The first time I heard that Barack Obama had decided to make a run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, my stomach flipped over. I had been following Obama's slow dance with that possibility and my initial response was one of great joy and relief that finally we would have a candidate who had the intellect and stature to right all the wrongs that had been done in the name of my country for the last four years.
But that feeling was quickly followed by a sense of fear and dread. I am a child of the sixties. I have lived through those terrible moments in our nation's history. I was seventeen years old on a sunny day in November 1963 when my father game dashing up the stairs shouting: "Turn on the TV. Turn on the TV. Kennedy's been shot." I watched in stunned horror and disbelief as Walter Cronkite could barely control his emotions as he confirmed our worst fears. I saw Kennedy's presumed assassin assassinated in kind on live television.
I was in my junior year in college studying to be a priest when the word spread throughout the dorms that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed. My classmates and I watched stunned as riots and acts of violence erupted around the country only moments after his death was announced. We heard the brother of the recently slain president, Bobby Kennedy, call for the nation to be calm.
It was late one night in June, 1968 on the east coast as I sat watching Bobby Kennedy declare victory in California and take that fatal route to his own death in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. I saw the mortally wounded young man being cradled in the arms of a by-stander as chaos erupted all around him. More days of muffled drums and tears across the land.
Those were the memories that came rushing into my consciousness as I realized the full import of Obama's decision. But then I thought, this is America in 2008. Things like that can't or won't happen again. I wasn't being naive. I just felt that the security bubble that a presidential candidate or a president himself was enveloped in was as good as it gets. But in the back of my mine was the lingering thought that nothing is foolproof. Or in this case, lunatic proof. But as Frank Rich pointed out, as time passed, the fear receded.
Not any longer. That fear has become my constant companion. But you know what I really can't understand? John McCain lived through those same moments as I did. As was once said of the fascist senator, Joe McCarthy, is there at long last no sense of decency left in him?
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