Dec. 22, 1963 | LBJ Leads Candlelight Memorial to JFK

Dec. 22, 1963 - Lyndon B. Johnson turned tonight to the words and the shrine of one slain President to say goodbye to another. His short but ringing farewell to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in a candlelight service that ended a month of national mourning, was threaded with phrases and paraphrases from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. About 14,000 persons, the flames of their candles shining in the gathering dusk, stood shivering in the cold at the Lincoln Memorial to share the farewell service with the 36th President. Seven Cabinet members and two Supreme Court Justices were there with Mrs. Johnson and her daughter Lucy Baines. The President, bareheaded and somber, declared: “We buried Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy, but we did not bury their dreams or their visions. They are our dreams and our visions today, for President Lincoln and John Kennedy moved toward those nobler dreams and those larger visions where the needs of the people dwell.” President Johnson began his simple speech with these words: “Thirty days and a few hours ago, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, died a martyr’s death. The world will not forget what he did here. He will live on in our hearts, which will be his shrine.” By the time the new President’s family had returned to the White House, the crepe that had darkened the portico of the Executive mansion was gone. Mr. Johnson lighted the national Christmas tree on the Ellipse, a tall spruce from West Virginia. And the nation’s mourning for John Kennedy — the official mourning at least — was over.

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