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Robert F. Kennedy

United States Senator from New York from 1965 to 1968

Robert Francis Kennedy (20 November 1925 – 6 June 1968), often referred to by his initials RFK or by his nickname Bobby, was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 64th United States Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, and as a U.S. Senator from New York from January 1965 until his assassination in June 1968. He was, like his brothers John and Edward, a prominent member of the Democratic Party and has come to be viewed by some historians as an icon of modern American liberalism.

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.

Quotes

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The United States Government has taken steps to make sure that the constitution of the United States applies to all individuals.
 
Change, although it involves risks, is the law of life.
 
The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use — of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public.
 
A revolution is coming — a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough — But a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.
 
Great change dominates the world, and unless we move with change we will become its victims.
 
I think back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this? I'd like to feel that I'd done something to lessen that suffering.
  • The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use — of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public.
    • "I Remember, I Believe," The Pursuit of Justice (1964)
  • In the words of the old saying, every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.
  • What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.
  • Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
    • "Extremism, Left and Right," pt. 3, (1964)
  • The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means.
  • Just because we cannot see clearly the end of the road, that is no reason for not setting out on the essential journey. On the contrary, great change dominates the world, and unless we move with change we will become its victims.
    • Farewell statement, Warsaw, Poland, reported in The New York Times (2 July 1964)
  • Now I can go back to being ruthless again.
    • Remark on his reputation for "ruthlessness" after winning his race for a seat in the United States Senate, quoted in Esquire (April 1965)
  • A revolution is coming — a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough — But a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.
    • Speech in the United States Senate (9 May 1966)
  • Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
    • Day of Affirmation, address delivered at the University of Cape Town, South Africa (June 6, 1966); reported in the Congressional Record (June 6, 1966), vol. 112, p. 12430
  • In my judgment, the slogan "black power" and what has been associated with it has set the civil rights movement back considerably in the United States over the period of the last several months.
    • Remark during testimony of Floyd McKissick before a Senate subcommittee of which Kennedy was a member (December 8, 1966); reported in Federal Role in Urban Affairs, hearings before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, 89th Congress, 2d session, part 11, p. 2312 (1967)
  • I expect one of the prices we pay for democracy is there are going to be differences. We pay a price but we get something very important in return.
  • He has borne the burdens few other men have borne in the history of the world, without hope or desire or thought to escape them. He has sought consensus but he has never shrunk from controversy. He has gained huge popularity but he has never failed to spend it in the pursuit of his beliefs or in the interest of his country.
  • Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.
  • Gross National Product 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 the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, 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, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
  • Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.
    • "Value of Dissent" speech Nashville, Tennessee (21 March 1968)
  • He has called on the best that was in us. There was no such thing as half-trying. Whether it was running a race or catching a football, competing in school—we were to try. And we were to try harder than anyone else. We might not be the best, and none of us were, but we were to make the effort to be the best. "After you have done the best you can", he used to say, "the hell with it".
    • Tribute to his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, read at Joseph Kennedy's funeral by Senator Ted Kennedy, November 20, 1969. Reported in Congressional Record (25 November 1969), vol. 115, p. 35877
  • Something about the fact that I made some contribution to either my country, or those who were less well off. I think back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this? I'd like to feel that I'd done something to lessen that suffering.
    • In an interview shortly before he was killed, responding to a question by David Frost about how his obituary should read.
  • Are we like the God of the Old Testament, that we in Washington can decide which cities, towns, and hamlets in Vietnam will be destroyed? Do we have to accept that? I don't think we do. I think we can do something about it.
    • About the Vietnam War, in his last speech at the Senate on the subject
  • I called him because it made me so damned angry to think of that bastard sentencing a citizen for four months of hard labor for a minor traffic offense and screwing up my brother's campaign and making our country look ridiculous before the world.
    • On calling Judge Oscar Mitchell for sentencing Martin Luther King, Jr., as quoted in Robert Kennedy: Brother Protector (2000), p. 173

Day of Affirmation Address (1966)

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Of course to adhere to standards, to idealism, to vision in the face of immediate dangers takes great courage and takes self-confidence. But we also know that only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.
Speech in Cape Town, South Africa (6 June 1966); with slight variants as quoted in Ripples of Hope : Great American Civil Rights Speeches (2003), edited by Josh Gottheimer
 
The essential humanity of men can be protected and preserved only where government must answer — not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, or a particular race, but to all its people.
 
Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and then the total — all of these acts — will be written in the history of this generation.
 
