We are looking back on 40 years of missed opportunities as we reflect on the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. My friend Harold Meyerson has a poignant piece in The Washington Post. Harold reflects from the perspective of a Gene McCarthy backer talking about the opportunity they never had to bring the progressive forces together after the primaries. On the NPR program Fresh Air, Terry Gross has an amazing discussion with Pete Hamill regarding the events at The Ambassador Hotel. Hamill was working on the Kennnedy campaign and reminds us that it was the late director John Frankenheimer who hosted Bobby Kennedy at his home the night before the primary.
If we do the work between now and November then in Senator Obama's stirring words ....we will look back another 40 years from now and say this was the moment. We ended a war, we brought universal health care, we brought dignity back to work...and we brought to life the dream of Bobby Kennedy, the dream that Teddy promised us would not die...has life and breath and depth.
For me, I will give another $50 to Senator Obama and reflect once again on Senator Kennedy's life and work and words.
From a speech at the University of Kansas March, 1968
I think there's more that we can do internally here, I think there's more that we can do in South Vietnam. I don't think we have to accept the situation, as we have it at the moment. I think that we can do better, and I think the American people think that we can do better.
George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?"
So I come here to Kansas to ask for your help. In the difficult five months ahead, before the convention in Chicago, I ask for your help and for your assistance. If you believe that the United States can do better. If you believe that we should change our course of action. If you believe that the United States stands for something here internally as well as elsewhere around the globe, I ask for your help and your assistance and your hand over the period of the next five months.
And when we win in November, and when we win in November, and we begin a new period of time for the United States of America - I want the next generation of Americans to look back upon this period and say as they said of Plato: "Joy was in those days, but to live." Thank you very much.
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