RFK Column

“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.” Robert Kennedy, quoting Aeschylus on the night of the assassination of Martin Luther King

The night before we were released from St. Procopius grade school, its last graduating class, Robert Kennedy was declared dead. Death hung like a pall over 1968, Martin Luther King, riots, and the Thursday night death tally in Vietnam, when over one hundred young men were dying per week. I think something died in our land that first week of June. I recall being moved by the little knots of people standing by the tracks for his funeral train, even nuns pulled children out of school to pay their respects.

His father considered him the runt of the litter and took years for him to accept his son’s abundant talents. To gain his mother’s approval, he was the most devout Catholic of the children. So, he had a dual nature: a “ruthless” side that mirrored his father and a religious side, attracted to the world of the spirit. He would serve Mass at different campaign stops and his family said their daily prayers. That side grew much stronger as he faced his grief at losing a second brother to death.  The side of Catholic social justice grew in those last few years. 

RFK was his brother’s campaign manager and Attorney General, where he walked a political tightrope on civil rights. JFK entrusted him to conduct a negotiation with the Soviet embassy that helped ease the tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as he admirably demonstrated in his book 13 Days. On the 26th of October, the Soviet leader made an alluring offer:  removal of missiles in Cuba in exchange for a promise that the United States would never invade Cuba, as well as the removal of U.S.  missiles in Turkey. Robert Kennedy himself actually delivered the United State's message to the Soviet ambassador in Washington, as he accepted the offer but demanded the missile removal had to be secret.

Obviously, he was from a rich family, but he developed a concern for the poverty that beset our land. As Senator, he visited poor areas of his new locale of New York. He toured the Mississippi Delta, where he wiped away tears after venturing into a family’s shack and meeting a child with a distended stomach who was listless from malnourishment. Kennedy traveled to eastern Kentucky’s coal country, where a doctor told Kennedy that 18 percent of the population was underweight and 50 percent suffered from intestinal parasites.

In 1966, the Richard Goodwin helped write a speech for South Africa. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.' "

Even though he participated in Vietnam’s escalation, he came to oppose the war: “past error is no excuse for its own perpetration.”

RFK developed a sense of being a citizen of a great country, where all deserved fundamental fairness. That sense if threatened. Perhaps what I lost in 1968 was a sense of optimism about the future, that glowing sense of forward movement that lit our land with JFK. “There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.”