| | | This isn't an article, and I bet nobody today has a clue about what a true Congressional Statesman is.
Trying to bring some order to my library today, I saw a stack of newspapers from the Missoulian with big red headlines about the Assassination of President Kennedy. My parents kept them all these years, and now I have them.
I have a book called "The Torch Is Passed," which I believe Mike Mansfield gave my Mom when she wrote him a letter thanking him for the eulogy he gave President Kennedy. The eulogy is a masterpiece, and blowhards we have now are incapable of such power. I have two other letters he wrote when he was a Congressman in 1950, one to my mother and one to my grandmother. Both sincerely acknowledged the death of my grandfather.
The one to my grandmother has a penned post script: "Maureen also joins me in extending our sympathy. Mike.
I think Mike Mansfield was a classmate of my mother's, because we used to get Christmas cards from him every year.
The eulogy follows:
December 9,1963
Dear Betty:
This will acknowledge your letter of sorrow and grief over the assassination of our late President.
I do not know how to answer you in return except to say that the Nation is bereft over a great leader and I am left with a loss of a good personal friend.
We will take up from where he left off; we will do the best we can to carry this Nation forward; and in doing so it will be as a memorial to the one who has left us and the best way to help the one who has succeeded him.
Must close now but thanking you for your courtesy and kindness in writing to me, and with best personal wishes, I am
Sincerely yours,
/s/ Mike Mansfield.
Eulogy by Senator Mike Mansfield at the Bier of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
The Rotunda - U. S. Capitol - Washington, DC November 24, 1963
There was a sound of laughter; in a moment, it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.
There was a wit in a man neither young nor old, but a wit full of an old man's wisdom and of a child's wisdom, and then, in a moment it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.
There was a man marked with the scars of his love of country, a body active with the surge of a life far, far from spent and, in a moment, it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.
There was a father with a little boy, a little girl and a joy of each in the other. In a moment it was no more, and so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands.
There was a husband who asked much and gave much, and out of the giving and the asking wove with a woman what could not be broken in life, and in a moment it was no more. And so she took a ring from her finger and placed it in his hands, and kissed him and closed the lid of a coffin.
A piece of each of us died at that moment. Yet, in death he gave of himself to us. He gave us of a good heart from which the laughter came. He gave us of a profound with, from which a great leadership emerged. He gave us of a kindness and a strength fused into a human courage to seek peace without fear.
He gave us of his love that we, too, in turn, might give. He gave that we might give of ourselves, that we might give to one another until there would be no room, no room at all, for the bigotry, the hatred, prejudice and the arrogance which converged in that moment of horror to strike him down. In leaving us -- these gifts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States, leaves with us. Will we take them Mr. President? Will we have, now, the sense and the responsibility and the courage to take them?
I pray to God that we shall and under God we will.
None of the speeches I heard today can compare. David McCullough's was good, but even it was longer than Mike Mansfield's.
Sidenote: The library at the University of Montana, where I, my sister, my mother, and Mike Mansfield attended is named the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library.
Mansfield served in the Navy, the Army, and the US Marine Corps. He succeeded Jeanette Rankin, who was acknowledged by JFK in his book "Profiles In Courage" for being the lone dissenter in entering WWII. He was one of the first to criticize LBJ's conduct of the Vietnam War. He was a Democrat when Democrat meant something besides left wing.
If we had even a few politicians with the stature of Mike Mansfield in Congress, we would not be having the problems that we are having now. |
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