This Saturday, November twenty second, will mark 62 years since President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Those of us who are old enough, have strong memories of where we were and what we were doing on that tragic day.  What follows, is my string of memories of that sad time. I hope you will find it both, interesting and instructive.

REMEMBERING JFK: LESSONS FROM A NOODLE SHOP IN NAHA

I ordered a copy of True Compass even before it was published. When Ted Kennedy died, I finally pulled the book from where it had waited in the basket beside my chair. As I reached the passage in which he recounts how he learned of his brother’s death, a tide of old memories rose.

For many in my generation, the question “Where were you when you heard?” requires no thought. The memory arrives unbidden.

In November 1963, I was living in Hawaii and working as an engineer for the System Development Corporation, a RAND spinoff. That month I found myself at Naha Air Base in Okinawa managing a small Air Force project. Midway through the assignment, a vicious bout of amoebic dysentery flattened me for days. Confined to my room in the visiting officers’ quarters, surviving on little more than Paregoric prescribed by a sympathetic flight surgeon, I finally awoke before dawn on November 23rd—November 22nd in the United States—weak but ravenous and grateful the cramps had eased.

When I reached the VOQ office to ask about food, the usually cheerful Okinawan night manager sat slumped, staring into a small transistor radio.
“Kennedy-san is gone!” he said.
“Gone where?”
“Dead. Shot. Killed.”

Not wanting to believe him, I ran across the street to the officers’ club. In the basement bar, a group of young airmen were gathered around a flickering Armed Forces Television set. Walter Cronkite’s steady voice confirmed what we wished not to hear: the President was dead.

The room fell into a silence so complete it felt ecclesiastical. Pilots and navigators who prided themselves on composure stared at the screen, their faces registering shock, anger, disbelief. The operational implications would come soon enough. In that moment, these airmen were simply young Americans absorbing the loss of a leader they admired.

When the club’s kitchen failed to offer relief for my hunger, I took a taxi into Naha. The city still bore the scars of war twenty years gone—thatch roofs alongside crude concrete structures, tiny wood-frame shops crowding the narrow streets. I found a small noodle shop open and stepped inside. A single battered television on a shelf carried Japanese coverage of the assassination.

Laborers, women, even children filled every seat, watching the news with quiet intensity. When the owner—a middle-aged man in work clothes—took my order, he set down a bottle of whiskey and two dusty glasses. He poured, lifted his drink, and said simply, “Kennedy-san.”
I raised mine. “Kennedy-san. Arigato gozaimasu.”

When I finished eating, he insisted on pouring another. As families began to leave, each paused to bow toward me. Representatives approached with gentle touches to my shoulder and whispered, “Kennedy-san. Gomenasai.” I felt as though we were mourning a shared relative.

As I reached for my money, the shopkeeper hurried around the counter and embraced me—a gesture startling in its warmth. In halting English, he told me he was honored to provide my meal without charge, “because of our shared loss.”

Walking the two miles back to the base, I pondered what I had witnessed. In a remote city of the Ryukyu Islands, among people with little material wealth and a language far from my own, John Kennedy was revered. His portrait hung in homes and shops. A local teacher had translated “Ask not what your country can do for you…” into the island dialect and asked her students to memorize it. America, in their eyes, was embodied in the youth, intellect, and moral courage they saw in Kennedy.

I did not question it then. Like so many, I was carried by the psychological and political magnetism of his leadership—charm matched with intellect, idealism tempered by pragmatism.

And that is where the op-ed portion of this memory resides.

For years after Kennedy’s assassination, the world saw no figure whose personal appeal and political clarity might equal his. But occasionally, a president emerges who rekindles hopes abroad, shifts the world’s perception of America, and demonstrates the fragile but essential power of U.S. leadership.

When this happens, the lesson of that noodle shop becomes relevant again: charisma may draw attention, but it is judgment that earns respect.

John Kennedy’s presidency was short, but its defining moments—particularly his refusal to heed reactionary calls to “nuke” Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis—showed a rare blend of courage, restraint, and intellectual discipline. His choice to blockade rather than bomb ended what historians rightly call “the most dangerous 13 days in history.” It was leadership grounded not in impulse but in careful appraisal of risk and consequence.

Any president, especially in turbulent times, would benefit from studying those chapters in True Compass where Ted Kennedy offers an unvarnished portrait of his brother’s political and moral compass. The archives of the Kennedy Library, too, contain a template of judgment: how to listen to hawks without succumbing to them, how to project strength without courting catastrophe, how to command not only a government but the respect of people continents away.

These are not partisan lessons. They are presidential ones.

And I learned them first not in Washington, but in a humble noodle shop in Naha—where strangers grieving a distant leader taught me that American leadership, at its best, extends far beyond our shores and deep into the lives of people we may never meet.