While Dallas anguishes over marking the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in
2013, the president’s nephew has a message for the city: Get over the collective angst, already. “The people here loved him,” Anthony Kennedy Shriver, the son of JFK’s sister Eunice and Sargent Shriver, said in Dallas Saturday. “I spoke with a man who saw him 20 minutes before he died, and he said he still gets chills, thinking about that day. It’s not the fault of the people of Dallas.
“What the community did with the [Sixth Floor Museum] was fantastic,” Shriver (pictured in photo by Jeanne Prejean) went on. “I took my daughter and my mom there a couple of years before she died. She was really moved by it. … [The assassination] was not the city’s fault … just as I’m not responsible if one of my family members … is a drug addict; that’s not a reflection on me. Nobody in my family has ever spoken in anything but a loving way about the people of Dallas.”
Shriver, who was in town raising money for his Best Buddies nonprofit for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, has often been mentioned as a potential Democratic candidate for governor of Florida, where he lives. He said he prays every day and is “open” to the possibility of running in 2014, if that turns out to be God’s plan for him.
