Three Great Men Died That Day: JFK, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley - The Daily Beast Tangled History Three Great Men Died That Day: JFK, C.S. Lewis, and Aldous Huxley On November 22, 1963, three towering figures of the 20th century died. John F. Kennedy is the one that we all remember, but let’s consider the others. John Garth 11.03.13 10:45 AM ET Do you remember what you were doing the day Aldous Huxley died? Or C.S. Lewis? You don’t think so? Well, the odds are that if you were old enough to be laying down memories at the time, you do. Because it was also the day President Kennedy was assassinated. The indelible experience of hearing the news is captured well in the opening scene of Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Odessa File, as the announcement interrupts a song in mid-bar on our German hero’s car radio. ‘Jesus,’ he breathed quietly, eased down on the brake pedal and swung into the right-hand side of the road. He glanced up.

Right down the long, broad, straight highway through Altona towards the centre of Hamburg other drivers had heard the same broadcast and were pulling in to the side of the road as if driving and listening to the radio had suddenly become mutually exclusive, which in a way they had. In this way the shots fired in Dallas echoed almost instantaneously around the world, and plunged uncountable numbers into shock, grief, fear for the future, and reflections on mortality. It was the day of St Cecilia, patron saint of music. Later American singer-songwriter Dion, and after him Marvin Gaye, hauntingly sang ‘Has anybody here seen my old friend John? Can you tell me where he’s gone?’—because John F. Kennedy’s assassination did touch many millions as if they had lost a friend. But virtually no one on 22 November 1963 realised—and relatively few realise even now—that that day also saw the departure of the two other major figures, who were also world-shapers in their very different ways. The deaths of Lewis and Huxley were mute, private events, only reported in The Times three days later. Death had moved remorselessly westward to claim his scalps.

Lewis died first, in his brother’s arms, a few minutes after tumbling with a crash from his bed at the foot of the stairs at the Kilns, his house outside Oxford, at 5.30pm. He was just a week shy of 65. One hour later—12.30pm in Texas—the 46-year-old President was shot. At the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles, Huxley’s second wife Laura, leaving his bedside with his request for an LSD injection, found the doctor and nurses in shock watching the news of the assassination; Huxley died, aged 69, at 5.20pm local time, just under eight hours after Lewis. Huxley was quietly cremated in Los Angeles on the Saturday and remembered by friends with a walk at Mulholland Drive on the Sunday. JFK lay in state in the White House and then the Capitol, where hundreds of thousands queued to pay their respects; and he was interred in Arlington Cemetery on the Monday in front of the representatives of 90 nations.

With his assassination blurrily smeared onto Abraham Zapruder’s home movie, and photographers capturing his son John saluting the flag-draped casket that Monday (his third birthday), this was—to adapt the title of Lewis’s 1961 book—the most observed grief in history. Lewis himself was buried at Holy Trinity Church near his home on the Tuesday, but the hullabaloo over Kennedy’s death had prevented news of Lewis’s from reaching many friends, and it was a poorly attended funeral . His brother Warnie, apparently unable to face it, was elsewhere, blind drunk. **** There’s no evidence that Huxley read Lewis, or that Kennedy read either—though his wife Jackie would certainly have read some of their books—but Lewis knew enough of Huxley to mention him in a letter of 1952 as an author of a future dystopia alongside H.G. Wells and George Orwell. The mental worlds inhabited by Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley—an Englishman translated permanently to West Coast America from 1938—were as mutually remote as their social worlds. Yet each devoted his energies to matters of universal concern, and together they form a curious triptych on the mortal condition.

The distinctions between the three men’s worldviews inspired a 1982 fiction, Between Heaven and Hell by Boston College philosophy professor Peter Kreeft, in the form of a ‘Socratic dialogue’ in Purgatory. In this debate, Lewis represents ‘mere Christianity’, Kennedy modern humanism, and Huxley ‘Eastern pantheism’. Kreeft captures Lewis’s voice perfectly—or so Lewis’s friend George Sayer told him. I don’t pretend to know if Sayer was just being diplomatic, but I do know that Kreeft’s Kennedy is so far off-key as to suggest the author had no more interest in capturing character than in providing a plot. A devotee, Kreeft gives Lewis the big philosophical guns, and has him trouncing Kennedy and Huxley pretty comprehensively. I felt a similar dissatisfaction reading Jill Paton Walsh’s far superior philosophical novel Knowledge of Angels, in which the atheist Palinor progressively dechristianises the devout Beneditx and Severo. If the men who died on 22 November met immediately after death, I agree that Lewis would have wanted to debate socratically.

But he would have found Huxley unswayable in his mysticism—if indeed death had released Huxley’s spirit from the effects of the LSD administered by his wife in his final moments. Kennedy might have engaged for a while: he was always interested in philosophical ideas. But pretty soon he would have manfully picked himself up—as he habitually had over a lifetime of severe health problems—and hurried off to catch up with his dear dead brother Joe, or his even dearer dead sister Kathleen, or perhaps (if in a different frame of mind) Marilyn Monroe. **** But let us return to non-fiction, the knowable world, and frankly earthbound thoughts. The British historian and journalist Godfrey Hodgson, who read Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford, is my eyewitness to the events of the day in American history. His 16 books include All Things to All Men, which deals with the Presidency, and his 17th will be about JFK and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson. Hodgson, who was then the Observer’s correspondent in Washington, D.C., was lunching there with his counterpart from The Guardian.

‘The radio was on, and as we were talking I heard someone say, “The President’s been shot.’ Hodgson jammed himself into a phonebooth for an hour, making arrangements for someone else to fly to Dallas while he covered the situation in D.C. Get The Beast In Your Inbox! Daily DigestStart and finish your day with the top stories from The Daily Beast. Cheat SheetA speedy, smart summary of all the news you need to know (and nothing you don't). By clicking "Subscribe," you agree to have read the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Subscribe Thank You! You are now subscribed to the Daily Digest and Cheat Sheet. We will not share your email with anyone for any reason At Andrews Air Force base he stood beside National Security Advisor McGeorge ‘Mac’ Bundy as Air Force One landed with the newly sworn-in President Johnson and his predecessor’s body. Hodgson recalls: ‘Mrs Kennedy came down at the back of the plane, her pink suit covered in her husband’s blood—as she’d been encouraged by the Kennedy crowd on board not to change.

