This Bleak November....

I read a book back in 1970 called Bleak November.  Marketed as a murder suspense, it was a Gothic Horror. Well, what it was actually Amityville Horror, though that wouldn't come along for another seven years.  It rather surprised me that the author didn't raise an issue over lifting his story!

Still, the title stuck with me. . .Bleak November.  Rather fitting name for the month. The leaves have lost their glorious colors. Still weeks until the Christmas rush hits. Not winter and neither autumn in a sense.  Some days are warm, but most are cool, hinting at the dreary winter months ahead.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated on this day fifty-four years ago.  And to this very day we haven’t learnt the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  The day the music died.  Camelot ended.  And the country awoke to a new reality, and in many ways not a better one.  Jack Kennedy was the man for the hour.  Like him or not, he had been there when the country desperately needed him.  Had it not been for him standing toe-to-toe with the Russians and not blinking we would have had WWIII.  The Russians backed down.  They withdrew the missiles from Cuba, and went back to the cold war uneasy peace. . .but a peace nonetheless. 

What a contrast to the president we have now, who meets with Russians on the sly.  And how do we know?  The Russians tell us, they provide pictures.  The Russians were and will always be the enemy.  This is not a Democrat view.  Ronald Reagan didn’t like them.  The first thing he did upon becoming president was prevent the Russians from trooping through US Washington garage.  A small thing.  They used it as a short cut to save them walking a couple blocks a day to the Russian embassy.  Reagan laughed and said walking was good for the health, and shut the garage to them cutting through.  His small thing made a big point.  He wouldn’t make matters easy for them, because they would never make them easy for us.

I often wonder how different the world would be now if on that bleak November day had Jack Kennedy used the bullet proof bubble that has been created for the car.  He would have been 100 now, most likely to die quietly in his sleep.  Instead he was ripped from his family, ripped from the country, and sent us spiraling us down a log troubled road.

One might remember, the man credited with killing Kennedy, defected to Russia, was permitted to return to US with a Russian wife, and kept in contact with the Russians, even visiting the Russian embassy in Mexico.  As I said, Russia is not our friend, and will never be our friend. . .something the current resident of the White House fails to begin to understand.