"This week, as in the days after Robert Kennedy's death, people kept asking the same unanswerable question: Had he lived, would he have defeated Hubert H. Humphrey for the Democratic Presidential nomination, and if so, would he have beaten Richard M. Nixon? What is clear is that after the assassination, the country took a turn toward more conservative policies that have persisted since. Social justice and the end of the war in Vietnam were long postponed. The "final and bitter irony in the murder of Robert Kennedy," James Reston wrote in The New York Times on June 9, 1968, was that "instead of the new man he wanted for a new age, we are getting the two most familiar candidates in the race, and instead of reassuring the dissatisfied elements of the nation, we are rewarding the satisfied." But even death does not absolutely close such issues, and now some of Robert Kennedy's younger acolytes, like Peter Edelman and Eli Segal, have moved into the Clinton Administration, to try once again to put into effect some of the ideas he espoused."
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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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R. W. Apple Jr. in 25 Years. The Vision of Robert Kennedy Lives On. (7 June 1993)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy
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