Robert F. Kennedy and the Dream that Lives On

His assassination was 54 years ago today

Bobby Kennedy died on June 6, 1968.

I was fifteen years old at the time. I stayed up as late as I could to hear if he survived. I fell asleep, then woke up early the next morning to the news that he had not.

One of the reasons I have such respect for young people is that I remember being young myself. If anything, life was clearer then. We didn’t “not understand yet.” We understood even more clearly what was good and what was bad, what should be and what should not be. No bullshit about “things being complicated” had started to fog our thinking yet. We still heard what our hearts were saying and that was all we needed to know.

Bobby’s death was totally and completely devastating. Our dreams, our aspirations, our hopes for the country were encapsulated by Bobby, by Eugene McCarthy, and by Martin Luther King, Jr. who had been assassinated only two months before. We idolized them. They were our leaders. I was only 15 years old but I knew they had paved the way I would follow for the rest of my life.

Rowland Scherman

With most people, no matter how cruel their death or how deep our grief at their passing, with every year that goes by the anniversary of their loss is less bitter. But not with the Kennedy’s, and not with Martin. With every year in some way it just hurts more. For everything we feared might happen when they died is exactly what has happened.

I’ve written elsewhere about the trauma of those assassinations and how I feel they affected my generation. The bullets that struck them struck all of us psychically, with a very loud unspoken message: “You will leave the public sector alone now. Do whatever you want in the private sector, but leave the public sector to whomever wants to control it so badly that they’re willing to kill in order to do so.” They didn’t need to say it but the message was clear: “Or we might kill you too.”

And in case the message still wasn’t clear enough, two years later they proved it. They killed four protesting students at Kent State University and wounded nine others.

That was it. The dream was dead. Nixon didn’t even have the decency to call their parents.

But it’s an odd thing about death. Bodies die but ideas don’t. Dreams don’t. Aspirations don’t, as long as there are people living who still hold onto them. An eternal flame was lit by Jacqueline Kennedy at the Kennedy gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery, where it remains to remind us that the work goes on and the dream of a more just and loving world doesn’t die as long as any of us still cherish it.

Several months ago I visited the Kennedy gravesite with a friend, and both of us had our silent communion with the souls of those who are buried there. I felt then what I am feeling tonight as I think about Bobby Kennedy on the anniversary of his death. I like to think it’s what he’d want to hear:

Thank you, Bobby. Rest in peace. We got this.