When Professor Kate McKeown read the recent Blog post entitled "The Man or The Woman in The Mirror," she wrote me with the following comments. They are worthy of being shared broadly with the readership of The White Rhino Report.
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Al, on Lincoln's birthday, after reading your blog, I find myself watching "The Kennedy Detail" over and over. I recorded it on February 11 on The Military Channel. Those Secret Service agents who guarded President and Mrs. Kennedy in Dallas were each alone with their grief and their guilt for almost 50 years.
I learned much about those days and events in Dallas, and what these young men went through. Agent Clint Hill describes arriving at Parkland Hospital, "Now Mrs. Kennedy had the president in her lap, and she wouldn't release him. I asked her to, 'Please, Mrs. Kennedy, let us take care of the President.' I realized that she was not going to let go, and I realized the reason she was not going to let go. She didn't want anybody else to see what condition he was in, and and so I removed my coat and put it over the President's head and his upper chest, and she let go of the President."
At the end of the documentary, Clint Hill, who suffered through depression and alcohol addiction says, "The individuals who were assigned to presidential protection...they worked hard...they did the best job they could. They were not in it for the money, nor were they in it for the politics or the glory, because there really isn't any...I wish that I had kept in touch with all the agents during that period of time, but I had not. I had cut myself off....if I had kept in contact with the other agents, they would have gotten me through that period of time because that's the kind of people they were. They held your back up, they made you strong, they kept you going."
Agent Win Larsen, the first agent to get to Parkland Hospital, saw his president's brain matter and blood flowing onto the gurney he'd procured. Now in a wheelchair, Win Larsen says, "I had a rough time, a very rough time. I believe that now, maybe, if something like that happened again, god forbid, there would be probably be a quite a bit of psychiatric help...I probably should have had some. I didn't. I didn't do it on my own either."
Agent Jerry Blaine breaks into tears as he talks about how he played handball regularly with a psychiatrist friend from the CIA, "You can just beat your frustrations out like crazy against that little rubber ball....but he helped me a lot, you know, to pull through, to pull through those days."
Jerry Blaine talked of Abraham Lincoln, too. He says of the White House, "Late on midnights you look down this hall...and you can almost visualize Lincoln walking with his stooped shoulders down the hall...."
All those who serve our country carry the weight of it on their shoulders. No one should have to carry it alone.
We all need peer support. Schools squash it by setting everyone against everyone else in the pursuit of a better grade. Entrepreneurs in all fields succeed by Hustling with Honor, Helping and being Helped. Agent Blaine sat in on a couple interrogations with Oswald. He says, "He was an arrogant little nothing that wanted to be something." Everybody wants to be something. School declares 50% of students "below average." Half of our kids are automatic losers...who can only hope to be something despite "education" as we practice it now.. Oswald is not the only human who found a very counterproductive way to try to not be nothing.
Agent Ron Pontius says, "We had Eisenhower, and he was a general and we were the troops...but here's Kennedy, and he knows everybody's name...." Agent David Grant, who moved on to the Johnson detail says, " I lost in President Kennedy really a wonderful human being and a guy who knew my name."
Link to the TV documentary: Documentary
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Thank you to Kate for sharing her thoughts.
Al
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