The assassination of President Kennedy came just as the Christmas 1963 edition of the Spectator was going to press – we had to paste a new headline over a colourful, cover. Here we reprint our leader from this issue:
The death of John F. Kennedy, President of the United States of America, inevitably produces banality in the leader- writers who have to comment upon it. The meaninglessness of the action is complemented by an inability to write meaning- fully about it. What we have seen in Dallas in the State of Texas is an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, political nihilism in its purest form with all the human suffering which nihilism entails.
Words, indeed—the words spun out on a typewriter in a newspaper office—have little power to express the feelings of the world today. What is wanted is some more intense form of language: that of a poet to talk of ‘a strong man in his pride con- fronting murderous men’ or an historian to speak of the Athenian dead.
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