Eternal Flame

51 years

Eternal Flame atop John F. Kennedy’s grave, Arlington National Cemetery

Tuesday, driving through an intersection where Storrow Drive gives way to Western Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I realized I was stopped at that light 51 years ago today.

My family had recently moved from Manila in the Philippines, to Wellesley. I had gone to the airport to pick up a friend who was coming from Manila for a visit. As I waited outside the international airport (it was then an enlarged old storage facility), a huge, burly Irish cop came out and said to no one in particular, “Someone took a shot at the president.”

When our friend Charlie emerged from the terminal, the word had begun to spread.

“What have you heard?” he asked.

“Nothing.” I answered.

We got in my Nash Rambler to head home. When we came to that intersection, Charlie rolled down the car window (my car had no radio), and shouted, “How is he?”

She turned toward us, tears: “He’d dead.”

“Oh shit,” Charlie shouted again. The light turned green. Traffic moved.

Charlie Winternitz, my father’s closest friend and doubles partner, was Austrian/Filipino. Over the next 3 days, we watched the incredible unfolding of a family’s, the nation, and the world’s grief acted out in pageantry that reached into the depth of human emotion.

When, on day three, the caisson bearing the flag-draped casket to Arlington, leaders from all over the world followed on foot. For some reason I remember Haile Selaissie, in plumbed headdress.

When they finally reached the cemetery and gravesite chosen by Jackie Kennedy, as the president’s family surrounded the casket, the eternal flame was lighted.

Some saw it was the moment in which whatever romantic illusions we harbored as a nation, gave way to the sobering reality that we were not host to Camelot.

I was 23. My adolescent Walter Mitty fantasies were incinerated in that flame.