So was his intellect; when he quoted authors like Edith Hamilton you could tell it was from his own reading, not from a ghost writer's quote cards. Some of his quips and epigrams still salt our speech: A rising tide lifts all the boats . . . Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm . . . Life is unfair. It was not on my 21st birthday that I really achieved my majority as a citizen. It was when he spoke of the torch being passed ''to a new generation.'' Like millions, I was enough of an idealist to believe that we were the new brooms that could sweep away the old cruelties and old inertia. Like millions, I was enough of a pragmatist to believe that it would take a cool head and a cool eye to show the way. He had both.

He was quick, too. Those televised news conferences were tennis matches, and how he covered the court! That's something you've never seen - a President who stands out there at the net, again and again returning every ball. If I sometimes thought him mistaken, I never thought him lazy or stupid or careless. Neither did his detractors. We saw him in action; we knew what we had.

On the day 25 years ago when that President of the United States was assassinated, I was not much older than you are now. But already I had known, twice, what it is to vote for a Presidential candidate with a joyful heart. One candidate lost, the other won and both have been tarnished by time. Never mind. I believed then, as I believe now, that they were the best my country had to offer.

Would that President have captured your imagination and your hopes the way he did mine? I can't even guess. But I hope that one day, best of all while you are young, you too will find your own standard-bearer and your own New Frontier.