<i>"To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world"</i>: Remembering Bobby

This post is a little late, but I was in Germany last month. This last June marked the 40 year anniversary of Robert Kennedy's assassination and the end of his 1968 presidential campaign. I've always been intrigued by Bobby's last campaign because I feel that he found something, morally speaking, during those fateful months in '68. I, and many others, wonder what could have been if Bobby had lived. I was reminded of all this after reading two recent books. The first is The Last Campaign: Robert Kennedy and 82 Days that Inspired America by Thurston Clarke. The second is A Time it Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties by Time photographer Bill Eppridge, a book largely composed of previously unpublished pictures of RFK's presidential run.

It is true that Bobby inspires mixed feelings and reactions, but I feel that something happened to him in the wake of his brother's assassination. To cope with his pain Bobby turned to the Greeks. One of his favorite quotes in speaking of JFK's death was this poem by Aeschylus:

Even in our sleep,
pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart until,
in our despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

I think Bobby, through his suffering, did find wisdom. Through his wounds he found a capacity to reach out to those who were suffering. This wisdom allowed Bobby to speak to pain as few could. Take, for example, Bobby's speech on April 4, 1968 as he addressed a volatile crowd in Indianapolis, just two hours after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Every major American city had race riots that night. But not in Indianapolis. To this day city leaders of Indianapolis credit Bobby's speech for the lack of violence in their city that night. As one black militant said of Bobby's speech: "We went there for trouble, but after he spoke we couldn't get nowhere." In that speech Bobby again appealed to the Greeks to show how we might use our pain to create a better world:

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.

What I find amazing about Bobby's '68 campaign is that he was saying things that no candidate could say today. Bobby was hard, morally hard, on Americans. In campaign stop after campaign stop he spoke about poverty, race relations, and the war. He blasted American consumerism. Here, taken from Clarke's book, is one of my favorite passages from RFK's campaign speeches:

"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product, now, is over eight hundred billion dollars a year, but the GNP--if we should judge America by that--counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead...and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage...it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."