “the Kennedy’s “moral center,” might have accomplished.

Thus with the passing this past week of Jean Kennedy Smith, the youngest daughter and second youngest of nine children, born to Rose and Joseph P. Kennedy, I lament the fact all of them are gone.

Certainly Jean Kennedy Smith, pictured above, accomplished much as did the Kennedys, it’s just that it could have been so much mo(o)re. (Alas Senator Edward Moore Kennedy, granted relatively long life and the “more chances,” male gender did the most).

She was Ambassador to Ireland, a diplomat and an activist. Most of all, she was part of family and ideal, certainly one of privilege, but tilted for whatever reason to help those less and far less fortunate.

In England, (1939), The Kennedy family: left to right are Eunice, John, Rosemary, Jean, Joseph P. their father, Edward/Ted, Rose their mother, Joseph Jr.  Patricia, Robert and Kathleen.

It is a photo by Dorothy Wilding.