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He spoke briefly, gracefully, composed as the camera held on his face; but his hands below camera level quivered and shook as he tried to hold his papers. He stepped down from the platform and, suddenly, we all noticed that there was an elastic membrane of Secret Service men separating us from him. He spoke first as he descended to the old Massachusetts guard. He had special words of greeting for all within touch distance; for myself a taunting "O.K.. Teddy, now you can go ahead and write that book of yours." And somewhere in that ten minutes he uttered a phrase that has scored itself on my memory.
It remains in my memory thus: "The margin is thin, but the responsibility is clear." The echo has returned to me on every election night in America, however thin or large the margin. Politics, in the U.S., beget power; and when the votes are counted, however thin the margin, the man who has that margin cannot escape the responsibility of power.
"Camelot, Sad Camelot"
A week had passed since that dreadful day in Dallas, and the nation was drained by its vigil of mourning before the TV screens. One thing remained to be done, and it was the widow of the assassinated John F. Kennedy who did it. She provided a fitting epitaph for his tragically foreshortened presidency:
The morning after Thanksgiving I was taken from the dentist's chair by a telephone call from my mother saying that Jackie Kennedy was calling and needed me. I came home immediately. Making a call back to Hyannisport, I found myself talking to Jacqueline Kennedy, who said she must talk with me—there was something that she wanted LIFE magazine to say to the country, and I must do it. She would send a Secret Service car to bring me to Hyannisport. I called the Secret Service—and was curtly informed that Mrs. Kennedy was no longer the President's wife, and she could give them no orders for cars. They were crisp. I could rent no plane because a storm hovered over Cape Cod. At this point it became quite apparent that my mother, unused to this kind of excitement, was having a heart attack. If the widow of my friend needed me and my mother needed me—what should I do? My wife Nancy made that decision; our family doctor, Harold Rifkin, said he would come now, holiday weekend or not, and preside at my mother's bedside; but Nancy said that I must go to comfort the President's widow.
In a rented limousine, in a driving rainstorm, I made my way back to New England. The driver stopped now and then so I could telephone to find how my mother was doing, learn she was stable, and then finally I told the chauffeur to gun the car.
It was now quite late on Friday, November 29th, a week after the assassination. Once more I had asked LIFE magazine to hold its presses open as it had the week before. Without hesitation, the editors had agreed to my suggestion. They would hold until I found out what Jacqueline Kennedy wanted to say to the nation. But since it cost $30,000 an hour overtime on Saturdays at the printing plants for me to hold up LIFE, they hoped I could let them know soon whether there was a story there. At that sum per hour; desperately worried about my mother; still unstabilized by the emotions of the assassination, I entered the Kennedy home in Hyannisport.