The day the dream died

I cried when Robert Kennedy was murdered.

I’ve only done that for one other politician, Sir Winston Churchill, but for very different reasons.

I mourned Churchill for his visions – for winning the unwinnable war in 1940, and then six years later, for a ‘United States of Europe’ as the best and perhaps the only way of guaranteeing the continent would not plunge back into the cycles of conflict that had plagued it for millennia.

Churchill died an old man in 1964 after a career that stretched back into the previous century. He had made mistakes, many of them, and there were people who cursed him for it, but his ability to see a way forward, to understand what the future required of the present, set him apart.

Against him, the current crop of leaders we are burdened with are, to misquote the Bard, a collection of petty men and women who peep about to find themselves dishonourable graves.

Kennedy was different, denied the chance to put his mark on history by an assassins’ bullet, he is frozen in time. He is forever a young-looking 42 with the boyish smile and the fashionably long hair of the day flopping over his forehead as he worked the crowds.

At the moment of his death, 50 years ago today, the United States Senator from New York had just won two American Presidential Primary Elections, including the crucial one in California.

He was on his way to the Democratic Convention in Chicago where he would still have to fight for the nomination, but momentum was with him and, from the vantage point of hindsight, most commentators believe he would have won there and gone on to defeat Republican Richard Nixon in November.

All that belongs to the vast collection of ‘what ifs’ peppering history, and we can never know how he would have handled the turbulent years that awaited in the 1970s, but there are indications he would have managed with greater success than those who were eventually handed the task.

He was an efficient organiser, managing his older brother’s successful presidential campaign in 1960; as the nation’s Attorney General, a job he never wanted, but was told by his father, Joe, that he had to take it because the president needed his good counsel, he was a hard-working crusader against organised crime.

His ability to handle crisis manifested itself as the world came close to nuclear war over Russian missiles stationed on Cuba, less than 170 kilometres from the US mainland. It was Kennedy who was sent out by his brother to negotiate a secret deal with the Russians that pulled both countries back from the brink of conflict.     

Above all, he had the ability, almost unrecognisable today, of a leader who was prepared to acknowledge his mistakes, learn from them and adapt.  From a ‘reds under the bed’ hunter of communists on the staff of Senator Joe McCarthy in the early 1950s, he became a champion of the poor and underprivileged in the next decade.

The rich kid from an entitled family could drop in on the homes of poor blacks and – this set him apart from other politicians who try the same thing during election campaigns – not seem uncomfortable and out of place.

Even so, he was shocked at what he found. He famously said to an aide: “I’ve been in third and fourth world countries and I’ve not seen anything as terrible as this.”

When he promised to do something for them, these forgotten people believed him.

As the train carrying his body made its slow, painful progress towards his final resting place in Arlington Cemetery they lined the tracks, many carrying his picture taken from the walls of their shacks.

In his eulogy, Ted, the youngest and last survivor of the Kennedy brothers, quoted the theme of Bobby’s campaign – a phase he used at the end of almost all his speeches.

"Some men see things as they are and say: Why? I dream things that never were and say: Why not?"

Rest in peace Bobby.