We lost something very important when John F. Kennedy died

When I was 13, I entered a period of weirdness that lasted a long time.

At Fourteen

In fact, it may never have ended.

I'm certainly not saying anything about it was unique -- sometimes I think most young adolescents are barely civilized -- but for a period of a few years, what seemed to make me happier than anything else was to be left alone. Every time my family was going somewhere, my greatest joy was to be allowed to remain at home by myself.

Yeah, I was a strange kid.

I missed out on a lot of family outings, and being left home alone peaked in the summer of 1970 when my family took a combination vacation/business trip for my Dad's job that lasted six weeks and took them all the way to California and back. I was going to summer school that year.

I missed out on a lot of things staying home, but most of them have disappeared from my memory. One that I do remember -- and I'm not sure I had a choice in the matter -- was the last full weekend in November 1963.

That Friday afternoon at school -- I was a freshman at Woodson High School in Fairfax, Va. -- the principal made two announcements over the public address system. At about 2:40 p.m., he told us President Kennedy had been shot. Twenty minutes later, he told us the president was dead.

I went home from school to see that all three television networks were on the story full-time and that done of them were breaking for commercials. Talk about strange. That continued all through the weekend, and the nation watched live on Sunday as Jack Ruby shot alleged presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

Waiting in line to pay last respects.

On Sunday, my parents drove downtown to get in line to view President Kennedy's casket in the Capitol Rotunda. I didn't go with them. I don't remember if they asked. I seem to recall having a bad cold that weekend, but as I said, I was weird then.

The capitol was supposed to close at 9 p.m., but as the "Washington Post" recounts in a wonderful piece about the weekend called "50 years later: Four shattering days," when 9 p.m. came, the line of people waiting to pay final respects to the murdered president was still more than two miles long.

They kept the Capitol open all night.

My mother told we they had spent nine hours in line on a really cold Saturday, and she told me it was amazing how quiet and well-mannered people were. No one tried to jump the line to save time. One man was walking ahead and people were jeering at him, but he repeated over and over, "I'm going to the drugstore."

The next day, we all watched on television as they buried the president.

A month later, I did go with my family to the Lincoln Memorial for some sort of commemorative service for President Kennedy. President Johnson spoke. I don't remember much about it, except that it was the only time in my life -- before or since -- that I saw the president of the United States in person.

We didn't know it, but everything changed in November 1963.

Since then, the New Frontier became the New Nixon. Johnson's War on Poverty became Reagan's War on the Poor. And the compassion shown toward the least fortunate among us by presidents from FDR through LBJ ultimately became Mitt Romney's remarks about the "47 percent" who won't take responsibility for their own lives.

But if you really wonder how much things have changed, try to find an old-fashioned liberal Democrat. When Bill Clinton was in the White House, he used to say, "We're all Eisenhower Republicans now."

One thing we're hearing a lot of as we approach the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's death is that he was a phony. We're told that his father was a crook with Mafia connections and he bought his son the presidency. We're told he cheated on his wife and we messed up the Bay of Pigs.

But what they don't say is the tradition of public service of the Kennedys. Joe Kennedy told his children he didn't want them living off the family's money or working to expand the fortune.

They served. Even the youngest of them -- Edward Kennedy -- served for 40 years as a U.S. senator after Chappaquiddick pretty well destroyed his chances of ever being president. And he will be remembered as a great senator, one of the true lions of the Senate.

One thing that truly has changed since JFK was president is that we no longer seem to attract the best minds to work for the public good. Government was the place where it was possible to do the most for the common good.

Twenty years later, right-wing hero Reagan was pretty well ridiculing that idea. With his usual simplistic way of looking at the world, Reagan said "The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away."

I'm not sure I've ever heard anything more cynical. It's an old-fashioned "Show me the money." Well, my father had one of the best minds I ever knew, and he worked for the Air Force for nearly 40 years. He made it up to GS-15, the highest of the regular Civil Service ranks, and he was offered jobs several times by defense contractors who would have doubled or tripled his salary.

My dad believed that at least some good people who believed in our country should put country ahead of money. There weren't many like him, and that's one reason things changed ... and not for the better.

Me? I guess I'm still weird.