The President would lean down and put his arm around the old man’s shoulders and say: “Now, now, Dad, it’s all right, it’s okay.” But Joe Kennedy was still crying when they left the room. Obviously if the man hadn’t had a stroke, he wouldn’t have burst out crying. Until his stroke he had been a bear. Nevertheless, the emotion was there, and it would have been there whether he had had a stroke or not. That was what the sight of John Glenn did to Americans at that time. It primed them for the tears. And those tears ran like a river all over America. It was an extraordinary thing, being the sort
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