A 40-Year Memory - Bobby Kennedy Dies

Just about 26 hours after he was shot, Bobby Kennedy died. For many, since I can't believe I'm the only person who responded that way, this, linked forever with Martin Luther King's assassination, was one of those overpowering turning points of my life. I would guess that for many it was the final straw that led to much of what we think of as the rest of the 60s- the Chicago convention riots, the rapid expansion of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the somewhat over-played hedonism of Woodstock, and the final straws in the Kent State and Jackson State killings.

By the time Watergate ended with Nixon's resignation, it was all just a postscript to what we lost in June 1968.

Would Bobby have been a good president? Would the nation have healed differently? Who knows. It is hard to remember but at the time of his death Bobby was only 42 years old. He would have been 43 just after the election in November. Barack Obama (like Bill Clinton) will be 46 at his inauguration, if elected. No, I don't mean to suggest that Obama is another Bobby. The nation and world are different places in spite of some of the more obvious similarities. Bobby was seen by many of us as perhaps the last best hope of our youthful generation.

He was not a polished campaigner. He had a slight stutter from time to time. He was inherently shy. His speeches were given with passion but not usually with great rhetorical skills. He just seemed real. He seemed to care. He seemed convinced that something different needed to happen.

Yes, he had a history of a strong Cold War anti-communist, a ruthless person and was part of the administration that expanded the Vietnam War. And yet he changed his mind. His brother's assassination forced him into some deep re-appraisals.

So far I have not again looked on any political leader in the same way. At some deep and unconscious level I have realized as I have worked on this painful anniversary, that every one has been in one way or another compared to Bobby. Fair or unfair isn't the question. He embodied in his own imperfect way a politician who was willing to struggle with the big issues and stand up for them. Only Jimmy Carter after leaving office can come anywhere near what Bobby seemed to show.

Yes, I am sure he would not have lived up to those ideals and visions as he does in memory. Teddy Kennedy warned us of that in his eulogy at the funeral (below). But Bobby pointed us to a different and hopefully better way of being a nation. He reminded us in his own personal way that we do have values and morals to live up to as a unified nation. Had he been elected he would have been, even far more than Bill Clinton was called, the first multi-racial candidate who was seen by all as a hope for unity in diversity.

Bobby loved a quote from Aeschylus that he used, off the cuff, in his famous speech in Indianapolis when King was killed:

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

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.

Perhaps in our grief 40 years ago we missed something that Bobby urged us to look for and which I have a feeling he himself found. That wisdom which comes from the "awful grace of God" can lead us to living that new way of life that he called us to see.

So, Bobby, 40 years later, many of us still miss you, and for many of us you are just another person in history. As a nation, we may still be waiting for what you brought to us so seemingly simply. I close with Teddy's closing words in New York on June 8 when Bobby's funeral was held.

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:

"Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not."