Kennedy's words touched all, near and far

W

ILLIAM J. GREEN III, who served as mayor from 1980 to 1984, was a young man eyeing a political career when he met John F. Kennedy through his father, who was a congressman and city Democratic leader. The end of 1963 was a sorrowful time for Green, who lost his dad just 30 days after the JFK assassination. He shared his memories with the

Daily News

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It remains difficult to contemplate what might have been. Each year I mourn anew. Yet each Nov. 22, warm personal memories always surface and mix with my sorrow.

I will share two.

August 1960 - Washington, D.C.: Attending a strategy dinner at the Capitol with then-Sen. Kennedy, my father, Gov. David Lawrence, Matt McClosky (later ambassador to Ireland) and Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, party chairman during the campaign.

Scheduling, fundraising, ideas and issues got attention. Each respected the other and their reasons for differing views. Ignore the religious issue; don't exacerbate it. Deal with it head on.

When he chose, Kennedy commented and questioned. Mostly he listened. I could feel his wheels turning. I felt privileged to be there. Never again would I spend so much substantive time in Kennedy's company. One month later he gave his finest campaign address to the Ministers Association of Houston. (Editor's note: Kennedy's speech to the ministers defused the Catholic issue by redefining it in terms of religious tolerance and separation of church and state. It is considered one of the greatest presidential campaign speeches.)

Oct. 30, 1963: The president, my father and I were in an elevator at the Bellevue Stratford. The president asked what I was doing. When he learned I was finishing law school, he turned to my dad and said, "What are you going to do with him, Billy?" My father asked what the president would suggest. "Do what my father did: Run him for Congress." Smiling, I asked, "How much experience do you need to be attorney general?" The president flashed that huge Kennedy smile and, laughing, said, "I'll check with Bobby."

The president was to be back for the Army-Navy game and asked us to join him in his box. The tickets arrived after his funeral. One month later, we buried my father and I was running for his congressional seat with Bobby's help.

President Kennedy's death was tragic for the United States and the world. Remarkably, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was so moved by his "Declaration of Interdependence" speech at American University on June 10, 1963, that he ordered it carried in the Soviet press word for word.

His sense of adventure, his determination to make us No. 1, set the goal. Go to the moon in a decade. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

Millions swarmed the city hall plaza in Berlin to see him. To those doubting the difference between the Free World and the communist world, he said, "Let them come to Berlin."

To us and a world two-thirds nonwhite, he proclaimed, "We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution."

He made the menace of nuclear weapons a special focus. "Yesterday a shaft of light cut into the darkness," he said, announcing the nuclear test-ban treaty.

His words lodge in my memory. He understood their power, and in the search for peace and justice, took them to war for us. On Nov. 21, 1963, we were clearly winning.

His memory lives in my heart. I will never see the likes of him again. Each Nov. 22, I pray our country does.