The Miami News from Miami, Florida • 3

The Miami News The Best Newspaper Under The Sun ST JU Pulitzer I'rize Fnr International Reporting In l)(ii Pulitzer Prize For Rational Reporting In. I'JoO Pulitzer Prize For Public Service In J'9 James M. Cox, Jr. Publisher and President J. Luckett Yawn, Jr.

General Manager Daniel J. Mahoney, Jr. Vice-President Clarke Ash Associate F.ditnr 'William C. Baggs Editor C. Edward Tierce Managing Editor 68th Year, No.

183 Saturday, Nov. t- TV-'-r''''r- 7 iiLK -rz -yv''1 We Mourn For Ourselves And For The World Vii V1 4 He had youth, charm, and a zest for life and leadership that the White House has seldom known. Surely no President faced larger problems than John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and none met his problems with greater optimism. It was a measure of his leadership that he never hesitated to attack a problem merely because that problem seemed insoluble, and Heaven knows many of them must have seemed just that. They would have crushed a lesser man into activity.

He had courage in war and in peace, and he had the wits to confound those at home or abroad who would despoil his beloved country. He had brilliance when only brilliance would suffice. Like Jefferson, he kept faith with the common man, believing in the common man's ability to manage his own freedom. Like Lincoln, he had an abiding conviction that all citizens have a right to equality. Despite his certain knowledge that this conviction was unpopular in much of the nation, he supported it to the fullest.

This was a demanding test of his integrity, and he passed it in his own way as nobly as Lincoln passed his. America is a great nation, and it is one of the blessings of our democracy that our government endures even such catastrophes as this. These are times when we rally together, behind our new leader. 'St i The President of the United States and the leader of the Free World is dead. The prayers of millions follow President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in death, and beseech guidance for his successor, President Lyndon Raines Johnson.

We mourn for President Kennedy's family, a notably close family even in a nation where, close families are the norm. We mourn for our country, which must undergo a difficult change of leadership in critical times. And mostly, we mourn for ourselves, who have been denied the fullest potential of a brilliant young President. We have been denied by what Winston Churchill has rightly called a monstrous act, whose full impact is only beginning to seep into the hearts and minds of the nation. In late years it has been axiomatic that the man who occupies the highest position in the United Stales occupies the most powerful position in the world.

America has been fortunate that the men who have held this lofty office have treated it as a sacred trust. Certainly it was treated so by John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Only rarely in the course of our history have we been blessed with a President whose qualities of leadership combined to inscribe his greatness forever on our national shrines. Jefferson was one of these, and Lincoln was another. And more and more you are going to hear Mr.

Kennedy's name mentioned as one of the great ones. 'fit, dead, God The President is save the President. Prnfilrs In (lonra.rrR Madness Destroys Law And Order Harvest Of The Psycopaths Ily RALPH McCILL By JAMES RESTOX the York Tlmri WASHINGTON when the latter said: We have made WASHINGTON, A young president, husband and father, now done savagely, pitilessly to death, is the latest harvest of psyco-pathic hate. Before we mourn it seems necessary America wept not alone for its dead young president, but for itself. The grief was general, for somehow the worst in the nation had prevailed over the best.

The indictment extended beyond the assassin, for something in. the nation itself, some strain of madness and violence, had destroyed the highest symbol of law and order. 1 that the a i comprehend this fact that hate, whether of the extreme left or right can destroy merely the chief of state but the state itself. By one of those RESTON McGILL Which is the side that I must go withal? I am with both; each army hath a hand. And in their rage, I having hold of both.

They whirl asunder and dismember me." There is, however, consolation in the fact that while he was not given time to finish his work or even to realize his ow-n potentialities," he has not left the nation in a state of crisis nr danger, either in its domestic or foreign affairs. A reasonable balance of power has been established on all continents. The state of truce existing in Korea, the Formosa strait, Viet Nam and Berlin is, if anything, more tolerable than when he came to office. Thus. President Johnson is not confronted immediately with urgent new decisions.

The passage of power from one man to another is more difficult in other countries, and Britain, West Germany, Italy, India and other friendly nations are so preoccupied by that task at the moment that drastic new policy initiatives overseas are scarcely possible in the foreseeable future. At home, Johnson's tasks lie in the Congress, where he is widely regarded as the most skillfull man of his generation. This city is in a state of shock and everywhere, including Capitol Hill, men are of a mind to compose their differences and do what they can to help the new news of the shooting came, and later that of tlie death of the President, some of the Southern newspapers received anonymous, cheering calls, saying: "So they shot the Negro lover. Good for whoever did it." There were others of like nature. Fnr some years now the more vocal extremists, left and right, have directly or indirectly encouraged violence and defiance of federal authorities.

