Aug. 27, 1964 - Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy moved serenely today through a painful past.
It was evoked for her and thousands of delegates to the Democratic National Convention at a hotel reception where selections of prose and poetry from which her husband took comfort were read.
More than 5,000 delegates and alternates were invited to meet the young widow of President Kennedy and her brother-in-law and sisters-in-law, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and his wife Ethel, Mrs. Eunice Shriver, Mrs. Patricia Lawford, Mrs. Jean Smith, and Mrs. Joan Kennedy.
The former First Lady flew back to her summer home in Newport, R.I., immediately after the reception.
There were so many guests that they had to be accommodated in three shifts throughout the afternoon.
Three times, excerpts from Thucydides, Tennyson, William Butler Yeats, and John Buchan were recited by Fredric March and his actress wife, Florence Eldridge.
Mr. March told guests seated in the hotel ballroom with the Kennedys that President Kennedy “would have deplored sadness in any of us,” and that “more than anything else in his life there was laughter and gaiety.”
But many of those who heard Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” found it impossible to hold back tears. President Kennedy had loved the poem so much that his wife memorized it at his request.
Mr. March said that the former First Lady had given him and his wife “a wealth of material” that President Kennedy had loved and that “she made many illuminating marginal comments which so lessened the distance between us and a President to bring us closer to a man.”
Among Mrs. Kennedy’s comments was this: “He was always moved by the poignancy of young men dying.” Seeger, a British poet, wrote prophetically. He was killed in World War I.
After the recitations — which also included the ringing final sentences of President Kennedy’s inaugural address and a speech he was to have delivered in Dallas last Nov. 22 — Mrs. Kennedy thanked those who came. Her words, even in the deep hush that lay on the audience, were barely audible.
“Thank all of you for coming — all of you who helped President Kennedy in 1960,” she whispered. Her voice faded even more. “May his light always shine in all parts of the world.”
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