"Now Bobby wanted to restore that authority, wanted to help return the country to its better angels. When he talked about the weakening of liberalism, he was talking about policy but also about this: Liberalism had subsisted on moral authority, on helping the poor and weak and voiceless and marginalized. He felt it could not survive otherwise. Neither, he thought, could America. And so Bobby Kennedy wasn't running for president to topple Lyndon Johnson or to change policy or even to help the people he so desperately wanted to help. He wasn't running to bring rationality to governance, as dispassionate Eugene McCarthy seemed to be doing, or to depersonalize government after Johnson, and John Kennedy for that matter, had personalized it. Bobby Kennedy, whose own mother had called him sanctimonious, felt he was running to save the nation's soul."
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Activists from the United StatesUnited States Attorneys GeneralAnti-war activistsUnited States presidential candidates, 1968United States presidential candidates, 1964
Original Language: English
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Sources
Neal Gabler, Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 (2020), p. 366
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy
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