Photo: Robert Kennedy accomplished an extraordinary feat in his last campaign by uniting blacks and working whites in a way that no American politician has since been able to replicate. ©Getty
And then, just a few months later, came Bobby. Looking back, I thought it could have been the final blow. The last candle of hope, extinguished. Robert F. Kennedy, a lot of people thought, was the last man who could calm everybody down. It was ironic: the billionaire’s son, the Harvard graduate, was the guy who could walk into impoverished neighborhoods and talk with people credibly, make them believe that tomorrow was going to be a better day.
But it wasn’t. He didn’t make it. So we cried. We grieved, but, true to our nature as Americans, we persevered.
The same issues that Bobby was so passionate about–poverty, education, civil rights–still face us today. We still endeavor to address them, solve them, resolve them.
And embedded in those redoubled efforts, of course, there is hope. Without it, we would not remember him with such recent pain, a never-healing wound of what might have been. With it, we move forward with renewed promise of what still could be.
For all his faults, he left us that perfect gift: the will to fight on, even in the darkest moments.