This isn’t going to be a good week for me. Friday will mark the 50th anniversary of the death in Dallas of President John F. Kennedy, and between now and then I expect a complete media blitz—make that a blitzkrieg—of stories, films, docudramas, book reviews, and counterfactual explorations about the event and, by extension, about all that the nation lost with the death of the brilliant but ill-fated president. Dallas policemen, such media duffers as Bob Schieffer and Jim Lehrer, Lee Harvey Oswald’s dentist, Jack Ruby’s rabbi, everyone still alive who has any memory of or connection with the assassination will be called upon to cough up his driblet of information.

I happen to be a member of that minority—perhaps in America the minoritiest of all minorities—who doesn’t get it. I understand the sadness of a still youngish man killed in the presence of his wife before a vast television audience. What I don’t get is the glamor of, the intense emotion surrounding, the general significance of John F. Kennedy. Nor do I understand the eagerness of so many of my countrymen to make the Kennedy family America’s equivalent of the royals.