RFK

On this, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, below is an interesting two hour PBS documentary on his life. It is not a hagiographic portrait of the man. It doesn't hesitate to discuss some of Kennedy's less than admirable accomplishments:, his affiliation with Senator Joseph McCarthy, his involvement as part of his brother's administration, in the plot to remove by all means necessary, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and his initial reluctance to support the American Civil Rights Movement, to name just three.

RFK was a man of great contrasts, a devout family man, who was nothing short of ruthless when anything or anyone got in his way.

Yet the most remarkable trait of Bobby Kennedy was his capacity to grow and to change. That is the main theme of this film. As a virulent anti-communist hawk, evidenced by his work with McCarthy in the fifties, a staunch early supporter of the Vietnam War, and a man of privilege with little understanding of the suffering of others, the tide began to turn for Kennedy after three momentous events that occurred within a short time of each other in 1962 and 1963.

The first of these was the Cuban Missle Crisis of 1962. As part of John F. Kennedy's Cabinet in the role of Attorney General, Robert Kennedy was also his brother the president's closest advisor. At the beginning of the crisis, Robert Kennedy adamantly advocated for military retailiation against the USSR's decision to install missles with nuclear warheads in Cuba, just ninety miles from American soil. But after several days of rigorous debate and soul searching, RFK came to the conclusion that the moral solution, was to negotiate a deal with Moscow that would involve, unbeknownst to the American public at the time, the tit-for-tat removal of US milles pointed at the Soviet Union, that had been in Trukey. That change of heart of Kennedy's could very well have prevented a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Another moment that profoundly changed Robery Kennedy's view of the world took place in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, There, the reaction of local authorities to civil rights protests resulted in images broadcast all over the world of firefighters turning hoses on, and police brutally beating and turning dogs on demonstrators, many of whom were children. It was Robert Kennedy, at least according to this film, who convinced a still complacent John Kennedy, that acting on befalf of civil rights in this country was not a political, but a moral obligation. As a result, the president addressed the nation on June 11, 1963, with the speech that would prove to be his finest moment, announcing the legislation that would lead to the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The event that most profoundly changed Robert Kennedy's life, was his brother's assassination in November of 1963. Out of the depths of despair from which  it took Bobby Kennedy years to recover, came an entirely different man, one of profound empathy for the suffering of his fellow human beings.

During his time of despair over JFK's death, it is said that his brother's widow Jacqueline Kennedy suggested that Robert read the works of the ancient Greeks to help provide him solace. Bobby Kennedy put these words of Aeschylus to good use during the time he had left in this world:

Even 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.

Kennedy was once asked why his ideas about civil rights and the Vietnam War had changed so drastically in such a short period of time. It's hard to imagine another American politician, especially one in our own era respond the way Kennedy did. He said, "Becasue I hadn't yet read Aeschylus."

Kennedy used those words to console an audience of African American people in Indianapoilis on the night Martin Luther King was musdered. The six minute speech he delivered that night was arguably his finest moment.

Those are the words of RFK's epitaph, inscribed on his headstone at Arlington National Cemetery.

And they are the words that inspired the title of the second half, and the closing words of the following film in the American Experience Series: