Robert F. Kennedy (Nov. 20, 1925 - June 6, 1968)
June 05, 2008
Tonight, before I go to sleep, I will say a prayer for Bobby, Jack, and Ted.
"...For the fortunate among us, there is a temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. Like it or not, we live in times of danger and uncertainty. But they are also more open to the creative energy of man than any other time in history. All of us will ultimately be judged; and as the years pass, we will surely judge ourselves on the effort we have contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped that event.
"Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance; but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live.
"That is the way he lived; that is what he leaves us.
"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.
"Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us, and what he wished for others, will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched, and who sought to touch him: 'Some men see things as they are and say why; I dream things that never were and say why not?' "
-- Eulogy for Robert F. Kennedy by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York City, June 8, 1968
Posted by Nancy E. Schwartz | June 05, 2008 at 09:06 AM
Thanks for sharing Teddy's moving and inspiring eulogy for his brother Bobby. His words seem even more relevant today than they might have then.
Posted by MiitchN | June 05, 2008 at 04:36 PM
You're welcome. I was born and grew up in the Boston area, and one of my earliest memories is of the picture my grandmother kept of a kneeling, almost saintly JFK. I was an eleven-year-old paperboy in northeastern Ohio the day Bobby was killed, and I trace my keen interest in politics back to that awful morning.