Moments later, Johnson came down at the front of the plane and made a short, dignified speech—“I shall need God’s help and yours”—and just after that Mac stepped forward and handed Johnson a set of manila folders, which I assumed were the White House’s latest take on what was happening around the world.’ Another significant moment happened out of sight. To avoid attention, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother, had concealed himself in a skip. ‘When the plane arrived,’ says Hodgson, ‘he dashed up the steps and went in, and pushed Johnson out of the way and went past him to see his brother’s body and his brother’s widow. Johnson and the Johnson people were considerably affronted by this, so the Johnson people and the Kennedy people started off on terrible terms. The Kennedy people would never refer to Johnson as the President. When they said “the President”, they meant Kennedy.’ The unease in the partnership between the two Democrat clans was already widely known, and now gave rise to one of the earliest of the many conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination.

Just the next day, a fellow journalist said to Hodgson, ‘Have you heard the joke: Lyndon Johnson isn’t deerhunting this season—because Lee Harvey Oswald has got his rifle.’ Hodgson is as sceptical as anyone that Oswald could have killed Kennedy alone and unassisted, but remains unpersuaded by any of the alternative theories. Hodgson also covered the killings of Oswald and Jack Ruby: Kennedy’s death was like a comet trailing others in its wake, right down to the waiter who had served him his last breakfast. **** It was also, in the popular construction, prefigured by the deaths of his elder brother Joe Jr in 1944, when the explosive payload of his plane detonated prematurely on takeoff from an RAF base near Norwich; and of sister Kathleen in 1948, when her private passenger flight went down in the Ardèche in France. In Kennedy: An Unfinished Life, Robert Dallek argues that these experiences lent urgency to JFK’s pursuit of power, not to mention women. The deep-set learning difficulties of his sister Rosemary—ultimately lobotomised on their father’s orders—probably made a greater contribution to his capacity for empathy with others less fortunate.

Both Lewis and Huxley’s first bereavements came earlier in life, and surely bit more deeply. By another striking coincidence of mortality, each lost a 45-year-old mother in 1908, to aggressive cancer. Lewis recalled in Surprised by Joy: ‘With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life…. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.’ Not quite ten, Lewis was sent almost immediately from his Belfast home to a brutal English boarding school. Perhaps it is unsurprising, therefore, that Narnia should so prominently feature children pitched suddenly into other worlds, as well as a delicious school revenge fantasy (The Silver Chair). And the autobiographical parallel is clear in the scene in The Magician’s Nephew when young Digory restores his dying mother to life with a magic apple—all the more poignant because Lewis himself could not do the same. His modest tombstone bears the line from Shakespeare that had been on his mother’s calendar the day she died: ‘Men must endure their going hence.’ Huxley, 14 in 1908, had been just settling in at Eton when his mother died.

Julia Huxley left her son with a deathbed letter he kept all his life: ‘Judge not too much and love more.’ Near-blindness from an eye infection in 1911 cut short his Etonian schooling; a further blow came three years later with the suicide of his brilliant and athletic brother Trevenen. Both of these family bereavements appeared, disguised, in his novels. Huxley said his 1950s drug experimentation was an attempt to retrieve some childhood memory, but Nicholas Murray, author of the biography Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual, tells me: ‘It is more likely that it centres on the trauma of his mother’s early death.’ **** Huxley was exempt from military service due to his severe eyesight problems. His response to the deaths of serving friends was anything but religious. Rather, it’s a kind of communitarian version of the now-common pantheist idea that when we die our substance goes back into the cycle of physical life. ‘One way that people survive after they are dead is in the society to which they belonged and particularly in their friends. To look back is a kind of betrayal of the life entrusted to one: one must go forward.

The best way of remembering them is not by dwelling on the past but the future.’ Through direct experience in their respective wars, Lewis and Kennedy each became close acquaintances with death. For Lewis, the horror was not a surprise, according to leading Lewis scholar Michael Ward: ‘He arrived on his 19th birthday in the French trenches and the front line. He knew it was going to be awful, so any slight lightening of the gloom he took as an uncovenanted boon.’ But Surprised by Joy describes ‘the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses’. A British shell fell short and obliterated his sergeant; Lewis, knocked out, had an out-of-body experience. ‘He looked down on his own body and the thought arose in his mind, “Here is a picture of a man dying,”’ says Ward. ‘That experience, he said, meant he understood what Kant meant when he talks about the phenomenal and the noumenal self.’ In plainer terms—for JFK’s brilliance was not in philosophy—a wartime scrape with death helped make the future President a phenomenon.

During a night operation in the Solomon Islands in 1943, the patrol torpedo boat he commanded was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Despite injury to his already long-damaged back, he performed heroically to bring his crew to safety. To his father Joe Sr, bent on seeing a Kennedy son succeed in politics, it was all capital—as valuable as the multi-million-dollar family fortune that greased the wheels of power. JFK used his PT boat drama as an excuse to publish a book in 1957, Profiles in Courage, which won a Pulitzer and did no harm to his 1960 White House campaign. Hodgson dismisses the idea that Kennedy’s war experiences gave him any significant surplus of insight or sensitivity, pointing out: ‘In 1960 almost all politicians would have had military experience. A lot of people were being killed in 1944, all over the place.’ But Kennedy’s experiences as a junior officer in the US Navy undeniably gave him a healthy contempt for the military top ranks—cemented in the first year of his Presidency after he let himself by guided by Pentagon ‘intelligence’ into the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Arguably it was this contempt for the top brass, more than anything, which was to save the world from a rain of death. Kennedy was born in 1917 six weeks after Lenin returned to revolutionary St Petersburg. By October 1962, the world had so changed that Kennedy now faced Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in a standoff over Cuba which threatened mutual nuclear annihilation. Huxley told a friend: ‘If only [Timothy Leary] could get into a Summit Meeting and give some mushroom to the two Mr Ks—the result might be world peace through total lucidity and breaking out by both parties from the prison of their respective cultures and ideologies.’ In fact Kennedy and Khrushchev did bend the bars just enough to reach out to each other at the eleventh hour. Just as vital, however, was Kennedy’s 13-day rearguard action against the Pentagon hawks who wanted aerial bombing, invasion, dizzying escalation. JFK was horrified by the prospect of nuclear war; and so (behind a veneer of insouciance towards the deaths of millions) was Khrushchev.

