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"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
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Bill Clinton - Speech at the 25th Anniversary Memorial Mass for Robert F. Kennedy (June 6, 1993)
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| Parent | Parent Candidate |
| Contributor | Thomas Walker |
| Post Date | , 12:am |
| Description | Father Creedon, Mrs. Kennedy, the children of Robert Kennedy, and the Kennedy family, to all the distinguished Americans here present, and most of all, to all of you who bear the noble title, citizen of this country:
Twenty-five years ago today, on the eve of my college graduation, I cheered the victory of Robert Kennedy in the California primary and felt again that our country might face its problems openly, meet its challenges bravely, and go forward together. He dared us all. He dared the grieving not to retreat into despair. He dared the comfortable not to be complacent. He dared the doubting to keep going.
As I looked around this crowd today and saw us all graced not only by the laughter of children but by the tears of those of us old enough to remember, it struck me again that the memory of Robert Kennedy is so powerful that in a profound way we are all in two places today. We are here and now, and we are there, then.
For in Robert Kennedy we all invested our hopes and our dreams that somehow we might redeem the promise of the America we then feared we were losing, somehow we might call back the promise of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King and heal the divisions of Vietnam and the violence and pain in our own country. But I believe if Robert Kennedy were here today, he would dare us not to mourn his passing but to fulfill his promise and to be the people that he so badly wanted us all to be. He would dare us to leave yesterday and embrace tomorrow.
We remember him, almost captured in freeze-frame, standing on the hood of a car, grasping at outreached hands, black and brown and white. His promise was that the hands which reached out to him might someday actually reach out to each other. And together, those hands could make America everything that it ought to be, a nation reunited with itself and rededicated to its best ideals.
When his funeral train passed through the gritty cities of the Northeast, people from both sides of the tracks stood silent. He had earned their respect because he went to places most leaders never visit and listened to people most leaders never hear and spoke simple truth most leaders never speak.
He spoke out against neglect, but he challenged the neglected to seize their own destiny. He wanted so badly for Government to act, but he did not trust bureaucracy. And he believed that Government had to do things with people, not for them. He knew we had to do things together or not at all. He spoke to the sons and daughters of immigrants and the sons and daughters of sharecroppers and told them all, "As long as you stay apart from each other, you will never be what you ought to be." |
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