us President Kennedy had been shot and probably killed in Dallas. I was devastated. Just four months before, I had seen him in the Rose Garden, so full of life and strength. So much of what he did and said—the inaugural oil painting wholesale address; the Alliance for Progress in Latin America; the cool handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis; the Peace Corps; the stunning line from the “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech: “Freedom has many difficulties, and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in”—all these embodied my hopes for my country and my belief in politics.After class, all the students in oil paintings the annex where our class met walked back to the main building. We were all so sad, all of us but one. I overheard an attractive girl who was in the band with me say that maybe it was a good thing for the country that he was gone. I knew her family was more conservative than I was, but I was stunned and very angry that someone I considered a friend would say such a thing. It was my first exposure, beyond raw racism, to the kind of hatred I would see a lot of in my political career, and that was forged into a powerful political movement in the last quarter of the twentieth century. I am thankful that my friend outgrew it. When I was campaigning in Las Vegas in 1992, she came to one of my events. She had become a social worker and a Democrat. I treasured our reunion and the chance it gave me to heal an old wound.After I watched President Kennedy’s funeral and was reassured by Lyndon Johnson’s sober assumption of the presidency with the moving words “All that I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today,” I slowly returned to normal life. The rest of senior year passed quickly with DeMolay and band activities, including a senior band trip to Pensacola, Florida, and another trip to All-State Band; and lots of good times with my friends, including lunches at the Club Café, with the best Dutch apple pie I’ve ever had, movies, dances at the Y, ice cream at Cook’s Dairy, and barbeque at McClard’s, a seventy-five-year-old family place with arguably the best barbeque and unquestionably the best barbeque beans in the whole country.For several months that year, Painting From PhotoI dated Susan Smithers, a girl from Benton, Arkansas, thirty miles east of Hot Springs on the highway to Little Rock. Often on Sundays, I would go to Benton to church and lunch with her family. At the end of the meal Susan’s mother, Mary, would put a pile of peach or apple fried pies on the table, and her father, Reese, and I would eat them until I practically had to be carried away. One Sunday after lunch, Susan and I went for a drive to Bauxite, a town near Benton named for the ore used to make aluminum, which was dug out of open pit mines there. When we wholesale oil painting got to town we decided to drive out to see the mines, going off the road onto what I thought was hard clay soil, right up to the edge of a huge open pit. After walking around the site, we got back in the car to go home, and our mood took a sharp downward turn. My car’s wheels had sunk deep into the soft, wet ground. The wheels turned over and over, but we didn’t move an inch. I found some old boards, dug down behind the wheels, and put them in the space for traction. Still no luck. After two hours, I had burned all the china oil painting tread off the tires, it was getting dark, and we were still stuck. Finally I gave up, walked to town, asked for help, and called Susan’s parents. Eventually help came and we were towed out of the huge ruts, my tires as smooth as a baby’s behind. It was way past dark when I got Susan home. I think her folks believed our story, but her dad sneaked a look at my tires just to be sure. In that more innocent time, I was mortified.As my senior year drew to a close, I became increasingly anxious about college. For some reason, I never even considered applying to any Ivy League school. I knew just where I wanted to go, and I applied only there: the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.54