**** Kennedy may have had a clearer sense of the horrors of nuclear war than the pacifist Huxley, the war veteran Lewis or most other people in the atomic era. Lewis wrote of the serious young anti-nuclear protesters of the post-war era: ‘Didn’t they know that, Bomb or no Bomb, all men die (many in horrible ways)? There is no good moping or sulking about it’. But Lewis’s realism about death’s inevitability follows from his childhood encounter with it. On the outbreak of the Second World War, he told friends wryly: ‘At any rate we now have less chance of dying of cancer’. On hearing an RAF chaplain vaunting the inner peace Christians can enjoy in the face of death, he countered: ‘No … death is dreadful and we are right to fear it … [It] is not a very little thing and it is horrible’. Huxley seems to have even less recourse to consolation.

On the passing of his friend Lytton Strachey, the Bloomsbury giant who wrote Eminent Victorians, he wrote: ‘How sad, sad, sad it all is; and with such a peculiar pointlessness and meaninglessness, when looked at from without.’ In 1930, the dying D.H. Lawrence stayed at the Huxleys’ home in France; Huxley wrote: ‘How horrible this gradually approaching dissolution is…’—and when Lawrence died he lamented: ‘a very painful thing to see an indomitable spirit finally broken and put out.’ But neither Huxley nor Lewis had any truck with the idea of super-extended life—and curiously each writer used a remarkably similar bestial image to express his disdain. Lewis’s version appears on the opening page of The Last Battle, and his name is Shift. Michael Ward provides persuasive evidence in his groundbreaking book Planet Narnia that The Last Battle revolves symbolically around the planet Saturn, whom Lewis in his 1935 poem ‘The Planets’ had described as ‘the last planet / Old and ugly’.

Writing that ‘Lewis in this last tale lets Saturn deal out death in abundance, “bearing all his sons away”’, Ward comments: As for ‘old’ and ‘ugly’, Shift the Ape is both: ‘He was so old that no one could remember when he had first come to live in those parts, and he was the cleverest, ugliest, most wrinkled Ape you can imagine.’ When Shift reappears in chapter 3 he is ‘ten times uglier’ than before. He tells the bewildered Narnians: ‘I’m so very old: hundreds and hundreds of years old. And it’s because I’m so old that I’m so wise. Shift’s claim to great age reflects the imprint of Saturn, whose home is that ‘mountain of centuries’ presented in That Hideous Strength: ‘more and still more time.’ But all of Shift’s years have provided him with no wisdom about the timeless verities of Narnian creation; his wrinkles suggest he has simply used low cunning to defer his natural end. He puts on human clothes and human airs; but when death comes to Shift, he isn’t even given the dignity of being called an ape.

‘After that,’ said Edmund, ‘someone flung a monkey through the door. And Tash was there again. My sister is so tender-hearted she doesn’t like to tell you that Tash made one peck and the Monkey was gone!’ Shift has invoked Tash, a vulture-headed demonic power, only because he is too purblind actually to believe in him. Huxley’s 1939 novel After Many a Summer provides an interesting parallel. I doubt that it is a source for Shift, but Lewis was so widely read that you never know, and there are similarities both superficial and substantial. After Many a Summer tells the story of Jo Stoyte, loosely based on billionaire William Randolph Hearst, who is persuaded by his snake-oil physician Dr Obispo that life can be extended indefinitely. Convinced that the key resides in the papers of the Fifth Earl of Gonister, an 18th-century English aristocrat, Stoyte employs an archivist to comb them for clues. The Earl’s diary records a breakthrough which has prolonged his youth for decades, though the recipe is decidedly unappetising: ‘the raw, triturated Viscera of freshly opened Carp’.

The millionaire and his entourage end up at the Gonister ancestral home, flashlights scanning the rooms of a secret basement for the source of a foul stench. And then: Beyond the bars … on the edge of a low bed … a man was sitting, staring, as though fascinated, into the light. His legs, thickly covered with coarse reddish hair, were bare. The shirt, which was his only garment, was torn and filthy…. He sat hunched up, his head thrust forward and at the same time sunk between his shoulders…. ‘A foetal ape that’s had time to grow up,’ Dr Obispo managed to say. ‘It’s too good!’ Laughter overtook him…. ‘Just look at his face!’ he gasped, and pointed through the bars. Above the matted hair that concealed the jaws and cheeks, blue eyes stared out of cavernous sockets. There were no eyebrows; but under the dirty, wrinkled skin of the forehead a great ridge of bone projected like a shelf. This Shift-like half-clothed ape, skulking in filth with his now equally simian wife, is of course the Fifth Earl, still alive at 201 thanks to the power of mashed fish innards.

But Huxley’s scorn for the dream of defeating death is worthy of Jonathan Swift, and the satire is not quite finished. The book ends with the billionaire Stoyte considering the scene with famished envy and, abandoning the last vestiges of dignity, telling Obispo: ‘I mean, it wouldn’t happen at once … there’d be a long time while a person … well, you know: while he wouldn’t change any. And once you got over the first shock—well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course.’ For Stoyte, no price is too high for eternal life: it’s a case of ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’. **** Kennedy’s deep health problems persuaded him he had little prospect of a long life, so he had better hurry and be doing. His spiritual outlook was inherited not from his pious mother but from his worldly father, a Catholic only for show. Privately, JFK felt that this earthly life is all we have.

