50 years later, the example of RFK still matters
When sitting at a desk in school as a substitute teacher, I was reading from Chris Matthews’s new book “Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit.” One of my students asked “Who was he? A rock star?” As my jaw dropped I had to remind myself Bobby Kennedy has been gone for 50 years. I gently gave him a thumbnail sketch on who RFK was and why many of us, even those of us who were children at the time, would still care for him. I no longer take it for granted everybody knows who he was.
Can anyone who wasn’t there understand why millions lined the railroad tracks when Sen. Kennedy’s body was carried from New York to Washington to be buried besides his brother in Arlington? Urban blacks and rural whites, young hippies and older conservatives, farm workers and Native Americans, the rich, middle class and poor, men, women and children; in short everyone. Could you imagine the same universal outpouring of affection for anyone now? I can’t.
Robert Francis Kennedy was a younger brother of President John F. Kennedy. A campaign manager and fiercely loyal to his brother, JFK appointed RFK to be his attorney general at the urging of their father, keeping a trusted family member close by who would have his back. It was Bobby who urged against an invasion of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was Bobby who would push for direct involvement in the Martin Luther King Jr. civil rights movement where Jack was slow to go. Ultimately, while John F. Kennedy saw many things in political terms, Robert F. Kennedy would grow to embrace the human costs of race relations, poverty, and the war in Vietnam.
Less than a year after President Kennedy’s assassination, Robert Kennedy would seek to funnel his grief into his own run for public office. In 1964, as senator from New York, then in 1968 to challenge JFK’s successor Lyndon Baines Johnson for the ’68 Democratic presidential nomination. His goal would not only be to pick up the torch where “The New Frontier” left off, but to expand the glow from that flame.
Robert Kennedy wanted to show it was possible to have a major political leader, a president, who could think beyond the next election, whose concerns for humanity grew from the depths of a wounded soul, not from this afternoon’s poll. A man whose powers of expression reached the people of his generation, not by pandering, but by demanding and inspiring. He never talked down to his audience, never sought to toss the red meat to a base. He would not be by current standards a good politician.
I think of his words on April 4, 1968, speaking to a black audience in Indianapolis minutes after getting word of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
“For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with — be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. …What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another; and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.”
It was his speech to youth on June 6, 1966, two years to the day prior to his own assassination, RFK gave his famous “Day of Affirmation” speech to students at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. This speech is often called the greatest of his career. He challenges the youth to be the hope of the future:
“This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.”
During his 82 days of campaigning for president, ending with his murder in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968, at the hands of a 22-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, he would connect with many people in many places with, “Some men see things as they are and ask why?; I dream things that never were and ask why not?”
His words, his grief, his evolution as a person and political leader have little parallel in the American landscape. It’s no wonder RFK still matters and his example is worth following even 50 years later.