NOVEMBER 22nd – AT 9:08 A.M. ET:  This is the 47th anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.  For those of a certain age, there are three dates that never leave us – December 7th, 1941; November 22, 1963; and September 11, 2001. 

Whether you favored President Kennedy or not, he represented the Democratic Party when it was still the national defense party.  His soaring inaugural address, in which he pledged that the United States would "pay any price" in defense of freedom, would be laughed at and ridiculed by his own party today.  Indeed, Jack Kennedy today might be a Republican today.

In 1963, when President Kennedy was murdered, his Democratic Party still had a powerful Southern wing.  It was truly a national party.  It represented the feelings of working people well because it actually spoke with them.  Today the party considers itself quite superior to the people it claims to represent.

I was being discharged from the Army the hour President Kennedy was assassinated.  I still recall the absolute silence in Pennsylvania Station as I waited for my train to my parents' home on Long Island.  We'd lost presidents before.  I can still recall, vaguely, President Roosevelt's death.  But we hadn't had a president assassinated since McKinley. 

But I also recall the outrage of some northeast liberals, who would later come to symbolize the modern Democratic Party, that Lyndon Johnson would be president.  Although he was one of the great legislators of the 20th century, Johnson was despised by a certain element that couldn't stand the way he talked or where he went to school.   He wasn't like us, and that's what counted.  I didnt know it at the time, but we were seeing the start of a fatal split in the party, a cultural split, that lasts to this day.

In a few months the last Kennedy will be gone from Congress, and the dynasty, like the Roosevelt dynasty, will probably pass into history.  No one knows what President Kennedy would think of the United States today.  I think we can guess what he'd think of his party.

November 22, 2010