In June 1968, a week after one modern icon had written his name in the stars, another lay on the floor of a hotel kitchen with a hole in his head. Robert F. Kennedy, the man who knocked Jimmy Hoffa offa his perch, who sent James Meredith to school, who faced down Khrushchev and who would have ended the Vietnam war 5 years early (maybe), lost his life. But what did America lose?
You could do worse than visit the Times mini-site which includes an article by Anthony Howard. He argues that the hopes of a generation died alongside Jack Kennedy’s younger brother. To what extent RFK’s posthumous deification can be traced to a genuine conviction that, had he lived, the 37th President of the United States would have been the greatest, and is not merely borne of the near-certainty that the US would have been spared Nixon, is at least arguable. What is not is that, like his brother before him and unlike anyone since, RFK represented intangible, unmistakable “hope” – especially if you were black, poor, homeless, jobless or sick.
Read this
Watch this (when it comes out).
Remember this:
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.
It’s nearly 40 years on and congressional elections loom. Where is today’s Bobby Kennedy?
