With the death of Sargent Shriver yesterday, Ted Sorensen in October, and Ted Kennedy a year earlier, the Kennedy Presidency is finally, truly, history!
Shriver died just two days before the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961.
There are no leading figures left from the Kennedy years, and even people who were associated with Kennedy in other ways are just about all part of the past.
As we commemorate the Kennedy years tomorrow, we can all be pleased that the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Massachusetts has made all of the Kennedy materials in its library available in digital form online, the first Presidential library to do so.
It was an undertaking of a long period of time, and should become the model for all of the other 12 Presidential libraries, along with the less official Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois and the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia.
For those of us who lived through and remember vividly the Kennedy years, therefore, there is good news in the midst of the final emergence of Kennedy as part of History, not current events!