"...and it will never be that way again"

Yesterday this photograph





appeared here -- taken at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, August of 1968, it features actor Paul Newman (Somebody Up There Likes Me; The Long, Hot Summer; The Sting) in foreground.  Further back at the left, with cigarette and flip-top glasses, is playwright Arthur Miller (The Crucible; Death of a Salesman)....


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1968.



MLK, greeting people


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----------------- March 31, 1968





----------------- [excerpt] -------------- No comparable good comes from great evil, but the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King enabled President Johnson to notch his last major legislative achievement. 


On October 22, Johnson signed the Gun Control Act, which outlawed mail order gun sales and made it illegal to sell guns to anyone


indicted or convicted of serious crimes,


the mentally ill,


drug addicts, and


illegal immigrants. 


In the main, these restrictions are still in effect today -- and gun control has not been greatly expanded since.  In addition, Secret Service protection was extended to major party candidates for president and vice president.
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--------------------- April 1968














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------------------ June 1968











The tragic decade of the Kennedys was coming to a close.  The queen of Camelot stunned the world on October 20, 1968, by marrying the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.


"Ari" Onassis was the antithesis of John Kennedy in youth, looks, and charm, but with his vast fortune and isolated foreign retreats, the divorced, often unscrupulous wheeler-dealer offered Jackie Kennedy security and escape for herself and her children. 


Public reaction was not kind; as one New York Times report put it, Americans showed "a combination of anger, shock, and dismay"....


Camelot was in retreat, if not receivership.  The presidential heir was leaving office deeply unpopular and reviled.







The family's crown prince had been assassinated.  The living symbol of that one brief shining moment had fled to the Mediterranean. 


John F. Kennedy's vanquished opponent, Richard Nixon, was elected the new president in November, which seemed to many a repudiation of the Kennedy-Johnson years and the tumult they had brought.  Pundits prematurely wrote an end to John Kennedy's era, as the second term he might have had came to a close.


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{excerpt:  The Kennedy Half Century, by Larry J. Sabato.  Bloomsbury-2013}


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