Robert F. Kennedy

"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black."

"And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people."

"The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one — no matter where he lives or what he does — can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours."

"What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason. Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily — whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence — whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded."

"Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire."

"Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them. Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul."

"For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all."

"When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force."

"Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence. We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge."

"Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution. But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can. Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again."

"There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?"

"For many, in a society that seems always to crave new myths and new idols, Robert F. Kennedy is a rapidly fading memory a quarter-century after his death, brittle with age. For many others, the third of the nation that was not yet born when he was killed, there is no first-hand memory at all. But to a remarkable number of Americans, Robert Kennedy remains a vivid presence, the archetype of the charismatic leader. Visiting Indian reservations, campaigning for Cesar Chavez, talking to children in Appalachia, pledging himself to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with blacks in their crusade for equal rights, he had an ability, rare in a glib and shallow trade, to convey real compassion. Often words would fail him and he would run them together or just move his mouth while nothing came out. Sometimes he would cry."

"He had a slashing, vengeful political style, and many could never forget that he had worked for Joseph R. McCarthy as a young man, or the way he browbeat -- indeed, all but blackmailed -- Gov. Michael V. DiSalle to throw Ohio behind John F. Kennedy in the 1960 Presidential nominating race. Robert Kennedy knew about that streak in himself, and he knew that others knew about it, too. His defense was to mock himself. He wrote this to a friend in Vietnam: "I'm spending a lot of time defending you against all the people back here who keeps saying you're too ruthless." Yet often he seemed frail and vulnerable, as at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City, when he stood on the podium as the great throng beneath cheered and cheered, for his slain brother but for him, too."

"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."

"In Margolick’s formulation, the greatest tragedy of 1968 lies in the political devastation wreaked by the dual assassinations of King on April 4 and Kennedy on June 6. In the short span of eight weeks, the country lost its most imaginative moral leader and its most progressive politician — and with their passings the chance of a meaningful national renewal all but disappeared. This calculus of loss rests on the supposition that the two men shared enough ideology and political motivation to foster a close working relationship following a Kennedy victory in the 1968 (or perhaps 1972) election. We can only speculate about the probability of such a victory or the nature of a hypothetical Robert Kennedy administration — or about how the administration would have addressed matters of war, poverty and social justice with King advising the new president either openly or behind the scenes. But the author’s projection of such a progressive alliance is intriguing."

"Interestingly, Margolick, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, demonstrates that a solid M.L.K./R.F.K. combination would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the decade. He devotes much of the book to a painstaking reconstruction of each man’s evolving moral and political consciousness — a dual narrative that reveals convergence but very little evidence of a developing relationship, either personal or public. Kennedy and King were neither friends nor formal political allies. While they had known each other since October 1960, when Robert Kennedy had phoned a Georgia judge to plead for King’s release from jail, their subsequent personal contact was limited to a few cursory meetings and phone calls. Indeed, during their last four years they seem to have met only once, at a congressional subcommittee hearing on urban poverty."

"In a year that seemed determined to shake Americans’ confidence in the foundations of their society, Kennedy’s death at 1:44 a.m. Pacific time on June 6, 25 hours after he was shot, was one of the biggest inflection points. Sirhan Sirhan’s bullets not only demolished the hope for a savior candidate who would unite a party so fractured that its incumbent, President Lyndon B. Johnson, had decided not to seek re-election. Coming just two months after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they also fueled a general sense — not entirely unfamiliar today — that the nation had gone mad; that the normal rules and constants of politics could no longer be counted on."

"Certainly, there is no denying that history would have been different if Kennedy had survived to win in November, and especially if he had managed to fulfill a campaign pledge to quickly wind down the Vietnam War. "If he gets to be president, then there’s no Nixon," said Peter Edelman, a professor at Georgetown University’s law school who worked as a legislative assistant to Kennedy. "I know this as much as anybody could know, because he was gone, but he had every intention of ending the war right away." "And of course then there’s no Watergate," he added. This is the rosiest version of what could have been: plausible, but unprovable. Perhaps the better question is not what would have happened if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated — inherently speculative — but what did happen because he was. His death had a powerful and immediate effect on the American political psyche, intensified by its proximity to King’s. Why, many people asked, should they continue to pursue change peacefully, through the ballot box and nonviolent protest, when two of the biggest evangelists of that approach had been gunned down?"