Godfrey Hodgson observes that this may have contributed to his reluctance on the brink of war over Cuba: ‘A man who believes that he will survive death in a nuclear holocaust is going to behave differently from a man who doesn’t. I once asked Mac Bundy whether he thought Jack Kennedy believed in life after death; to which he said, “Of course not, don’t be silly.”’ Huxley’s focus was on this life, too, yet he increasingly sought to penetrate beyond mundane appearances to discover what might lie beneath. From well before his critical faculties became fully formed at Balliol College, Oxford—in fact probably from the cradle—he had set out in the intellectual tradition of his naturalist grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley, who first coined the word agnostic. But his 1936 novel Eyeless in Gaza marked a shift towards mysticism: Aldous came to espouse Gottfried Leibniz’s 18th-century view that all great religions are reflections of a ‘perennial philosophy’, and to seek enlightenment on earth. True to his scientific heritage, though, in the last decade of his life he sought to achieve this by experimentation—with the aid of psychedelics.

His 1954 book The Doors of Perception, which recorded this attempt, later became a hit with the Flower Power generation, but Huxley scorned those who used drugs for purely sensual pleasure. After all, his prophetic 1932 novel Brave New World had long before predicted a society enslaved by the drug soma. Notwithstanding his own loftier goals, it is questionable whether mescaline and LSD gave Huxley the enlightenment he craved. Biographer Nicholas Murray says: ‘He envied people like William Blake who had these wonderful visions of alternative realities.’ Perhaps Huxley’s drug experiences achieved little more than mimicking the instant of oblivion that accompanies sexual orgasm, the ‘little death’ as he had called it in Brave New World and in After Many a Summer, where he wrote: ‘Like all the other addictions, whether to drugs or books, to power or applause, the addiction to pleasure tends to aggravate the condition it temporarily alleviates. The addict goes down into the valley of the shadow of his own particular little death.’ Lewis’s view of the meaning of life, in Michael Ward’s words, was ‘probably to love God and love one’s neighbour’.

Among his favourite themes as a Christian writer were the afterlife, the hope of resurrection, and heaven itself: The Screwtape Letters ends with a patient going to heaven; most of The Great Divorce is set there; The Last Battle ushers the heroes and good Narnians in through the door. Ward says that all this ‘is unconventional in the depth of the imaginative attempts he makes to visualise heaven. He was a great fan of Dante’s Paradiso, but his own vision of the afterlife is less rhapsodically contemplative, and more active. It’s tasting beautiful fruits and running and never growing tired; being welcomed into the heart of reality and hearing the divine accolade “Well done, good and faithful servant,” and becoming a participant in the divine attributes—theosis, becoming a god, sharing in the divine life and becoming adopted into the divine family.’ **** The spiritual viewpoints of the three men are variously embodied in the moon. In Huxley’s Brave New World, inside a Westminster Abbey turned entirely over to worldly pleasure, ‘the sexophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the little death were upon them’.

And it occurs in the first reference to the novel’s drug of social control: ‘There is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon’. But this association between the moon and trippy mindlessness would have seemed to Lewis to miss at least half the picture. Looking at the medieval cosmos in The Discarded Image, he identifies the moon as the very dividing line between us and the divine: At Luna we cross in our descent the great frontier … from aether to air, from heaven to nature, from the realm of gods (or angels) to that of daemons, from the realm of necessity to that of contingence, from the incorruptible to the corruptible. In The Silver Chair, if Michael Ward is right, the moon straddles both realms, as a symbol of mutability sinuously embodied by the Queen of Underland, and of the divine immutability which only the Eeyorish Puddleglum can stoically keep in mind. Kennedy left America and the world moonstruck.

He ramped up the Soviet—American space race in 1962: ‘We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’ And Americans actually did it. As Ward points out, there is some reason to think Lewis would actually have been thrilled—the word of his gardener Paxford. ‘It was a pity that [he] could not have lived a few more years until the moon landing…. How thrilled [he] would have been if he could have seen the rock and dust brought back from the moon!’ On the other hand, Lewis once wrote that the colonisation of the moon would mean ‘The immemorial Moon—the Moon of the myths, the poets, the lovers—will have been taken from us for ever. Part of our mind, a huge mass of emotional wealth, will have gone.

Artemis, Diana, the silver planet belonged in that fashion to all humanity: he who first reaches it steals something from us all.’ The Apollo journey parallels the hubristic Weston’s pioneering flight to Mars in Out of the Silent Planet, which, in transecting the moon’s orbit, violates the boundary between the human sphere and that of the celestial powers. Which is precisely what Kennedy intended by the moon mission of the Sixties: to transform ordinary humans into gods. **** By the time of Kennedy’s moon speech, both Lewis and Huxley were freshly acquainted with death. Like Lewis, Huxley lost his wife to cancer; he said it was like ‘an amputation’. He remarried but was diagnosed with cancer himself in 1960, and then stripped of almost all his possessions and papers in a house fire. Huxley wrote: ‘I am evidently intended to learn, a little in advance of the final denudatio, that you can’t take it with you….

I took it as a sign that the grim reaper was having a good look at me.’ On his last visit to his childhood haunts he wrote, ‘How posthumous one feels’ (and shopping in London he asked, ‘Why do all the manikins look like Jackie Kennedy?’) In an essay on Shakespeare dictated with great difficulty from his deathbed, Huxley reiterated his belief in the visionary life: ‘The world is an illusion, but it is an illusion which we must take seriously…. Our business is to wake up…. We must not attempt to live outside the world, which is given us, but we must somehow learn how to transform it and transfigure it….’ But he was still averting his eyes from death, and his biographer says he approached the end in denial. ‘Death is one of the great unknowns too, and you would have expected him to be more curious, reflective, articulate about it. It wasn’t until virtually the day of his death that he realised the game was up.’ In stark contrast to Huxley and Kennedy, Lewis had long ago come to see life as defined by his Christian faith; and death had played a vital role in the process.

His most recent biographer, Alister McGrath, reconfigures his father’s death in 1929 as a catalyst for Lewis’s shift to belief in God. The experience of tending his dying father was also strangely premonitory for his son, because the two looked so much alike: Lewis could see how he himself might look on his deathbed. Lewis’s Christianity was strengthened and refined through further bereavements, including the loss of Charles Williams of the Inklings in 1945, who died during a perfectly routine operation at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. Lewis had gone there to lend Williams a book while on the way to the regular Tuesday morning gathering, at the Eagle and Child pub just down the road, of the Inklings, the literary circle that revolved around Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Williams. ‘I thought he would have given me messages to take to the others,’ Lewis recalled. ‘When I joined them with my actual message—it was only a few minutes’ walk from the Infirmary but, I remember, the very streets looked different—I had some difficulty in making them believe or even understand what had happened.

