After 60 years, John F. Kennedy’s assassination still hurts but his legacy endures.

It’s in any school principal’s DNA to be relentlessly upbeat, cheerful and above all, positive. The principal at Our Lady of Lourdes grade school, Ursuline Sister M. Olivia, was all of those things — but the voice, her voice coming over the intercom into our 7th grade classroom on Friday, November 22, 1963, was so serious that it was, well, frightening.

With no preliminaries, Sister said “There is a report that President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas, Texas. And [pause] . . . they are reporting that there was blood on his head.”

At this last detail, the girls in my class started crying, we boys looked ashen and uncomprehending. Instead of recess, the entire school processed, in total silence, to the church where our pastor, Msgr. Anthony Gerst, led the prayers. After the service, Sister Olivia announced that John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th and first Roman Catholic president of the United States, was gone. We were dismissed home to a traumatic, 3-day weekend of grief and sorrow such as I never experienced again until the 9/11 tragedy. When John F. Kennedy, Jr., on his third birthday, saluted his father’s flag-draped coffin, America wept as one.

John F. Kennedy: President for peace?

In all of my 12 years of life at the time, I had known no first-hand death, certainly nothing on the scale of an American president. I had never seen the adults in my insular world so upset and weeping openly. Even Walter Cronkite, the Rock of Gibraltar of network television, had trouble controlling his emotions on the air. In a way, it was my first death in the family for, instead of famous baseball players, I idolized JFK, this handsome, charming, witty, smiling, graceful figure who lived in the White House. I rushed home from school whenever he held one of his televised afternoon press conferences to follow his good-natured bantering with reporters. “How do I like being president so far?” he repeated a question. “Well, just fine, it’s indoor work and there’s no heavy lifting.” I not only wanted to be just like him in demeanor but to espouse the same ideals he spoke for so with such passion and eloquence.

“Let every nation know . . . that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Who of my generation can forgot that immortal inaugural address, proclaimed in frosty clouds of speech on that raw January day, 1961?

“And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

A copy of that address has hung in my law office for going on 48 years. No one who has visited that office has had to ask why a Republican lawyer would honor a Democratic president’s work — for John F. Kennedy, like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt belongs to all of us.

The eternal flame that burns at the murdered president’s grave represents his timeless, enduring legacy that every American, from the age of reason, should embrace:

“With good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own.”

Bob Heleringer is an attorney and former member of the Kentucky General Assembly. He can be reached at helringr@bellsouth.net.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: John F Kennedy was shot 60 years ago. His assassination still hurts.