The National Geographic story was called “The Last Full Measure,” and was written by its president and editor, Melvin Bell Grosvenor. He began…
“His life was such — the radiance he shed —that if we live to be a hundred, we will remember how he graced this earth, and how he left it. Only the future can assign to John Fitzgerald Kennedy his true place in history, But this I know. When men now boys are old, in distant time beyond the year 2000, they will say, ‘I remember I remember when they brought him home, the murdered President, from Dallas…’
“Again and again the story will be told —just as I recall my Grandfather Grosvenor, at 92 telling me graphically of how, as a young student at Amherst College in Massachusetts , he traveled by horse and train to the bier of the martyred Lincoln.”
I still have that copy of the National Geographic. I keep it on a shelf of books and artifacts — touchstones from my life. Meaningful to me, but few others.
