The Kennedy Brothers: Rest in Peace

This weekend, people came to Arlington National Cemetery and gravitated to the Eternal Flame where President Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline are buried. From there, they made the short pilgrimage to the adjacent clearings on the grassy hill to the simple white crosses where the president's brothers were buried, Robert Francis Kennedy in 1968, and Edward Moore Kennedy this very summer.

"I thought the three graves would be closer together," said Terri Headrick, a 54-year-old woman from Phoenix who had come to Arlington after praying at National Cathedral. "But this doesn't really matter," she said, referring to the Kennedys' souls and not the ephemeral contents of their coffins. "They are together. Finally."

Once, this hauntingly beautiful piece of land was Robert E. Lee's beloved farm. No longer. As an American flag waved in the breeze of a warm autumn day in front of the majestic Lee home in silent rebuke to the tragic mistake made by Lee in choosing the Confederacy over Union – slavery over emancipation -- visitors came from all over the world to pay their respects to the higher ideal.

Headrick surprised herself by choking up when asked what she remembered of JFK. "I know Dwight Eisenhower was a great hero of World War II," she said. "But I (remember) when Jack Kennedy ran for president. He was this young, exciting thing!"

Hubertus Wernersbach, a visitor from Germany, was in elementary school in Frankfurt when President Kennedy came to Berlin in 1963 and electrified a continent by proclaiming his solidarity with those who defied Communism in a simple declaration: "Ich bin ein Berliner," the young American president vowed.

Did he remember that speech, I asked Wernersbach.

"Remember it? Why wouldn't I?" he replies, "It was one of the greatest moments in German history. It gave us hope."

In his 1961 inaugural address, Kennedy asserted that in the long history of the world, few generations "have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger." Those words are etched in stone a few feet from the Eternal Flame. They represent a noble sentiment, especially because of the thought that followed: JFK said he didn't shrink from this awesome responsibility, but welcomed it, adding that the faith, energy, and devotion America devoted to this task "will light our country and all who serve it."

Yet Kennedy's soaring rhetoric is not the last word. The history of the new century has shown that it is the obligation, onerous as it might seem, for every generation of Americans to defend freedom, and to do so at great cost. My mission at Arlington this weekend was not solely to talk to people who came to pay their respects to the Kennedys. It was also to visit the gravesite of a man I knew who died in Afghanistan, a journalist-turned-U.S. Marine named William Cahir.