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
 
"Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the world." These men moved the world, and so can we all.
  • This is a Day of Affirmation, a celebration of liberty. We stand here in the name of freedom.
    At the heart of that Western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man, the child of God, is the touchstone of value, and all society, groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any Western society.
    The first element of this individual liberty is the freedom of speech: the right to express and communicate ideas, to set oneself apart from the dumb beasts of field and forest; to recall governments to their duties and obligations; above all, the right to affirm one's membership and allegiance to the body politic — to society — to the men with whom we share our land, our heritage, and our children's future.
  • Hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard, to share in the decisions of government which shape men's lives. Everything that makes man's life worthwhile — family, work, education, a place to rear one's children and a place to rest one's head — all this depends on the decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people. Therefore, the essential humanity of men can be protected and preserved only where government must answer — not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, or a particular race, but to all its people.
    And even government by the consent of the governed, as in our own Constitution, must be limited in its power to act against its people; so that there may be no interference with the right to worship, or with the security of the home; no arbitrary imposition of pains or penalties by officials high or low; no restrictions on the freedom of men to seek education or work or opportunity of any kind, so that each man may become all he is capable of becoming.
    These are the sacred rights of Western society.
  • The road toward equality of freedom is not easy, and great cost and danger march alongside us. We are committed to peaceful and nonviolent change, and that is important for all to understand — though all change is unsettling. Still, even in the turbulence of protest and struggle is greater hope for the future, as men learn to claim and achieve for themselves the rights formerly petitioned from others.
    And most important of all, all of the panoply of government power has been committed to the goal of equality before the law, as we are now committing ourselves to the achievement of equal opportunity in fact. We must recognize the full human equality of all of our people before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not because the laws of God command it, although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.
  • All do not develop in the same manner, or at the same pace. Nations, like men, often march to the beat of different drummers, and the precise solutions of the United States can neither be dictated nor transplanted to others. What is important is that all nations must march toward increasing freedom; toward justice for all; toward a society strong and flexible enough to meet the demands of all its own people, and a world of immense and dizzying change.
  • Only earthbound man still clings to the dark and poisoning superstition that his world is bounded by the nearest hill, his universe ends at river shore, his common humanity is enclosed in the tight circle of those who share his town or his views and the color of his skin.
    It is — It is your job, the task of young people in this world, to strip the last remnants of that ancient, cruel belief from the civilization of man.
  • Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the world I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their desires and their concerns and their hope for the future.
  • I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. it would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress — not material welfare as an end in itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would be proud to have built.
  • The help and the leadership of South Africa or of the United States cannot be accepted if we, within our own country or in our relationships with others, deny individual integrity, human dignity, and the common humanity of man. If we would lead outside our borders, if we would help those who need our assistance, if we would meet our responsibilities to mankind, we must first, all of us, demolish the borders which history has erected between men within our own nations — barriers of race and religion, social class and ignorance.
    Our answer is the world's hope; it is to rely on youth. The cruelties and the obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger which comes with even the most peaceful progress. This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.
  • Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and then the total — all of these acts — will be written in the history of this generation.
  • It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
  • The second danger is that of expediency: of those who say that hopes and beliefs must bend before immediate necessities. Of course, if we must act effectively we must deal with the world as it is. We must get things done. But if there was one thing that President Kennedy stood for that touched the most profound feeling of young people around the world, it was the belief that idealism, high aspirations, and deep convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programs — that there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibilities, no separation between the deepest desires of heart and of mind and the rational application of human effort to human problems. It is not realistic or hardheaded to solve problems and take action unguided by ultimate moral aims and values, although we all know some who claim that it is so. In my judgment, it is thoughtless folly. For it ignores the realities of human faith and of passion and of belief — forces ultimately more powerful than all of the calculations of our economists or of our generals. Of course to adhere to standards, to idealism, to vision in the face of immediate dangers takes great courage and takes self-confidence. But we also know that only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.
  • And a third danger is timidity. Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.
  • For the fortunate amongst us, the fourth danger, my friends, is comfort, the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of an education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. There is a Chinese curse which says, "May he live in interesting times." Like it or not we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history. And everyone here will ultimately be judged — will ultimately judge himself — on the effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.

Speech on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968)

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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.
Speech on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (4 April 1968), delivered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Inscribed on the Robert F. Kennedy gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery
  • Ladies and Gentlemen, I'm only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening, because I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
  • Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it's perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black -- considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible -- you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.
    We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization -- black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love. [...] But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.
  • My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
  • 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.

On the Mindless Menace of Violence (1968)

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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.
 
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.
This speech was given the day after the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination. Delivered at the City Club of Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio, April 5, 1968.
  • 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.


