Thanksgiving - A happy time, and a melancholy anniversary

The crisp, short days and the multicolored leaves fluttering down mark a time of year that for me always means two things, one happy, one sad. The happy one is our family’s annual Thanksgiving dinner, for 19 this year. The sad one, the anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination, made more melancholy this year by the passing of two of the last living links to that day. As a young Associated Press reporter, I helped write about some of that weekend's shocking events. But I really learned what it was like from Clint Hill, the valiant Secret Service agent who threw himself over Jackie Kennedy when Lee Harvey Oswald fired those fatal shots in Dallas, and Sid Davis, the last living reporter at Lyndon B. Johnson's swearing in on Air Force One.

- Carl P. Leubsdorf, Tribune News Service

Richard Nixon

Hill, who took decades to come to terms with the guilt he felt for being unable to save Kennedy, and Davis, who debarked to tell the assembled press corps — and the world — of the peaceful transfer of power, both died in recent months. Hill was 93, Davis 97. Both were in their 30s when they played key supporting roles in the drama that came to epitomise how the unexpected can transform a nation’s history. No one can doubt that the course of the United States, and with it the world, might have been far different — less groundbreaking domestically perhaps, less devastating abroad — had the nation’s youngest president lived to win and serve a second term.