The world seemed to us at that moment primarily a strange world.’ Lewis wrote to a friend at the time, ‘Death has done nothing to my idea of him, but he has done—oh, I can’t say what—to my idea of death. It has made the next world much more real and palpable.’ Lewis’s fraught response to the death in 1960 of his American wife of four years, Joy Davidman—from cancer at the age of 45 just like his mother—was recorded pseudonymously in A Grief Observed, with its famous opening line, ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.’ Ward describes it as ‘a whirlwind of sorrow, fear, regret, anxiety’ but adds: ‘It’s not just raw, unassimilated emotion. Lewis is partly, with an eye to his readers, giving what he thinks is an Everyman’s account of grief.’ It’s the closest Lewis came to losing his faith. ‘He entertains all sorts of dark ideas about God and meaninglessness, and whether his faith is all a house of cards that has come tumbling down.

But in part four he’s beginning to recover.’ One of Lewis’s hopes for heaven was to be reunited with loved ones there. Lewis nearly died of a heart attack in July 1963 and was even given the last rites. Michael Ward says: ‘He came round and half-jokingly said that, having been ushered up all the way to the gates of death, it was a bit of an anti-climax for them to be shut in his face and for him to be sent back.’ But some time before his actual death—from complications from an enlarged prostate—he told his brother Warnie, ‘I have done all that I wanted to do and I am ready to go.’ **** How to measure these men, 50 years on? Huxley’s star has been on the wane since his misappropriation by a hedonistic drug culture whose escapism and self-indulgence he deplored even before their zenith in the late Sixties. The English grave he shares with his parents in Compton, Surrey, has been neglected. Most of his 50-odd books, many hugely popular in their time, are now eclipsed by one.

Yet that book, Brave New World, remains with George Orwell’s 1984 one of the great dystopian novels of the modern world, and for many the most applicable to a post-Soviet world of vast populations lulled to torpidity by consumer culture. Lewis is now more than ever a name to conjure with, his Narnia books established as classics (and a film franchise), his works of theology bringing a devoted and perpetually renewed following, his overall work earning him a memorial stone in Poet’s Corner at London’s Westminster Abbey, to be unveiled on 22 November. And Kennedy, whose grave at Arlington is marked by an eternal flame? Thanks no doubt to his assassination, he divides opinion as much as ever, his Presidency seen by some as the high water mark of liberal democratic hopes, by others as a whited sepulchre. You might say that by thus exposing our differences, he still helps define who we are. But the manner of Kennedy’s going transfigured him utterly.

At the 1964 Democratic National Convention nine months after his death, when his brother Bobby arrived on the podium to introduce a film about JFK, the audience stood and applauded for fully 22 minutes before they would let him speak. Almost overcome, Bobby finally managed to talk about his brother’s vision for party and nation. Then he enshrined him in words from Romeo and Juliet: When he shall die 22nd November 1963 | johnrlovett 22nd November 1963 , Aldous Huxley , Banned Books , Brave New World , C.S.Lewis , Charlie Chaplin , Fordism , Henry Ford , History , Hitler , India , Kennedy Assassination , LSD , Lysergic acid diethylamide , Mussolini , Pornographic , Soviet Union ‘Brave New World’ by Aldous Huxley is a book that has been banned more than once since it was first published in 1932. Firstly it was banned in Ireland for being Anti Religion and Anti Family. The same charges of public decency saw it removed from shelves in Maryland schools in 1965 and from schools in Miller Missouri in 1980.

In 1967 India banned it merely for being pornographic. However in 1993 an attempt to have it removed from the California School Reading list was blocked. The charge of being anti religion is at best spurious. It is subject to interpretation. The civilized characters in the book do not practice christianity whereas the savages do. However one of the main themes of the book is who are the real savages? The religion of choice for the alphas is Fordism. The veneration of the great Ford. Henry Ford to you and me. Chosen because he is the father of the modern world and perhaps because he was a bit of a fascist. In 1932 Hitler was still a nut in a uniform shouting to people Munich, Mussolini was an ally against the Soviet Threat, Ford was the bogyman du jour just four years later Charlie Chaplin would target him in ‘Modern Times’. The charge of being anti family is again open to interpretation. While the majority of the books characters are bread by synthetic means and encouraged to have many and varied sexual partners the savages have traditional family groups.

One aspect that is seldom mentioned is that women are encouraged to have regular chemically induced pregnancy cycles to get rid of any broodiness. The charge of being pornographic is by todays standards not one that would hold water. Even compared with what goes on in Bollywood movies ‘Brave New World’ is tame. In fact more is left up the readers imagination than actually described. Perhaps it reflects more on the reader than the writer. The 1993 case claimed the book “centered around negative activity”. Indeed it does however it does not promote them. Huxley wrote the book as a vision of the future that he envisioned. A follow up essay in 1959 he concluded that we are moving toward that society faster than he had thought in 1932. The book does foreshadow many things that have come to pass. Reading the book today it is easy to forget just how old it is. It shares many themes with much later works of Science Fiction and established both themes and concepts that we take for granted today. Huxley himself died of an overdose of lysergic acid diethylamide.

The LSD had been prescribed to help deal with the pain of the laryngeal cancer from which he suffered for the last three years of his life. His death occurred on the same day as that of C.S.Lewis. However neither Huxley or Lewis’ deaths were much reported, too minor and trivial for that day of history. When for many people the world took another step towards Huxley’s vision of ‘Brave New World’. Huxley and Lewis died on the 22nd of November 1963 hours before Lee Harvey Oswald from the window of a school book depository in Dallas Texas assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Search: John F. Kennedy - Biography - IMDb John F. Kennedy Biography Showing all 141 items Jump to: Overview (5) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (1) | Trade Mark (3) | Trivia (88) | Personal Quotes (43) Overview (5) 6' (1.83 m) Mini Bio (1) John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917 in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Rose Kennedy (née Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald) and Joseph P. Kennedy .

