The ambassador goes home:

...No one could capture in brief comments anyone as brilliant and accomplished as Bill Shannon...

...For those whose lives were closely bound with Bill's, his death leaves a gap that must be permanent...

...Bill was lingering in front of his closet...

...Christopher, and David paid to Bill as husband and father...

...Those who knew him primarily through his writing will miss a kind of moral/political analysis that is always rare and today much needed...

...Bill's deep political interest and insight, his vast memory, and his elegant prose made every book, every article he wrote a pleasure to read and a formidable challenge to those who held contesting views...

...I learned early on not to dispute him on historical facts...

...had he questioned it, I think I would have come to doubt even my own birth date...

...An unusual but not a unique achievement...

...Recalling Lord Acton in a piece he wrote for Commonweal over thirty years ago (April 16,1954), he referred to "academicians who in their eagerness to be fair and to present history in all its many-sided complexity evade altogether the historian's ultimate responsibility for making moral judgment on men and events...

...ambassador, to Ireland...

...Bill said, he made among the editors three very close friends, John Cogley, William Clancy, and myself...

...For example, long before final proof rolled in and before it was popular to say so...

...JAMES FINN James Finn is a former editor of Commonweal and is currently the editor of Freedom at Issue, a publication of Freedom House.dom House...

...Aidan was a seventh-century Irish missionary and it was in this same church that John F. Kennedy had been baptized...

...Bill declared that "Spiro T. Agnew is not qualified for the high office he seeks...

...First, the celebrant informed us that St...

...One must be careful what tie to wear when one is going to have a baby," Bill explained...

...Even when Bill's moral judgments were not explicit, they permeated his political analysis and historical commentary...

...Bill did not evade that responsibility...

...My own memories of Bill are closely entwined with Commonweal where...

...But there did emerge from testimonials delivered at Bill's funeral Mass a sense of his integrity, compassion, wit, elegance, loyalty, and appropriate political detachment...

...Noting Bill's fastidiousness in dress and decorum, he remembered waiting nervously to drive Bill to the hospital where his wife, Elizabeth, was preparing to give birth to one of the children...

...I remember Bill coming into the office to write a column and in short order turning out a highly polished, thoughtful piece...

...These qualities were evident in his prose as they were in his person...

...During the funerary tributes paid to Bill Shannon, Senator Edward Kennedy revealed that a principal reason that President John Kennedy had received the warm reception he did when he visited Ireland was that many of the words he delivered had been composed by William Shannon, Bill himself was later to receive high praise and much affection from the Irish when, under the Carter administration, he served as a very engaged and imaginative U.S...

...And for those who could join in the message of the funeral Mass celebrating the passage of Bill Shannon to another life, we can truly say: our prayers go with you...

...Aidan's Church in Brookline, Massachusetts on September 30, the many strands of his professonal and personal life were brought together...

...John Oakes then read the loving tribute that Elizabeth Shannon and Liam...

...Bill's piece, however, was studded with dates and statistics that most writers would have retrieved only from reference books, but which Bill easily found in his remarkably capacious memory...

...John Oakes not only spoke of his deep admiration for Bill's professional integrity as editorial writer for the New York Times but of his own long friendship...

...Other tributes came from colleagues who knew Bill as a journalist, historian, columnist, editorial writer, and teacher...

...What made his writing of more than the day's or month's passing interest was that it was grounded in a deep moral sense...