I am not going to write very much tonight. The President is dead.

Kennedy was shot in Dallas this afternoon. He was pronounced dead at 1:00 PM Central Time at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Vice President Johnson took the oath of office on Air Force One at 2:38 PM, with Jacqueline Kennedy standing beside him in her pink suit, her husband’s blood still on it.

I’ve been sitting with this notebook for two hours trying to figure out what to write. I keep thinking about the speech in May 1962. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade.” His voice, measured and confident, telling us what we were going to do. We are going to the Moon because it is hard and that is exactly the reason to do it.

He won’t be there when we get there. If we get there. If the program he launched survives his death and whoever comes next has the will to carry it forward.

I don’t know what Johnson will do with the space program. He’s a Texas pragmatist, a dealmaker, a man of the Senate. He was the one who pushed the NASA budget through Congress in the first place — he understands the strategic value. But Kennedy owned this personally in a way few presidents own anything. It was his. His speech, his commitment, his name on it.

The country is in shock. I went to the grocery store this afternoon, after the news came, and no one was speaking above a murmur. Betty came home from her sister’s and she’d been crying. Harold came to the fence and just stood there for a while. He didn’t have anything to say and neither did I.

Kennedy was 46 years old. Younger than my father.

I’m going to close this notebook and sit with Betty. The space program will still be there tomorrow. Tonight is for something else.