As the fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s death approaches, I am mindful of the speech he gave at Boston College in the spring of 1963. I was sitting in the large crowd gathered to hear him help celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the college’s founding.

The words I have remembered from that talk came at the beginning. That’s when Jack made the audience laugh by calling it “a great pleasure to come back to a city where my accent is considered normal and where they pronounce the words the way they are spelled.”

This line was typical of the man’s sense of humor and, like so much else that he said in other speeches, added to my loss at his outrageous death.  When this latter event happened I was living in Wales, far removed from my grieving home nation.  But I was helped by my colleagues from other countries who, for days, gathered around the television set and mourned the loss of JFK.