And Now It's On to Chicago...
Today would have been Robert Kennedy's 80th birthday.
Robert Kennedy emerged from the shadows of his brother's presidency to take on the three great moral injustices of his day — inequality, poverty, and war. For those of us who remember the hope for a better America that Kennedy virtually personified back then, it is almost impossible to think of him today and not wonder what might have been.
Kennedy's aggressiveness, even combativeness, gave him a reputation for being ruthless, which he vehemently denied — sort of:
People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.
But his drive only served his finer qualities: honesty, compassion, intelligence, genuineness. An admirable, remarkable man, to be sure, but not unique. When he died, so young, it was a tragedy for his family and a loss for the nation. But the 60s were blessed with remarkable leaders — John Kennedy and Martin Luther King among them. Surely there were more right behind them, somewhere. So when Robert Kennedy died, I never doubted for a minute that we would see his like in politics again.
I was wrong.
A tribute to Kennedy in today's Boston Globe sees it this way:
Looking back over the decades since the death of Robert Kennedy, I realize that for many years we simply assumed that another comparable leader would appear to battle for the causes he cared about. Every four years, we've been bitterly frustrated by the failure of our candidates for the White House to live up to RFK's standards. Now that I am much older, I realize what I should have known in 1968 -- that Robert Kennedy was irreplaceable.
But I think the truth is more complex than that, and we, the people who choose the men and women who lead us, and who define the spirit and character of this nation, have to bear much of the blame.
The Globe article might have oversimplified the reason for the problem, but it articulates the problem itself quite well:
These days, when I have had enough of listening to so-called political leaders who cut corners and waffle on fundamental issues like poverty and war, I close my eyes and I see the youthful and passionate RFK. I see him as he was in the '60s, going to South Africa to take on apartheid, to Delano to support grape workers, to Appalachia to show us its desperate poor, speaking out against the war in Vietnam.
I hear him speaking boldly, without fear, urging us to become involved, to make a difference. I open my eyes and I feel unspeakably sad about what we lost.
Yes, and what we have been left with.