John was named after his maternal grandfather, John "HoneyFitz" Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston. John was very ill as a child and was given the last rites five times, the first one being when he was a new-born. He was the second of four boys born to an Irish Catholic family with nine children: Joseph Jr., John, Robert F. Kennedy (called Bobby), and Ted Kennedy (born Edward). Because Rose made Joe and Jack (the name his family called him) wear matching clothes, they fought a lot for attention. When John was young, the family moved from Boston to New York. John went to Choate, a private school. Most of the time, though, he was too sick to attend. In the late 1930s, father Joe became the ambassador to England. He took sons John and Robert with him, as well as his wife and daughters Kathleen and Rosemary Kennedy . John went to Princeton, then Harvard, and for his senior thesis, he wrote a piece about why England refused to get into the war until late. It was published in 1940 and called "Why England Slept".

His older brother Joe was a pilot during the war, and was killed when the bombs his plane was carrying exploded. Not long after that, John's sister Kathleen and her husband died in a plane crash. In the early 1950s, John ran for Congress in Massachusetts and won. He married Jacqueline Kennedy (thirteen years his junior, born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier) on September 12, 1953. He became a father rather late in life. Their first child, Caroline Kennedy , was born on November 27, 1957 when J.F.K. was forty and their son, John Kennedy Jr. , was born on November 25, 1960 when J.F.K. was forty-three. They had a son named Patrick Bouvier, but he died a few days after birth. In 1954, J.F.K. had to have back surgery and in the hospital wrote his second book, "Profiles in Courage". His father always said that his son Joe was going to be President of the U.S.; when he died in World War II, though, that task was passed on to John. He ran for president in 1960 against Richard Nixon and won.

His administration had many conflicts, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis being key examples. In November 1963, he and Jackie (his wife's nickname) went on a trip to Texas. Everywhere they went there were signs saying "Jack and Jackie." On November 22, 1963, John was to give a speech in Dallas, but on his way an assassin hidden on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository opened fire at Kennedy, who was riding in an open car. Hit twice and severely wounded, Kennedy died in a local hospital at 1:00 P.M. The alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald , was captured a short time later after shooting and killing a Dallas policeman, and was himself assassinated before he could be thoroughly interrogated, let alone tried. In just a little bit of irony, considering the death of Abraham Lincoln a century earlier, Kennedy was shot in a Ford Lincoln (Lincoln was in Ford's Theater when he was shot). He was laid to rest on his son's third birthday.

- IMDb Mini Biography By: CR Spouse (1) ( 12 September 1953 - 22 November 1963) (his death) (4 children) Trade Mark (3) He always put his hand in the pocket of his suit Jacket Chewed on end of earpice on sunglasses Boston accent Believed to have been shot by Lee Harvey Oswald , who was later killed by Jack Ruby . Was the first and to date only Roman Catholic US President. Was the youngest elected US President. Was the 35th President of the US, from 1961-63. Attended the installation in Rome of Pope Pius XII with his parents and family. In 1956 his wife Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth to their first child, Arabella Kennedy. She was stillborn. Son John Kennedy Jr. , born 25 November 1960 and died 16 July 1999. His fourth child, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, died from infant respiratory-distress syndrome two days after his birth in the summer of 1963.

Was instrumental in the creation of the space program, and in just eight years (1961-69) the US sent a man to the moon. Appointed his brother, Robert F. Kennedy , as US Attorney General. After his appointment, Congress enacted laws to prevent immediate family members from serving in the President's cabinet. Daughter Caroline Kennedy , born 27 November 1957. Graduated from the Choate School in Connecticut in 1935. Was elected to the House of Representatives in 1946 and to the United States Senate in 1952. In 1940 he wrote the best-selling book "While England Slept", about some of the decisions which led to World War II. Suffered from Addison's disease. He created the Peace Corps. He graduated from Harvard in 1940. Was named after his grandfather, John Fitzgerald, who was elected mayor of Boston, MA, in 1905. In 1955 he wrote "Profiles in Courage", which won the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1957. Served in the United States Navy during World War II.

He was the youngest man elected President, and the youngest to die. Uncle of Christopher Lawford Pictured on a 5¢ US memorial postage stamp issued 29 May 1964 (birthday following assassination). Pictured on the 13¢ US postage stamp in the original Prominent Americans series, issued 29 May 1967 (50th anniversary of his birth). In 1961 he was chosen as Time Magazine's "Man of the Year". During a stopover in Palm Beach, FL, en route to Dallas, TX, on November 17, 1963, a private screening of Tom Jones (1963) was organized for him. It was the last film he saw. During his tenure at the White House, Kennedy, like Herbert Hoover before him, refused to accept a presidential salary. While in office, the family Secret Service code names were: Lancer (The President); Lace ( Jacqueline Kennedy ); Lyric ( Caroline Kennedy ); Lark ( John Kennedy Jr. ). Died November 22, 1963, the same day as C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley .

Although he was the youngest person elected president, he was not the youngest person to become president. That was Theodore Roosevelt , who became president after William McKinley was shot. US Senator from Massachusetts from 1953-61. His Vice President, Texas congressman Lyndon Johnson , campaigned against him for the presidential spot in 1960, and Kennedy later chose him to be his Vice President because he needed Johnson to win over southern voters. John's brother, Robert F. Kennedy , disliked Johnson intensely and the feeling was mutual. Was a natural speed reader. He could read about 2,500 wpm (ten times the average reading speed). He would read six newspapers from front to back while he had breakfast. In stark contrast to his own poor physical health, his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy was a very strong and physically active man who enjoyed hiking and canoeing among other outdoor sports. His favorite film was Spartacus (1960). His funeral took place on the same day as that of Lee Harvey Oswald and Officer J.D. Tippit , the Dallas policeman who was killed by Oswald. His assassination inspired journalist Hunter S. Thompson to create his famous phrase, "Fear and Loathing".

He, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby all died in Parkland Hospital in Dallas, TX. The Lincoln Continental convertible limousine (plate: GG 300) in which he and then Texas governor John Connally and wife Nellie Connally were riding in on the day of Kennedy's assassination is on display in a museum in Dearborn, MI. In the course of his famous 1963 speech near the Berlin Wall, Kennedy had meant to say, "Ich bin Berliner" (I am a Berliner). Since nationalities in German are not preceded by articles, Kennedy actually said, "Ich bin ein Berliner" (I am one with the people of Berlin). The urban legend that it translates into "I am a jelly donut" is a myth, since the pastry is known in Germany as "pfannkuchen" (pan cake). Was portrayed by Martin Sheen in the miniseries Kennedy (1983). The second of only two US presidents to be entombed in Arlington National Cemetery, the first being William Howard Taft . "Black Jack", the riderless horse that served at his funeral, also participated in the funeral ceremonies of Presidents Herbert Hoover and Lyndon Johnson and Gen.

Douglas MacArthur . Coincidentally, "Black Jack" was also the nickname of Jacqueline Kennedy 's father. Brother-in-law of Lee Radziwill He had numerous bizarre distant connections with the 16th US president, Abraham Lincoln . Although privately he suffered from numerous illnesses and ailments, he insisted on a public image of rugged fitness and masculinity. Following his infamous debate against Richard Nixon , he spent a week in Florida tanning and working out on the beach. He was often photographed playing football with younger brother Robert F. Kennedy , working out and playing various sports with his family. In one famous photograph, he is pictured wearing a leather jacket, jeans and sunglasses, casually leaning against a wall. In reality, he was so exhausted from getting over a virus and the job, that he literally fell asleep standing up. Was portrayed by Stephen Collins in A Woman Named Jackie (1991) and Martin Donovan in RFK (2002). Grandson of Congressman John F. Fitzgerald. Both he and his brother Robert F. Kennedy have been portrayed by Martin Sheen . Was an avid reader, and at one point expressed his fondness for the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming .

He said that a particular favorite was "From Russia with Love". For this reason, the producers of the Bond series made From Russia with Love (1963) the second Bond film. Encouraged Kirk Douglas to make the anti-nuclear movie Seven Days in May (1964). Was a Fourth-Degree member of the Knights of Columbus, belonging to both the Bunker Hill No. 62 and the Bishop Cheverus General Assembly. Fourth US president to be assassinated (unsuccessful attempts had been made on Presidents Andrew Jackson and Harry S. Truman , and on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt ) and the seventh president to die in office. He was a big fan of the Boston Red Sox baseball team. This was something instilled in him by his grandfather, Boston mayor John Francis Fitzgerald (aka "Honey Fitz"), who was himself a member of The Royal Rooters, a turn-of-the-century Red Sox fan club. His sister Jean Kennedy Smith was US ambassador to Ireland from June 1993-September 1998. His portrait appears on the US half-dollar coin. The street Rue John-F-Kennedy in downtown Montreal, Quebec, Canada, is named in his honor.

When he died in 1963 he left an estate estimated at $10 million, all of which derives from trust funds established by his father, Joseph P. Kennedy . PT 109--the boat that he commanded during World War II--was mentioned on more than one occasion on the television series, McHale's Navy (1962), Kennedy is referred to, but he is never mentioned by name. On at least one episode, however, PT 109 is seen backing out of the dock next to the one where McHale's PT boat is, although no one can be seen on it. He is mentioned in the lyrics of the songs "Killer Queen" by Queen , "Hey Manhattan!" by Prefab Sprout and "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel . The Oscar-winning "High Hopes" (from A Hole in the Head (1959)) was Kennedy's official presidential campaign song. Uncle of Anthony Radziwill and Tina Radziwill . Considered his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy to be his top advisor and closest friend.

Bobby similarly felt the same way about Jack and was "utterly devastated" by Jack's death in 1963. Friends and family said that, after his brother's death, Bobby was never the same man. Despite their later close bond, he and brother Robert F. Kennedy were not close growing up. This was due, in part, to the eight-year age difference between them. It was not until Jack, during his third term as a Massachusetts congressman, took a seven-week trip through the Far East and parts of the Middle East, and took Bobby (who had just graduated from law school) with him that they grew closer. During the trip the duo discovered their mutual similarities and forged the deep bond that would last until Jack's death. Jack appointed Bobby his campaign manager in 1952 and in 1960 he was reportedly so close to Bobby that while he was President he would often ask "Where's Bobby?" during important meetings, and would finally relax when Bobby showed up. For his part, Bobby's devout loyalty to Jack was often ridiculed and parodied by the media.

Bobby, loving to poke fun at himself, often joked, "If I find the guy who says I'm too ruthless, I'll kill him". During his entire political career, he never once lost a single election. Journalist Jeff Greenfield (who later became a speech writer for Robert F. Kennedy ) described Jack as "the guy who looked like your cool older brother". When he visited Ireland in late June 1963, he became the first sitting US. President to set foot on Irish soil. His 1953 marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy (then Jacqueline Bouvier) was celebrated at St. Mary's Church in Newport, RI, where more than 700 guests were in attendance. The couple later went to Hammersmith Farm overlooking Narragansett Bay (Rhode Island Sound), where a reception for 900 guests was lavishly catered. Best man at the wedding was Kennedy's brother Robert F. Kennedy . Among the ushers were Ted Kennedy , George A. Smathers and Sargent Shriver . Jacqueline's matron-of-honor was sister Lee Bouvier (aka Lee Radziwill ).

Only US President to predecease both his parents: (father) Joseph P. Kennedy (d. 18 November 1969); (mother) Rose Kennedy (d. 22 January 1995). Was the first Irish-American President. Was the first US President to be born in the 20th century. After the parade through Dallas, Kennedy was scheduled to attend a Texas barbecue and then spend the night at Vice President Lyndon Johnson 's ranch. Johnson had organized a whip-cracking and sheep-herding demonstration for Kennedy's entertainment. The Kennedy assassination (Nov. 22, 1963) occurred on a Friday. The 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination (Nov. 22, 2013) also fell on a Friday. His great-grandfather, Patrick Kennedy, was a very poor Irish immigrant who emigrated to America in the fall of 1848. He fell sick from cholera and died in his Boston home on November 22, 1858, exactly 105 years to the day of JFK's assassination.

