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EDITORIAL Robert Kennedy recalled, in his own words
Millions of words have been written about Robert F. Kennedy, with
tens of thousands more emerging now to mark the 30th anniversary of his
assassination. Something about him remains compelling, even for those not yet
born at the time of his death.
To express that something is no easy task, and legion
is the number of essay and editorial writers who have tried and failed.
Perhaps, therefore, it would be best to fall back on the words of Kennedy
himself to remind us of a time when calls to honor and courage and our
nations most noble ideals didnt yet sound like the setup for Warren
Beattys cynical raps in the movie Bulworth.
These excerpts are taken from RFK: Collected Speeches
(Viking, 1993).
In his most famous address, Robert Kennedy spoke on June 6, 1966,
at the University of Capetown in South Africa. His remarks ostensibly addressed
the apartheid system in that nation, but he was clearly mindful of the
continuing racial turmoil in the United States:
Only earthbound man still clings to the dark and
poisoning superstition that his world is bounded by the nearest hill, his
universe ended at the river shore, his common humanity enclosed in the tight
circle of those who share his town and views and the color of his skin.
It is your job, the task of the young people of this world, to strip the
last remnants of that ancient, cruel belief from the civilization of man.
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 love of ease.
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history
is shaped. 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.
If there was one thing President Kennedy
stood for that touched the most profound feelings of young people around the
world, it was the belief that idealism, high aspirations and deep convictions
are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programs. It is
not realistic or hardheaded to solve problems and take action unguided by
ultimate moral aims and values, although we all know some who claim that it is
so. In my judgment, it is thoughtless folly. For it ignores the realities of
human faith and of passion and belief -- forces ultimately more powerful than
all of the calculations of our economists or our generals. While
efficiency can lead to the camps at Auschwitz, or the streets of Budapest, only
the ideals of humanity and love can climb the hills of the
Acropolis.
Kennedy also touched on the themes of racial and class healing in
his announcement of his candidacy for the presidency on March 16, 1968.
As a member of the cabinet and a member of the Senate, I
have seen the inexcusable and ugly deprivation which causes children to starve
in Mississippi, black children to riot in Watts, young Indians to commit
suicide on their reservations because theyve lacked all hope and feel
they have no future, and proud and able-bodied families to wait out their lives
in an empty idleness in eastern Kentucky. I have traveled and I have listened
to the young people of our nation and felt their anger about the war that they
are sent to fight and about the world that they are about to
inherit.
Vietnam, and more generally the cause of peace, was the other
transcendent issue with which Kennedy was associated. His first major address
on the subject took place at Kansas State University two days after his
announcement of his candidacy.
I was involved in many of the early decisions of Vietnam,
decisions which helped set us on our present path. It may be that effort was
doomed from the start; that it was never really possible to bring all the
people of South Vietnam under the rule of the successive governments we
supported -- governments, one after another, riddled with corruption,
inefficiency, and greed; governments which did not and could not successfully
capture and energize the national feeling of their people. If that is the case,
as it may well be, then I am willing to bear my share of the responsibility,
before history and my fellow citizens. But past error is no excuse for its
perpetuation. Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by
which to live.
I am concerned that at the end of it all, there will be
only more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of
the bitterness and hatred on every side of the war, more hundreds of thousands
of Vietnamese slaughtered; so that they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: They
made a desert and called it peace.
If we care so little about South
Vietnam that we are willing to see the land destroyed and its people dead, then
why are we there in the first place?
The cost of the wars present
course far outweighs anything we can reasonably hope to gain by it, for
ourselves or for the people of Vietnam. It must be ended, and it can be ended
in a peace for brave men who have fought each other with a terrible fury, each
believing that he alone was in the right. We have prayed to different gods, and
the prayers of neither have been answered fully. Now, while there is still time
for some of them to be partly answered, now is the time to stop.
Perhaps it is romantic nostalgia to see in those words the promise
of a man who saw both what was wrong with America and what was right; and who
might have done something to end the former and to bolster the latter. Clearly
he was a creature of his times. His use of sexist language, for example, will
sting the ears of those for whom Kennedy is an avatar of inclusion.
But as he lay dying on the floor of a kitchen in the Ambassador
Hotel in Los Angeles 30 years ago, his last words reportedly were: Is
everyone all right?
National Catholic Reporter, July 3,
1998
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