By Tom Leonard in New York Published: 6:01PM GMT 08 Mar 2010  John F Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy moments before the US president's assassination in 1963 Photo: REUTERS  They include messages from a church organist who cried so much that her tears soaked the keys, another American who compared it to the Crucifixion and an 11-year-old who wrote every week for six months.  The letters and the intense emotions they contain illustrate the importance attached to the president's death in Dallas in 1963, widely considered one of the defining moments in modern American history.  Mrs Kennedy acknowledged the letters a month after his death but most were destroyed.  However, at least 200,000 pages were sent to the John F Kennedy Library in Boston where they have finally been catalogued by Ellen Fitzpatrick, a historian.  Previous attempts to publish them would have had to contend with the requirement of getting permission from each writer but Fitzpatrick selected just under 250 of them for a new book.  Jane Dryden, the schoolgirl who wrote more than two dozen letters from her home in Austin, Texas, told the First Lady she had set up an altar with candles in her bedroom.  She and her friends then pretended to be her, Teddy and Bobby Kennedy, she said.  "They say I look like you, too, although I am blonde and wear glasses," she wrote to Mrs Kennedy.  "I know that you hate the whole state of Texas. I do, too," she wrote in January 1964. "I wish I lived in Washington DC, where maybe I could maybe see you standing on your porch."  Mary South, then at middle school, told Mrs Kennedy she had learned the president had been shot just as she sat down to play the church organ at her Catholic school in Santa Clara, California.  "I tried to tell myself he would be all right but somehow I knew he wouldn't. ... the tears wouldn't stop," she wrote two days after the shooting.  "The slightly damp keys were hard to play but I offered it up that the president might live." She said she burst into tears again when a researcher for the new book rang her and read out the letter, adding that she wrote to Mrs Kennedy because "I just wanted her to know how upset we were and how helpless we felt".  One of the youngest correspondents, a boy scout named Monroe Young Jr III, noted that "some mean man" had also killed his father, a soldier.  His letter to Father Christmas requesting a bicycle had subsequently gone missing so he asked Mrs Kennedy to pass on his name when she wrote to him.  Fitzpatrick, a university professor, said she was surprised at the eloquence of so many of the writers.  "There have been so many books about the Kennedy assassination but here are the voices of those voiceless, everyday Americans," she said.  Marilyn Davenport, a New York housewife, described herself as "just an average American" but included her telephone number "if you ever want to talk".  Barbara Rimer was 15 when she wrote, promising that "I will give body and soul to perpetuate the very ideals President Kennedy lived for".  Now a university dean, she said she had forgotten her letter.  "When I read it, I thought, 'Wow, was I naive!'. I don't know how many people write letters to the president today or to Michelle [Obama], but it seemed incredibly naive," she said.
Previously unpublished condolence letters to Jacqueline Kennedy sent by 1.5    million ordinary Americans have provided new insight into the depth of    public grieving over the assassination of John F Kennedy.