"Thurston Clarke, author of The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America, said a direct line could be drawn between Kennedy’s assassination and the social breakdown of August 1968. “What happened at the Democratic convention, which was terribly wounding for years to come — I can’t believe there would have been that kind of protest and that kind of violence if Kennedy had been the presumptive or actual nominee,” he said. As one segment of a disillusioned populace turned to violence, another retreated from politics altogether. Kennedy’s death "really did persuade many people to seek private solutions, to retreat, to achieve a kind of personal redemption, and that had a very, very long-lasting effect on American life," Dr. Baker said, pointing to the Back to the Land movement and cult phenomena like Jonestown. "People just turned away from the public square and said that any kind of national reconciliation and progress was hopeless through the political process." Voter turnout in 1968 was only slightly lower than in previous elections: 60.7 percent of the voting-age population that year, compared with 61.4 percent in 1964 and 62.8 percent in 1960, according to the Census Bureau. But moving forward, it fell off a cliff, into the mid- and low 50s, and didn’t rebound for decades. When Mr. Clarke was promoting his book in 2008, he said, he spoke with many readers who told him that Kennedy’s death "still haunted them.""

""I heard again and again that they felt the loss of Bobby Kennedy more keenly even than the loss of John F. Kennedy — that they felt the country would have been even more different had Robert Kennedy been president than if John F. Kennedy had lived."

"(How has the city changed over the decades?) In the 70's we were so engaged - that's a hard one for me, to try not to discount the losses, to see what is hopeful. I feel a lot of times that we've lost leadership. There's no Cesar Chavez or Robert Kennedy. We've lost the great inspiring role models that gave us ideas about a bigger self. We started to value the celebrity, the person who got his."

"It was a great shock to me-I want to say this on the air-that the Attorney General did not know-Mr. Robert Kennedy-that I would have trouble convincing my nephew to go to Cuba, for example, to liberate the Cubans in the name of a government which now says it is doing everything it can do but cannot liberate me."

"(What are your present feelings about Robert Kennedy? Do you think he has changed? What do you think of him as a presidential candidate?) Robert Kennedy has made enormous progress along those lines he deems most desirable, and will almost certainly-especially considering the enormous proportion of women in the United States who have almost nothing to do but vote-be our President one day. I am curious indeed to know if he will then find it expedient to visit any American state and inform them that "apartheid is evil.""

"the whole political structure in Washington is partly designed to protect the Southern oligarchy. And Bobby Kennedy's much more interested in politics than he is in any of these things, and so for that matter, is his brother. And furthermore, even if Bobby Kennedy were a different person, or his brother, they are also ignorant, as most white Americans are, of what the problem really is, of how Negroes really live. The speech Kennedy made to Mississippi the night Meredith was carried there was one of the most shameful performances in our history. Because he talked to Mississippi as if there were no Negroes there. And this had a terrible, demoralizing, disaffecting effect on all Negroes everywhere. One is weary of being told that desegregation is legal. One would like to hear for a change that it is right! Now, how one begins to use this power we were talking about earlier is a very grave question, because first of all you have to get Eastland out of Congress and get rid of the power that he wields there. You've got to get rid of J. Edgar Hoover and the power that he wields. If one could get rid of just those two men, or modify their power, there would be a great deal more hope. How in the world are you going to get Mississippi Negroes to go to the polls if you remember that most of them are extremely poor, most of them almost illiterate, and that they live under the most intolerable conditions? They are used to it, which is worse, and they have no sense that they can do anything for themselves. If six Negroes go to the polls and get beaten half to death, and one or two die, and nothing happens from Washington, how are you going to manage even to get the ballot?"

"His message, his voice, his attitude, his every appearance and intent were clear. He sought to make America great again."

"McCarthy was a Republican. The Democrats, however, have skeletons in their own closet and it's worth remembering them, too. For example, Democrat Woodrow Wilson's Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, who was just as rabid an anti-Communist as McCarthy, did far more to repress free speech and political freedom than McCarthy ever attempted. It wasn't a Republican president who locked up thousands of loyal Americans of Japanese descent in concentration camps for years. It was Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. And it wasn't a Republican who wiretapped and snooped on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but Democrats John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, who signed the order as Attorney General."

"We should all express our thanks to Senator Robert Kennedy for his constant work on behalf of the poor, for his personal encouragement to me, and for taking time to break bread with us today."

"He would dare us to leave yesterday and embrace tomorrow."

"We still strive to answer his insistent challenge to do good and to do better."

"In a time of division, more than any American, he bridged those gaps, reaching out to starving families in the Mississippi Delta and to factory workers in Chicago, to migrant workers in Northern California and struggling teens in Harlem. He touched their lives. And just as important, they touched his."

"We had the impression that Bobby was simply Jack's ruffian. Jack could sit above it. Bobby was the one who wanted action. There was an intense dislike in CIA for Bobby."

"Well, I think there was always a very close relationship between him and Bob Kennedy, an unusually close relationship. I think we all relied...Bob Kennedy did a very fine job as general counsel for the committee in conducting these investigations. He exhibited complete lack of any fear. He exhibited a complete indifference to the time and the energy he put in his work. And he was of material assistance not only to Jack Kennedy but to every other member of the committee. I think he relied very much on Bob's judgment."

