late last night I watched a documentary on the immediate aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Though no one's behavior was inexcusable, the men involved acted in sometimes animalistic ways...RFK, LBJ...all of them. The women, on the other hand, were all the paragons of class.

Though Kennedy's shattered body was in a casket in the rear of the same plane, with Jackie sitting nearby still wearing clothing stained with her murdered husband's blood and brains, Lyndon Johnson refused to allow Air Force One to leave Dallas until he had been sworn in as President. He also wanted Jackie standing next to him as the oath was being administered (he may have been cold and calculating, loose-limbed and shambling, but he was anything but stupid). Despite her sorrow, when an aide told her of Johnson's request, Jackie responded, "Of course, it's the least I can do."

After the plane departed Lady Bird Johnson walked past all of the angry and suspicious Kennedy staffers gathered in the plane's rear and sat with Jackie, comforting her in a way no other person present - perhaps no other person in the world - could have at that moment.

When Johnson called Rose Kennedy - from Air Force One flying from Dallas to Washington - to offer his condolences, Mrs. Kennedy answered the call by saying "Hello, Mr. President..." Though he'd been surrounded by hundreds of people in the past few hours, she was the first person to call him that. Though she must've been inconsolable, at that moment she remembered who he was now - and, more importantly, who SHE was.

When JFK lay in state at the White House, a military honor guard was stationed around his catafalque. When Jackie saw the men arranged with their backs to their dead commander (thereby symbolizing their place as his guardians in death, though they could not protect him when he was alive), she asked them to turn around and face the casket, so her dead husband wouldn't be so lonely. Though it represented a unique and immense contradiction of protocol, of course they did as she asked.

These things symbolize why, if forced to choose, I'd prefer the company of women to that of men at almost any time. They are simply more humane.