Arts and Letters

We meet today in the shadow of a national tragedy. In the death of President Kennedy, the first American President to give art, literature, and music a place of dignity and honor in our national life, all of us here have lost a staunch friend. Mr. Cowley and I have conveyed the grief and sympathy of the Institute and the Academy to Mrs. Kennedy; and we in turn have received similar messages from our colleagues abroad, notably from the Secretary General of the Société Européenne de Culture. It is fitting that we should begin the reading of Tributes to our own members by gravely saluting the memory of President Kennedy. Death has given him a special sanctity. By his untimely death he has become the symbol of all our younger generation, the dead, the maimed, and the living, the counted millions who have been cheated of their life's fulfillment, and the countless millions who are still threatened by insolent national and racial pride, insensate hatred, meaningless violence, purposeless extermination. To repair this loss, we must rededicate ourselves, as President Johnson has already so admirably done, to those works of justice and reconciliation, at home and abroad, that President Kennedy had barely had time to set in motion. By recalling John Kennedy's virtues, now clarified in our minds by this tragedy, we shall restore our own belief in the efficacy of virtue itself. May goodness and justice and mercy walk with us all the days of our life, and fill the hearts of our countrymen—all our countrymen—in the years to come.