His younger sister, Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, married English politician and soldier William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, in the spring of 1944. This angered father Joseph P. Kennedy , who hated the idea of his Irish-American daughter marrying a British man. His older sister, 'Rosemary Kennedy', was born with learning deficits and had to be placed in alternative school. This shamed their father, Joseph P. Kennedy , who wanted all of his Kennedy children to be perfect in every way. In 1941 he forced Rosemary to undergo a lobotomy that went devastatingly wrong, causing her to become mentally incapacitated for the rest of her life. During the Cuban Missile Crisis he secretly agreed to remove US missiles from Turkey and Italy, and publicly announced that the United States would never invade Cuba again. He refused to provide air support for the Bay of Pigs invasion, even though Dwight D. Eisenhower had provided air support for the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'etat. He increased the number of American soldiers in South Vietnam, and tolerated an illegal coup d'état there on 1-2 November 1963.

His official height was six foot, although Kennedy himself said he was 5'11". Has an airport named after him in New York. Personal Quotes (43) Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. [5/25/61, in a special address to Congress] I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. [1/20/61 inaugural address, on joint US/Soviet scientific ventures] Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. [1/30/61, State of the Union address] In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon . . . it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, 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. Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

[6/26/63, speech in West Berlin, Germany] Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was "Civis Romanus sum". Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is "Ich bin ein Berliner". All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!". I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics but for our contributions to the human spirit. Victory has a thousand fathers but defeat is an orphan. Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth. [privately, about Richard Nixon ] Richard Nixon's a conservative . . . and if he became President, we could expect Republican policy would switch to the right. He is a filthy, lying son-of-a-bitch, and a very dangerous man. All my life, I've known better than to depend on the experts.

[9/12/62, speech at Rice University, Houston, TX] We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to measure and organize the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. [on Marlon Brando ] The greatest womanizer who ever set foot in Hollywood. [ten days before his assassination] The high office of President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American's freedom, and before I leave office I must inform the citizen of his plight. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. [ Harry S. Truman ] regards an open convention as one which studies all the candidates, reviews their records and then takes his advice. [6/10/63, in a commencement address] The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war.

This generation of Americans has already had enough--more than enough--of war and hate and oppression. We shall do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before the task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we must labor on--not towards a strategy of annihilation but towards a strategy of peace. In the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal. Our problems are manmade. Therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. The civil rights movement should thank God for [ Eugene 'Bull' Connor ]. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln . [after the Bay of Pigs invasion] The advice of those who were brought in on the executive branch was unanimous, and the advice was wrong. And I was responsible. [1962] If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move.

I am not going to push the Russians an inch beyond what is necessary. [in the fall of 1960] I suppose if I win, my poon days are over. [1960, joking with a supporter] Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I'm the only person between [ Richard Nixon ] and the White House. [1961] We are probably strong enough to prevent one nation from unleashing nuclear weapons on another. But we can't prevent infiltration, assassination, sabotage, bribery, any of the weapons of guerrilla warfare. One guerrilla can pin down 12 conventional soldiers, and we've got nothing equivalent. [in 1960, to Benjamin C. Bradlee , on how he intended to announce the appointment of brother Robert F. Kennedy to the position of US Attorney General] Well, I think I'll open the door of the Georgetown house some morning about 2:00 A.M., look up and down the street, and if there's no one there, I'll whisper, "It's Bobby". [November 1961] This chimpanzee who is flying in space took off at 10:08.

He reports that everything is perfect and working well. [1962, to Theodore Sorensen ] If we solve the Berlin problem without war, Cuba will look pretty small. And if there is a war, Cuba won't matter much, either. Some people have their liberalism "made" by the time they reach their late 20s. I didn't. I was caught in crosscurrents and eddies. It was only later that I got into the stream of things. I must say, in defense of our own country, if the United States had not emphasized the military since 1945, the shape of the globe would be very different than it is today. So that those who feel that we overemphasize it might consider the fate of freedom if we had not emphasized it. [June 11, 1963] It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is the problem of one section of one country or another, or deplore the fact that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, than change, peaceful and constructive for all.

Those who do nothing are inviting shame, as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right, as well as reality. [June 11, 1963] If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay? [1962] Too often in the past we have thought of the artist as an idler and dilettante and of the lover of arts as somehow sissy or effete. We have done both an injustice. The life of the artist is, in relation to his work, stern and lonely. He has labored hard, often among deprivation, to perfect his skill. He has turned aside from quick success in order to strip his vision of everything secondary or cheapening. His working life is marked by intense application and intense discipline.

As for the lover of arts, it is he who, by subjecting himself to the sometimes disturbing experience of art, sustains the artist - and seeks only the reward that his life will, in consequence, be the more fully lived. It is only after you wield the powers of the presidency that you get hated. [ Wayne Morse ], [ Jimmy Hoffa ], Al Hayes, etc., all hate me now merely because of one bill. Presidents are bound to be hated unless they are as bland as [ Dwight D. Eisenhower ]. [November 22, 1963, upon arriving in Dallas, Texas] We're really in nut country now. [March 1962] I sometimes think we are too much impressed by the clamor of daily events. Newspaper headlines and the television screens give us a short view . . . Yet it is the profound tendencies of history, and not the passing excitements, that will shape our future. [1960] Once you say you're going to settle for second that's what happens to you in life, I find.

[on Inauguration Day, January 21, 1961] The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavour will light our country and all who serve it - and the glow from that fire can truly light the world. [on Inauguration Day, January 20, 1961] Together, let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce. [to 49 Nobel Prize winners who came for dinner] This is the most extraordinary collection of talent that has ever gathered at the White House--with the possibility of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or watch - we are going back from whence we came. See also

Question: CS Lewis died on 22nd November 1963, the same day that President JF Kennedy was assassinated. Which other famous author also died that day?
Answer: ALDOUS HUXLEY