It's time to pick up JFK's unfinished business

When the American dawn broke 59 years ago this morning the nation was traumatized by a murder. A young family had been destroyed by an assassin’s bullets, while the entire country watched in disbelief as the horror played out.

The day before a 46-year-old man had been murdered. His name was John. He came from one of the wealthiest and most privileged families in America. He had lost a brother in the skies of Europe during the Second World War, and he was a highly decorated combat veteran from the Pacific theater. He was the president of the United States of America. His assassination would be the first of three that would define the 1960s and profoundly alter the course of American history.  

The second assassination occurred in Memphis, Tennessee. Martin Luther King was 39 years old when he was murdered. He was married with two young children. He delivered one of the greatest pieces of oratory in American history the night before in which he had prophesied his own death and saw the dawn of a just society from a mountaintop of moral greatness.

When MLK was murdered, violence erupted all over the country in a spasm of rage, grief and shock. That didn’t happen in Indianapolis because of the words of the third man who would be murdered a few months later: Bobby Kennedy. The speech that he delivered extemporaneously from the back of a pickup truck bed will always be the greatest extemporaneous speech in American history. I wrote about both men here.

Robert and Ethel Kennedy had 10 children when he was murdered. Ethel was pregnant with their 11th child. He was 41.