RFK still asking the right questions
Robert F. Kennedy died on June 6, 1968. I heard the awful news as I stood at the bus stop on my last day of fourth grade. America never felt the same to me after that.
Bobby Kennedy seemed like our last best hope, at least in my fourth-grade mind. He seemed like the only presidential candidate who could stop the war, stop the violence, stop the madness. He seemed like the only person who could unite us and heal us.
I was wrong, of course. Fifty years later, I know that’s too much to expect of any single human being. Whichever political leader we see as a savior is bound to fall short and disappoint, if not worse.
Even the most transformational leaders in our history — Washington and Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Reagan and Obama — didn’t stop the violence, couldn’t keep us together for long.
The candidates we elect almost never turn out to be the elected leaders we want or need. That’s on us.
We spend a lot of time — especially those in the news media — trying to hold politicians and public officials accountable. It’s vital work in a democracy. But our greatest political leaders spend a lot of time trying to hold us accountable — to each other and to our ideals.
In the spring of 1967, Kennedy visited sick and starving children living in three counties in the Mississippi Delta.
He came to Mississippi as a member of a U.S. Senate subcommittee on employment, manpower and poverty. He left as America’s most powerful advocate for the unemployed, overpowered and impoverished.
“We spend $75 billion a year on armaments and $3 billion a year on dogs,” Kennedy said that day. “We have to do more for these children who didn’t ask to be born into this. How can a country like this allow it?”
The day after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Kennedy spoke in Cleveland about “this mindless menace of violence” in America.
“We seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike,” Kennedy said. “We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire . ...
“What has violence ever accomplished? Violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.”
The candidates we elect almost never turn out to be the leaders we need. Still, I think RFK would have become one of those transformational leaders.
Kennedy had what all of our greatest political leaders had — a clear mind, a compassionate heart and a compelling faith in we the people.
The challenges of Kennedy’s times — poverty, violence, prejudice, divisiveness — remain the challenges of ours.
“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States,” RFK said on the night King was assassinated, “it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.”
Fifty years later, the question stands.