Misattributed

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  • 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?
    • Though Kennedy stated that he was quoting George Bernard Shaw when he said this, he is often thought to have originated the expression, which actually paraphrases a line delivered by the Serpent in Shaw's play Back To Methuselah: “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’". This phrase was first used by his brother John F. Kennedy in 1963 (June 28th), during his visit to Ireland, in his address to the Irish Dail (Government): "George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life, 'Other people, he said, see things and say why? But I dream things that never were and I say, why not?" (Address on YouTube). Robert's other brother Edward famously quoted it (paraphrasing it even further), to conclude his eulogy to his late brother after his assassination (8 June 1968): Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not? - (Eulogy in CBS news video)

Quotes about Kennedy

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  • 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.
    • 1963 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)
  • (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."
    • 1967 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)
  • 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?
    • 1969 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)
  • 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.
    • Cesar Chavez March 1968 speech, anthologized in An Organizer’s Tale (2008)
  • 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.
    • Former CIA official Walter Elder in an interview with Seymour Hersh, cited in The Dark Side of Camelot (1997)
  • 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.
    • Neal Gabler, Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 (2020), p. 306
  • 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.
    • Neal Gabler, Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932-1975 (2020), p. 366
  • 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.
    • Senator, former U.S. attorney and Kennedy intimate George Smathers to JFK when told that RFK would be appointed attorney general. Recounted in an interview with Seymour Hersh and cited in The Dark Side of Camelot (1997)
  • 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.
  • I was the East Coast distributor of involved. I ate it, drank it, and breathed it. Then they killed Martin, then they killed Bobby, elected Tricky Dick twice, and people like you must think I'm miserable because I'm not involved anymore. Well, I've got news for you. I spent all my misery years ago. I have no more pain for anything. I gave at the office.
  • I come to this with tremendous humility. I was only seven when Bobby Kennedy died. Many of the people in this room knew him as brother, as husband, as father, as friend. I knew him only as an icon.
  • People who believe that while evil and suffering will always exist, this is a country that has been fueled by small miracles and boundless dreams – a place where we’re not afraid to face down the greatest challenges in pursuit of the greater good; a place where, against all odds, we overcome. Bobby Kennedy was one of these people.
  • And Kennedy’s was not a pie-in-the-sky-type idealism either. He believed we would always face real enemies, and that there was no quick or perfect fix to the turmoil of the 1960s. Rather, the idealism of Robert Kennedy – the unfinished legacy that calls us still – is a fundamental belief in the continued perfection of American ideals.
    • Barack Obama at the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award ceremony commemorating the eightieth anniversary of RFK's birth (20 November 2005)
  • As a U.S. Senator from New York and a presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy had the rhetorical ability to distill complex social ills into coherent moral stands. Whether he was talking about apartheid in South Africa during his trip there in June 1966, breaking a fast with Cesar Chavez in Delano, California, expressing the nation’s grief after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, or calling for an end to the Vietnam War, Robert Kennedy’s words could cut through social boundaries and partisan divides in a way that seems nearly impossible today.
  • Bobby, in my view, was an unprincipled sinister little bastard.
    • Former CIA official Thomas A. Parrot in a 1995 interview with Seymour Hersh, cited in The Dark Side of Camelot (1997)
  • Robert Kennedy's service to his country, his commitment to his great ideals, and his devotion to those less fortunate than himself are matters now for history and need little explanation from me. The facts of Robert Kennedy's public career stand alone. He roused the comfortable. He exposed the corrupt, remembered the forgotten, inspired his countrymen, and renewed and enriched the American conscience.
  • And it is in the final triumph of Robert Kennedy that he used his personal gifts to bring this message of hope and love to the country, to millions of Americans who supported and believed in him. "Come my friends," he liked to quote the Tennyson lines, "it's not too late to seek a newer world." And this is how we should remember him, beyond the distinguished public service or our own sadness that he is gone. His friend, composer John Stuart, said about him what he said about the first fallen Kennedy and about us: that when a chill wind takes the sky, we should remember the years he gave us hope, for they can never die.
  • Steel also argues that Robert Kennedy's nomination was still far from a sure thing, even after he won the California primary. Thus the popular notion that assassination prevented another Kennedy presidency is seen as largely false. Steel paints Robert as much more conservative than the liberal, even radical movement he sought to lead. But his huge appeal is rooted in the fact that he was a troubled man in a troubled time. "The Bobby Myth," he concludes, "is our creation, not his." Steel makes Robert seem less than we remember; Clymer makes Teddy more important than we may have thought.
  • But why is there such yearning, and why should it focus on him? The nation is not experiencing any great crisis, and has not since the Watergate episode in the mid-1970s, and arguably not since the Vietnam War. Furthermore, Robert Kennedy is a curious figure for the role of messiah. He was attorney general for only a thousand days and a U.S. Senator for not much longer. He is not remembered for any single great achievement during that time. When admirers look back upon his career they speak more of what he would have accomplished than of what he actually did. He was a receptacle into which a dissatisfied people have put their frustrated emotions and longings. Yet this has in no way diminished his impact.
    • Ronald Steel, In Love With Night: The American Romance With Robert Kennedy (2000), pgs. 17-18.
 
The young man never says please. He never says thank you, he never asks for things, he demands them. ~ Adlai Stevenson.
  • The young man never says please. He never says thank you, he never asks for things, he demands them.
    • Adlai Stevenson referring to RFK. Cited in 1960: LBJ Vs. JFK Vs. Nixon : the Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies (2008), p. 63.

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