RFK: Fifty Years On

"I guess there's no point in being Irish if you don't realize that, sooner or later, the world is going to break your heart."
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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When Moynihan said that, he was speaking of Jack Kennedy, but it applies to Bobby, too. I found out very young that my heart would be irrevocably broken.
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This is the anniversary that always depresses me, the forty-ninth one I've lived through. Fifty years ago today, in the early hours of June 5, 1968, Someone who shall remain nameless fired a .22 caliber gun behind the right ear of Robert Francis Kennedy. After lingering for twenty-six hours in extremely critical condition, he passed away early the following morning, June 6.
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Bobby Kennedy was my first political hero. It was around this time that I started paying close attention to the news and the people making the news. I knew he was running for the presidency and I was an enthusiastic supporter. Ideology had not a thing to do with it; I was, after all only two months shy of my tenth birthday. The fact of the matter is that I just liked the guy. All day long on the fifth, all anyone could do was think of -and pray for - Bobby. I went to bed that night with the nightmare images of him lying on the cold floor of the Ambassador Hotel Kitchen, barely conscious and bleeding from a wound to the back of the head. Early the next morning my father came into mine and brother Pete's bedroom to awaken us with the grim news: "Senator Kennedy died a few minutes ago."
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 He was so unlike the caricature of what we've come to expect from most politicians: his voice was soft and he spoke with a slight lisp. In spite of his much heralded "toughness" there always seemed to be an almost fragile vulnerability about him. When talking to an audience of farm laborers or inner city youth, he could quote George Bernard Shaw or the ancient  Greek playwrights Aeschylus and Sophocles without showing even the slightest hint of condescension. Said his most recent biographer, Evan Thomas:

"He seemed so young when he died. He was young - only forty-two, a year younger than JFK had been upon his election as the second youngest president in the nation's history. But Robert Kennedy somehow seemed younger, more boyish. With his buck teeth and floppy hair and shy gawkiness, he sometimes came across like an awkward teenager. At other times, he was almost childlike in his wonder and curiosity."
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He also had the political courage to tell the American people the hard and bitter truths they would have preferred to ignore. During the ill-fated campaign of 1968, during a `question and answer session after a speech, a smug member of a mostly college-age audience sarcastically asked the Senator just who he thought was going to pay for all of these proposed programs of his. Robert Kennedy looked the guy dead in the eye and said, "You are."

They just don't make Democrats like that anymore, do they?
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To think where we might have gone but for the bullet of one deranged and confused mad man. A second Kennedy administration (which would have ended on January 20, 1977) would definitely have prevented five-and-a-half years of Nixon and Watergate and might very well have prevented the dawning of the insane right wing era that began exactly four years later with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan - and has continued for thirty years - an era which has ruined a country that used to be a nice place in which to live. We are a better people because, for one brief shining moment, Bobby Kennedy walked among us. I wish he had been allowed to stick around, don't you?
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On the night of August 28, 1964, at the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, Robert F. Kennedy was greeted by the delegates with a thunderous ovation that lasted almost a half an hour. When the crowd finally calmed down, he paid tribute to his late, martyred brother, dead only nine months. Quoting Shakespeare in a passage from Romeo and Juliet, what he said that evening resonates across the decades. It might also be said for Bobby himself:
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When he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of Heaven so fine,
That all the world will be in love with night,
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
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I, too, am in love with the night. There's a lot to love.

Tom Degan

Goshen, NY

SUGGESTED READING:

Robert F. Kennedy His Life and Times

by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.