"He sat down there on the side of the bed in an old broken-down building. Tears were running down his cheeks. I knew he cared. I can just see him sitting there and crying. The man had no vanity."

"Few politicians who fail to win the presidency are subsequently judged to be giants in our history. Among the select few are Robert F. Kennedy, Barry Goldwater and Hubert H. Humphrey in the 20th century; Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun in the 19th century; and William Jennings Bryan, who straddled the two. There would certainly be lively debate about other political figures who deserve inclusion on such a list, and many non-politicians have earned places in our national story far more exalted than those of middling presidents and elected officials. As John McCain's contemporaries, we may be ill-positioned to insist with certainty that he will join the likes of Kennedy, Bryan and Clay as figures who were profoundly consequential though the White House eluded them."

"The poll-tax fight, in which Ted deployed all those strengths, had shown Ted's new heightened sense of purpose; the Morrissey affair, a lowered one. 'That was a difference between Ted and Bobby. Bobby could be passionate for his causes and personally invested in them, but he would never have been caught between his sense of personal obligation and his political duties, his lower and higher senses of purpose, which is precisely why he jettisoned Morrissey, despite his father's entreaties. Ted often would be caught because he had a difficult time distinguishing between the two. For Ted, the personal often was the political, as it had been in both the poll-tax and the Morrissey battles. Bobby would never have fought for Morrissey. Ted would never not have."

"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."

"The thing is, John and Bobby Kennedy are eternally young. The Democrats are trying to show us how young, and with it they are by reminding us of how things were 30 years ago."

"When Bobby Kennedy went after organized crime in the early 1960s, one of the things he learned was that the Mafia had a series of rituals new members went through to declare their loyalty and promise they’d never turn away from their new benefactors. Once in, they’d be showered with money and protection, but they could never leave and even faced serious problems if they betrayed the syndicate."

"He never had a case in his life. He never argued in a courtroom. If you make him assistant secretary of defense, he'll have a lot of power. It's an appropriate job for a guy who has never done a damn thing."

"A child playing in a Dresden china shop."

"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."

"To reach these swing voters, progressive populists like Bernie Sanders say they will fight for working-class interests against a rigged system, while right-wing populists like Donald Trump say, among other things, that they respect the values of working-class people in a way that liberals don’t. But a half-century ago, a champion of civil rights offered a third approach: a liberalism without elitism and a populism without racism. In a remarkable 82-day campaign, Senator Robert F. Kennedy ran in several Democratic presidential primaries and was able to forge a powerful coalition of working-class whites and blacks, even as race riots were raging across the country, and at a time when whites were far more bigoted than they are today."

"A half-century later, how could progressives try to rebuild the Bobby Kennedy coalition? Kennedy’s appeal was based in part on being the brother of a revered and martyred president, of course, and the most salient issues were different in 1968 than they are today. But Kennedy stressed fundamental themes that travel across time and transcend specific policy issues. First, to appeal to a sizable number of white working-class voters in 1968, Kennedy did not forfeit his basic principles or change his positions on civil rights, or war and peace — and neither should progressives today. Ignoring the rights of women, gay people and people of color is both morally wrong and politically stupid if your aspiration is an inclusive populism. Second, progressives should fight for economic justice in a manner that is relentless rather than episodic. On the campaign trail, Kennedy consistently hit themes of economic inequality and named the names of wealthy individuals, like the oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, who paid little in taxes. By contrast, in the final weeks leading up to the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton de-emphasized economic issues in favor of attacks on Mr. Trump’s qualifications, according to research by Democracy Corps and the Roosevelt Institute, and his support among white non-college voters rose considerably. Progressives also need to vigorously punish Wall Street malfeasance. It is difficult to imagine that Kennedy, a tough prosecutor, would have argued, as some members of the Obama administration did, that some companies are "too big to jail." Third, progressives should explicitly signal the inclusion of working-class whites in their vision for change by applying civil rights laws to issues of class inequality, consistent with Kennedy’s view that “poverty is closer to the root of the problem than color.” I have long argued that we should extend the Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination against workers of all races engaged in labor organizing; integrate elementary and secondary schools not only by race but also by socioeconomic status; combat discrimination in housing by economic status as well as race; and adopt affirmative action programs in higher education for economically disadvantaged students of every color. Fourth, progressives could adopt policies that respect the values of working-class people under the banner of patriotic populism, as Kennedy did. They should unapologetically champion a strong American identity around the shared values espoused in the Declaration of Independence as an antidote to exclusionary white nationalism. An inclusive patriotic populism would be much more racially tolerant than Mr. Trump’s white nationalism, and it would be tougher on national and domestic security than the populism offered by Mr. Sanders. If Robert Kennedy, the civil rights champion, could attract Wallace voters at a time of national chaos, surely the right progressive candidate with the right message could bring a significant portion of the Obama-Trump voters back home. Doing so would not only bring electoral success but also make it easier to forge a more economically progressive public policy to address America’s dangerous economic divide."

