That’s what Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee says she was feeling in Dealey Plaza today as she awaited the ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“This is my first visit to Dealey Plaza,” the Houston Democrat told the Houston Chronicle. “It is moving to be here. We are seated near the Texas Book Depository. This is a place where I feel the pain of his loss and the honor of being part of the commemoration.”
Jackson Lee, a 13-year-old student in Jamaica, Queens when JFK was killed, said a school administrator burst into the classroom to tell the students what had happened.
“Even then I could understand that something had happened that was bad and catastrophic,” Jackson Lee recalled.
The lawmaker who has served in Congress since 1995 said that JFK had welcomed African Americans “as a political force and as a political consideration.”
“This was a Harvard-trained young veteran of World War II who was the first to recognize the entirety of America, the wholeness of America,” Jackson Lee said.
It has only been since JFK was killed that accounts have delved into the physical pain that JFK endured as a result of a back injury suffered when his Navy patrol boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer in the South Pacific.
“We can reflect now on how much pain he was in. He was a great president in part because despite his pain, he never gave out. And until the day he died, no one knew.”
As she awaited the ceremony, Jackson Lee said the mood across Dealey Plaza was “a sense of sadness, a sense of what could have been.”
She added: “There is such a sense of remorse and sadness, a sense of the specialness of being here.”