“She is the mother of two fatherless children and she was walking into the history of this country because she was showing everybody who felt old and helpless and without hope that she had this terrible strength that everybody needed so badly.”

Like a lot of people, last week I reread the story that made Jimmy Breslin famous. It has his greatest hallmark: writing about the little guy, in this case Clifton Pollard, who was paid $3.01 an hour to dig the grave of his assassinated president. But it is this line, about the patrician first lady, that stays with me. Maybe it’s because Breslin, with his working-man’s soul, was feeling the same thing as everyone lining the cortege route: that their sad, lonely queen would show them the way out of the darkness.