When the President was assassinated in 1963, Mrs. Mildred Hesch was one of thousands of Americans to send a note of sympathy to the Kennedys. She is a lifelong resident of Chicago and Lake Michigan Beach and today at the age of 93 still makes her home in Hagar Township.
Mrs. Hesch was recently notified that her letter will be featured in a new book that draws upon such sympathy correspondence to illustrate what Kennedy meant to the nation. In Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation, author Ellen Fitzpatrick includes 250 of the most “intimate, heartfelt, eye-opening responses” to the President’s death, arguably one of the most traumatic events of the twentieth century.
As the mother of a one, three, and five year old, Mildred Hesch directed her letter to the Kennedy children John and Caroline, ages two and five. She explained that the President’s fatherhood was one of the qualities that she had trusted most about his leadership. Mrs. Hesch wrote in her conclusion:
“Your mother may well wonder how to explain us, the citizens of the sixties, to you, when you grow to a knowledgeable age. This is how I will try to tell such a bitter page in history to our children. We needed your dad to lift us from the tired, trite, sophist era of politics and politicians. We needed him to remind us all that it could be fashionable to be good and aspiring, strong and witty, determined and unbending, hopeful and charitable – in varying degrees as the need demanded. We needed to be reminded. He did this. I hope that time will prove that enough of us have continued to remember his high hopes for humanity, and individually we have considered the effect our actions have on those about us. We shall certainly be grateful, with history, for having known such a president.
Most Sincerely,
Signed Mildred F. Hesch
(Mrs) Robert L. Hesch”
Letters to Jackie is currently available in the North Berrien Historical Museum Gift Shop.
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