Gathering marks 50th anniversary of RFK’s death

ARLINGTON, Va. — Fifty years after his death, Robert F. Kennedy’s words remain powerful. At ceremonies Wednesday at Arlington National Cemetery, speakers paid homage to his oratory by simply reciting excerpts of his speeches to a crowd of several thousand that gathered to remember him.

Civil rights leader and U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia quoted Kennedy’s speech after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which occurred just two months before Kennedy himself was shot and killed.

“What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred but love, and wisdom, and compassion for one another,” Lewis said.

Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the Parkland school shooting in Florida, read a quote from a 1966 speech Kennedy gave in apartheid-era South Africa.

“First is the danger of futility: the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills — against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. Yet many of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man,” Gonzalez said.

Kennedy, a former attorney general remembered for his efforts to advance civil rights, ran for president in 1968 and had won the California primary when he was shot June 5 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died the next day.

A Navy veteran, he is buried at Arlington near his brother, former President John F. Kennedy.

Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Skakel were married in 1950 at St. Mary’s Church in Greenwich, where she was raised,

At the start of Wednesday’s ceremony at the cemetery amphitheater next to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Kennedy’s daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, said the family takes comfort in the fact that so many people shared their sense of loss at her father’s death.

“It is tough to lose a parent,” Townsend said, recalling mornings in the family home where she awoke to her father’s routine of doing pushups while listening to Shakespeare. “It was very painful to lose my father.”

Leigh Vogel / Getty Images for RFK Human Right Ethel Kennedy places flowers at the gravesites of Jacqueline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, and Patrick Kennedy on Wednesday.