Count Me Blue: June 6: a world-changing day in history

Today is a pretty significant anniversary in our country's history. I'll deal with them in separate posts.

Thirty-nine years ago today, we lost one of the last truly great statesman this country has seen: Robert Francis Kennedy, who was shot by assassin Sirhan Sirhan the day before at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California.

Above is a very moving eulogy by Robert's brother, Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy. It's probably one of the best eulogies I've ever heard - well written with just the right touch for his grieving family, and a mourning nation.

In his eulogy, Ted cited a very powerful speech that RFK delivered, ironically two years to the day before his death at the University of Cape Town, South Africa on June 6, 1966. An excerpt:

Few will have the greatness to bend history; 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 ... It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is thus 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.

This is a pretty collection of RFK moments during his storied and distinguished career in public life.

Many of RFK's detractors (and the rest of the Kennedys, for that matter) like to cite his womanizing as proof that he wasn't a good man. I don't buy it. No one is perfect, that's for sure, and neither was RFK. He did a great deal for this country, and could have been so much more.

I just can't help but think what would have happened had RFK lived. It's not a stretch to say that two American tragedies would have been different: Vietnam would have been been ended much sooner, there would have been no Watergate. We would live in a much different country today, almost certainly for the better. I wasn't alive then, but from what history I have read, I'd like to think that RFK would have beaten Richard Nixon. Actually, I don't know if he could have secured the nomination - by June 1968 Hubert Humphrey had a sizable lead in delegates to get the nomination. But, if RFK would have been able to sway party bosses (who still, to a certain extent, controlled the party back then), and I think he would have, he could have won the nomination.

It's easy to forget that Nixon only won the '68 election by some 900,000 votes (.07%); a very thin margin indeed. Who among us thinks that RFK's charm, charisma and idealism could not have bridged that gap. If a staid, conservative (in a social sense) candidate like Humphrey could get that close to Nixon, Kennedy surly would have beaten him.

I've heard of no one sum up RFK's life and dreams better than his brother, Ted, which he did during his eulogy:

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life. He'll be remembered simply as a good and decent man; He saw wrong and tried to right it, he saw suffering and tried to heal it, he saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us, 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 sought to touch him: "Some men see things as they are and say 'Why?'; I dream things that never were and say 'Why not?'"

There will never be another man like him - I wish we had a candidate for president today, from any party, who is half the person he was.

I beseech you to read up on the man, and to see the movie Bobby, which has received favorable reviews. I read this today, and I believe it more than I've believed anything I've ever read about the Kennedys: President Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. formed the triumvirate of modern liberal philosophy, and with their assassinations, America was set back at least 40 years. I couldn't agree more.