We Prayed for Another Outcome; Now Let's Pray for the Guy Who Won

The flag at the Oakland Temple on the day of Jacquie and Garrett's wedding.

That's what Americans do. I've seen it all my life. We fight tooth and nail during the campaign, but, after the election, we start trying to work together to make things better. I've seen my parents pray for people whom they would never have considered supporting in the election. But it made no difference that they had voted for someone else. This person was our President now, and that meant we prayed for him and his family and all his advisers. We prayed for their health and their safety. We prayed for them to receive inspiration and wisdom. And when bad things happened, we even wept for them.

I was less than three months from my thirteenth birthday on 22 November 1963. Mother kept me home because of a cold. She put me in my parents' bed with a stack of my favorite books and some other things, maybe Kleenex, or something like that. I was ignoring the little B&W TV that was on. It was only a soap opera, after all, and those are pretty easy to ignore.

Then a fellow said something I'd only ever heard a few times before. "We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin." I looked up. My mother seemed to pause in the next room in whatever she was doing. The man continued after a pause. "Shots have been fired in the vicinity of President Kennedy's motorcade in Dallas." I didn't hear much after that. Mother was running into the bedroom, already beginning to cry, even as the man said that the President's condition was unknown. I heard her say, "Oh, poor Jacquie!" Then she said something about the kids whose names everyone knew -- Caroline and John-John.

Everybody who recalls that week will tell you similar things. Many of us recall vividly the exact tattoo that the drums played when the President's casket was being drawn by horses towards the cathedral. We saw people of all ages, colors, and conditions standing on the sidewalk and watching the casket go by. All of them looked as though they'd lost someone who was personally important to them. Many of them wept openly and comforted each other. I looked at my parents. They were crying, too. That's how you learn what you're supposed to feel at such a time. You look at your parents. And, if you have good ones as I did, then you instantly feel that what you've learned is right, just as you feel something is right when the Holy Ghost testifies to your heart of its truth. And after that you aren't merely imitating them on such occasions when you shed tears of your own. You are genuinely feeling what they felt.

Our little TV was hardly off at all for about a week. We watched it whenever we weren't sleeping or out of the house. We listened carefully, even reverently, to what was said, even if it had been said before. A couple of days after the assassination I was standing in the middle of the living room floor, looking right at the TV, when an announcer explained that we were about to see the accused assassin being moved from one jail to another. I had never seen such a person before, and I watched intently, hoping to catch a hint of what made him tick. Just as he came into view, someone else rushed in front of the camera and I lost sight of him and the marshalls who were escorting him. There was a loud sound and a lot of scuffling, and I could tell that something was going wrong. Then the announcer said almost shrilly, "He's been shot! He's been shot! Oswald has been shot."

Now please try not to judge me in what I'm about to say here. It was somewhat entertaining to live through that week. Yes, I felt some of the horror of all that was happening, but there was a great deal of the feeling of adventure permeating nearly every moment of that week. As a childish student of History, I'd read about Mr. Lincoln's assassination many times. I had not yet learned about those of Garfield or McKinley, and I learned later that many Americans had no recollection of those events. But there was something almost - dare I say it? - fun in living through such drama, even just as a spectator. I wouldn't have felt at liberty to have those feelings of fun and adventure if it weren't for the constant example of my parents and some of their adult friends which calmed me and reassured me that it was safe to feel what I felt. Then, too, it is probable that it wasn't all completely real to me at first, so that it felt like a shockingly realistic movie or TV show. And movies and TV shows were for entertainment. So I felt entertained, even though I shed a few tears with my parents over the course of those sad days.

I was not constantly "a sober child" like the prophet Mormon, but I did have more sober moments than some kids my age. Throughout my childhood, many adults seemed to notice that and they often took me into their confidence about their feelings and thoughts about things of importance. I loved this kind of treatment. Often I would come in from playing outside with the kids to sit still and listen to the adults talk. And it was by listening to my parents and their friends, most of them from the Twin Falls First Ward, that I came to realize just how real it all was, and that I came to see it as not entertaining at all, but just an island of sadness and amazement in the school year and in my life.

And so I will continue to pray for the safety, health, and wisdom of my country's leaders without any regard whatsoever to their political affiliation. After all, everyone has family and everyone wants to live happily in a family setting. We should all have that much empathy, anyway.

Finally, we should see the President as Francis Scott Key saw him, as a symbol of the nation, itself. That was why Key prosecuted Richard Lawrence so vigorously in 1835. Both his caplock pistols might have misfired (missed fire,) but he had tried to kill the president. In the mind of Mr. Key, this was an attack on the nation, itself.