Back when we had real leaders

The Laramie County Democrats celebrated the 90th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's birth tonight. Not a 90th birthday party, as Kennedy's been dead for 44 years. He's been gone now almost as long as he was on the planet.

Party Chair Mike Bell displayed part of his Kennedy collection. He wrote his master's thesis on Kennedy's first election campaign in 1946. He's traveled to Boston to interview some of Kennedy's old pol pals.

We ate birthday cake and told stories from the 1960 campaign trail and remembered where we were on that most sad of days, Nov. 22, 1963. Watched part of a Kennedy documentary. Raffled off some Kennedy memorabilia to raise funds for the county and state parties. We'll need lots of dough to keep the Democratic torch alive in 2008.

Most of us were probably thinking sad thoughts. I can't look at a Kennedy picture without turning morose. JFK was more sinner than saint. He was a ruthless politician from a ruthless political family.

But he was a leader at a time when we needed leadership. He was a hero to this fourth-grader, watching the D.C. inauguration from 3,000 miles away on the eastern Washington prairie. When he was shot down in Dallas, I was in the seventh grade and lived on another prairie, this one near Wichita in southeastern Kansas.

Now I'm much older, living on the edge of the Wyoming grasslands, thinking of what might have been.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories. Most Kennedy conspiracists give me the willies. But I get chills when I hear these lines about the Kennedy and King assassinations in Steve Earle's song "Conspiracy Theory" from his Jerusalem CD:

What if you could have been there on that day in Dallas
What if you could wrestle back the hands of time
Maybe somethin' could have been done in Memphis
We wouldn't be livin' in a dream that's died