Bobby

The title of our blog comes from Robert Kennedy, or really Aeschylus, whom Robert quoted in a speech just after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. 

"Let us dedicate ourselves to
what the Greeks wrote so many years ago
to tame the savageness of man
and make gentle the life of this world.

I've posted below the text to an eulogy for Kennedy that I am giving in speech class tomorrow.

George Bernard Shaw said, “There are those that look at things the way they are and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” Robert Francis Kennedy was fond of poetically quoting others in order to make a point or express a belief. Robert, or Bobby, as he was popularly known, was a son, brother, husband, politician, and a voice for the weak and disenfranchised. Of his eight siblings, one, John, became President, and another, Ted, became and still is a United States Senator for Massachusetts. John got involved in politics first as a Senator, but Bobby followed him to Capitol Hill, where he became famous in his own right for aggressively prosecuting the corrupt Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa.

In 1961, when John became President, he appointed brother Bobby as Attorney General. Instead of building political capital for his own future, Bobby risked not only his career but his life, pursuing the Mob and fighting valiantly for civil rights. During the potentially disastrous Cuban Missile Crisis, he proved so valuable President Kennedy remarked, “Thank God for Bobby.”

Stricken with grief after JFK’s assassination in 1963, Robert became despondent and depressed. Within time, however, he recovered enough to realize that his duty was to the American people. Therefore, he ran successfully and became a Senator in 1965. While there, he grew increasingly disdainful of the glad-handing, smoke-filled room bargaining style of the Senate, focusing his efforts instead on community revitalization projects in New York’s inner cities, and dragging Senate committees to investigate poverty in the Mississippi Delta and farm labor unrest in California among other things.

The year 1968 marked probably the most significant chapter of his life. That year, Lyndon Johnson’s plans to fight poverty had disintegrated under the pressure of fighting Vietnam, an issue that had consumed public dialogue and even sparked domestic terrorism. The cities were burning and blacks were struggling to be made equal Americans. Robert announced his candidacy in the upcoming Presidential election and began a campaign that would take Americans by surprise. He campaigned against the Vietnam War and against military aggression in general. He was a proponent for the rights of minorities. He railed against the poverty in both cities and rural areas of America. With an almost demonic rage, crowds would swarm his campaign cars, trying to touch him and in the process ripping off his cufflinks, taking his shoes, and once, smashing his face against a curb knocking out a tooth. But he thrived off the crowds, struggling against the divisions in America, promising a new day and new age in a time wrenched apart by social and cultural revolution and discord.

While at a campaign stop in Indianapolis in April, RFK learned off the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. He was speaking to a largely black, inner-city crowd, to whom he had to break the news. In his impromptu speech from the back of a pickup truck, he quoted the Greek poet Aeschylus. “Even in our sleep, pain which we 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.” That awful night, riots broke out in 60 major cities, but not in Indianapolis.

Two months later, Bobby won the California primary, moving from an outside candidate to front-runner alongside Vice President Humphrey. As he left the victory party, a man named Sirhan Sirhan shot Kennedy and killed him. In the aftermath, the Democratic Party became split and Richard Nixon became President.
I’d like to leave you with a quote from Robert himself that effectively summarizes what he stood for.

“Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."