"My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

"His death left a vacuum that has not been filled. He had a capacity to reach out to disparate groups in our society: black and white, young and old, middle‐class and poor, blue‐collar workers and intellectuals. There is no political figure now, and none on the horizon, with whom so many Americans can identify."

"Robert Kennedy rejected comfort. He chose to be an uncomfortable man. It would have embarrassed him to hear such things said about himself. But he believed that individuals can make a difference if they care, and people knew he did. I think much would be different if he had lived."

"My father never retreated from shining a light on racial injustice. He forced hard conversations to play out in public, and pursued policies like the Voting Rights Act to specifically address the systemic racism plaguing our society. He realized that racism itself divided our country."

"Robert Kennedy accomplished an extraordinary feat in his last campaign by uniting blacks and working whites in a way that no American politician has since been able to replicate."

"The world had watched Bobby growing a little every day in 1968 - the muttering family runt who became a little more clear-spoken, a little more inspired, with every interview, each appearance, campaigning with an energy and determination rare in American politics, through crowds with signs that said "Kiss Me Bobby" and who ripped off his shoes and clothing as though he were a rock star. He became so good at television that Abbie Hoffman enviously called him "Hollywood Bobby." Hoffman said with frustration, "Gene wasn't much. One could secretly cheer for him the way you cheer for the Mets. It's easy knowing he can never win. But Bobby...Every night we would turn on the TV et and there was the young knight with long hair, holding out his hand... When young longhairs told you how they heard that Bobby turned on, you knew Yippie! was really in trouble." Tom Hayden, not given to admiring candidates from the political establishment, wrote "And yet, in that year of turmoil, I found that the only intriguing politician in America was the younger brother of John F. Kennedy." Yevtushenko had described Kennedy's eyes as "two blue clots of will and anxiety." When Kennedy met the Russian poet, Yevtushenko proposed a toast and wanted to smash the glasses. Kennedy, being not at all Russian, wanted to substitute some cheaper glasses. But cheap glasses are thick, and those, slammed to the floor, did not break, which the Russian poet took as a frightening bad omen. Everyone could see the doom that Lowell wrote was "woven in" his nerves. So could he. When he learned of his brother's assassination, he said that he had expected it to be himself. His brother's widow, Jackie, had feared that he would be next and told historian Arthur Schlesinger at a dinner party, "Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby? The same thing that happened to Jack." Only two weeks before he was shot, he had a conversation with French writer Romain Gary in which, according to Gary, Kennedy said, "I know there will be an attempt on my life sooner or later. Not so much for political reasons, but through contagion, through emulation.""

"First was the political question, could he win? It was often said that he would be shot if it looked as if he would win. On June 4 he won the California primary, defeating McCarthy 45 to 42 percent, with Humphrey drawing only 12 percent of the vote. At that moment he had finally overcome McCarthy's considerable lead. He had only to outmaneuver Hubert Humphrey at the Chicago convention. "And now it's on to Chicago, and let's win there," he said. Minutes later he was shot in the head, strangely while taking an unplanned shortcut through the kitchen because admirers had blocked the planned exit path. And there in the kitchen, on the unplanned route, was a man waiting with a handgun. He had been shot by someone named Sirhan Sirhan, an odd appellation that made no sense to American ears. Unsatisfactory answers started coming. A Jordanian, an Arab from occupied Jordan, a Palestinian, but not in the old sense of a militant. Not an Arab with an agenda—no agenda. A displaced person who seemed mentally unstable. We learned who killed him, but we never found out why. Now that Kennedy was gone, who would be the next front-runner, and would he too be killed? "There is no God but death," Ferlinghetti wrote in a poem to Kennedy that he read the day he was buried. All the candidates, Democrats and Republicans, none so much as McCarthy, who seemed to have withdrawn from the race, knew that they could be next. Norman Mailer, who attended both party conventions, observed that all of the candidates had become uneasy-looking when in crowds. The most likely victim was already dead, the federal government decided it had to do more to protect the other seven. Robert Kennedy's assassination would have failed if the Secret Service had been guarding him, because they would have cleared the kitchen before he entered. One hundred and fifty Secret Service agents were attached to the remaining candidates, which had little impact on Hubert Humphrey or George Wallace because they were already heavily guarded. But it was a huge change for Eugene McCarthy, who had never even had a bodyguard."