Like every sentient American of my generation, I remember where I was when John F. Kennedy was shot in November 1963. A professor who was trying to put some physics into the heads of a classroom of liberal arts majors told us the news. Proving just how old he was, he recalled the assassination of William McKinley (in 1901). I remember the kindness in his voice, the agony he conveyed that this was our lot. Our young president was dead.

Follow up:

By the time Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was felled by an assassin’s bullet in 1968, I was living in Washington, D.C., and watched from Capitol Hill as fires broke out around the city. Heavy trucks carrying national guardsmen drove up K Street alongside my apartment. In Atlanta, there was an almost presidential funeral, but in Washington, we were under curfew.

King died in April. Two months later in the summer twilight, I stood in a crowd at the entrance to the Arlington Memorial Bridge as the caisson carrying Robert Kennedy’s body slowly made its way to the cemetery. His assassin had found him in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after he won the California Democratic primary.

Had those three men lived to the fullness of their years, I believe this world would be a better place. People everywhere who shared their dreams still pause at the mention of their names.

Of course, one doesn’t have to be liberal to attract an assassin: segregationist George Wallace suffered for 26 years from an attempt on his life while he campaigned for the presidency in 1972; Gerald Ford dodged a bullet, and Ronald Reagan was seriously injured. After recovering from a head wound, his press secretary, Jim Brady, turned his zealotry from Republican politics to gun control. Brady has lived in constant pain since 1981, but, regrettably, his example and hard work have hardly loosened the deathgrip of the gun lobby.

So I am not the only American who fears for Barack Obama’s life. Every day. He is at risk far more than other candidates, because he is the living personification of the qualities that marked King and the Kennedy brothers—a sense of a different kind of future, the ability to inspire the young and the old through rhetoric, and a natural grace.

To Hillary Clinton, this must seem so unfair. Not long ago, people hailed her husband as the embodiment of that same legacy. Her accomplishments surpass those of her husband when he was elected president, but that was in 1992, and another world (and a terrorist attack and a war) away. Ambition bleeds through her charm. When in a debate Obama said, “You’re likable enough, Hillary,” I laughed, but I felt the sting.

So, when Senator Clinton reminded the editors of the Sioux Falls, SD, Argus Leader that Robert Kennedy had been campaigning for the Democratic nomination in June 1968 when he was assassinated, she said what has been on the minds of many people of our generation. The month was what she hoped would register, but all we can hear is the A word.

Maybe we should be relieved that she said it. Mike Huckabee implied the same thing in a much cruder way at the National Rifle Association convention on May 17, and he didn’t get nearly enough heat. He apologized to Obama, Clinton, so far, only to the Kennedys. She is pleading for time. Few contingencies would give her the nomination, but the A word is one of them. And under those circumstances, we might be stuck with this Republican regime for the rest of our natural lives