This has included evangelists, beads of organizations dedicated to defying the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against racial discrimination, and groups both anti-Semitic and anti-Negro. Some of their leaders have been careful to avoid open incitement of violence but that their words and their own expressions of hate directed at their government and their president inspired those whose disturbed minds tend towards crimiral action is supported by evidence. After the long and dreadful night of rioting at Oxford, a little more than a year ago, the Department of Justice took statements from many witnesses. On that night U.S.

marshals were attacked and troops were subjected to abuse and assault. Two men were killed by snipers' fire. One of the reports made to the Department of spoke of hearing ar-rivers who had come from distant points to Oxford, saying: "1 am glad at last to be able to fight against this damn countrv." up our minds to square every process of our national life with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts." But the young man who came to office with an assurance vicariously imparted from reading Richard Neustadt's book, "Presidential Power," soon discovered the two truths which all dwellers on that lonely eminence have quickly learned. The first was that the powers of the president are not only limited but hard to bring to bear. The second was that the decisions as he himself so often said "are not easy." Since he was never one to hide his feelings, he often betrayed the mood brought on by contemplating the magnitude of the job and its disappointments.

He grew fond of quoting Lord Morley's dictum "Politics is one long second-best, where the choice often lies between two blunders." Last June when the civil rights riots were at their height and passions were flaring, he spoke to a group of representatives of national organizations. He tolled off the problems that beset him on every side and then, to the astonishment of his listeners, he suddenly concluded his talk by pulling from his pocket a scrap of paper and reading the famous speech of Blanche of Spain in Shakespeare's King John: "The sun's o'ercast with blood: fair day, adieu! odd coincidences of history, the President was shot in the week of the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address. This President himself so soon to die by an assassin's bullet reminded us that it is we. the living, who must dedicate ourselves lo democracy and truth. This has been reaffirmed for us in Dallas.

Texas. The first suspect was a typical product of the factories of hate. He is American born and bred. That he is a psychopathically disturbed young man is evident from his actions and his record. He had served his country in the armed forces.

He had quit his country for Russia. He had become disillusioned with communism. Back in his own land be sw ung over to one of the pro-Castro groups. There were other evidences of hate, bitter, deep and irrational. Later in Mississippi a sniper hidden in roadside bushes under cover of darkness shot and killed an NAACP official.

Ever since the time of the Little Rock school riots, some six years ago, we have seen that persons psychopathically dangerous would use dynamite and gunfire against established authority. Innocent Sunday School children have been dynamited to death in church. We have grown used to seeing in newspaper pictures and on television the hate-twisted faces of young men and women and adults crying out the most violent threats and expressing a virulent of venom against their country and its authority. All of these are pieces of the mosaic of hate that has poisoned this country to the point where in Texas a killer premeditatedly murdered the President and seriously wounded the governor. That he did not kill Mrs.

John Kennedy, the Vice President and Mrs. Johnson and others may be ascribed to the lack of time. One can only wonder in what furnace this hate distorted mind had been fired and one asks, too, how many men in. our country are secretly planning violence and death. It has been increasingly plain that there arc American men and women who no longer feel any love for their country.

They have withdrawn in hate. The extreme right and left of this country have revealed their minds to us in their literature, public utterances and anonymous mail, filth and lies, against and about the now dead president and our government. In some instances great wealth made in America is reported behind some of the more extreme organizations and their propaganda. They have preached that freedom is dying seemingly because they could not dominate the government with their greedy dream of power. Those persons who at luncheons and cocktail parties have indulged in vulgar jokes and expressions of hate against the President, his wife and their government, as was done against Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, must also feel a small share of guilt.

So at this hour before we begin to mourn would do well to understand that hate can kill a president and if unchecked in behalf of morality, decency and human dignity, it can kill a nation or so weaken it that it will die. Speaker John McCormack, now 71 and by the peculiarities of our politics, now next in line for the presidency, expressed this sense of national dismay and self-criticism: "My God, my God! What are we coming to?" he asked. The irony of the President's death is that his short administration was devoted almost entirely to various attempts to curb this very streak of violence in the American character. When the historians get around to assessing his three years in office, it is very likely that they will be impressed with just this: His efforts to restrain those who wanted to be more violent in the cold war overseas and those who wanted to be more violent in the racial war at home. He was in Texas yesterday trying to pacify the violent politics of that state.

He was in Florida last week trying to pacify the businessmen and appealing to them to believe that he was not "anti-business." And from the beginning to the end of his administration, he. was trying to damp down the violence cf the extremists on the right. It W'as his fate, however, to reach the White House in a period of violent change, when all nations and institutions found themselves uprooted. His central theme was the necessity of adjusting to change and this brought him into conflict with those who opposed change. He came into office convinced of the truth of Teddy Roosevelt's view of the president's duties "The President is bound to be as big a man as he can." And his inaugural "Now The Trumpet Summons Us A a i stirred an echo of Wilson, in 1913 LYNDON JOHNSON and Srjeaker John Mpflnrmark lieton.

ed intently during Mr. Kennedy's State Of The Union A CONFERENCE at the Democratic National Convention in 1960..