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While Donald Trump was embroiled in an unseemly feud with Elon Musk in the White House, Kerry Kennedy was four miles away, kneeling silent by the graveside of the best man never to become president.
YouTube videos of black-and-white 1960s newsreels show a smiling RFK standing in an open-top car with thousands reaching out to touch his hand as he was driven slowly through the streets of America. The country was very far from perfect then, but Robert F. Kennedy carried the baton of hope after the shocking tragedy of his brother’s assassination four and a half years earlier.
One of RFK’s favorite quotes was George Bernard Shaw’s “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” But the dream was short-lived. On June 5, 1968, the 42-year-old senator was gunned down in the back kitchen hallway of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California Democratic primary. He died from his wounds the following day. His wife, Ethel, pregnant with the youngest of 11 children, Rory, at the time, died only last year in October at the age of 96.
On the anniversary of the assassination on Thursday, RFK and Ethel’s daughter, Kerry, along with friends, family, and supporters of his eponymous Human Rights Foundation, visited his gravestone in Arlington Cemetery. The original plan was to put two gravestones for Ethel and Bobby side by side. But instead, the children chose a new single gravestone bearing the names of both parents. In a moment of silent reflection, Kerry kneeled alone before the site in prayer, making the sign of the cross before she stood. Had he lived, her father would have been 100 years old this year. She pointed out in her speech that her family and our nation missed fifty-seven years of this man. The foundation she leads was created in 1968 to carry on the late senator’s unfinished work of creating a more just and peaceful world.
Prayers were said and flowers were laid. We moved on to the graves of her uncle, John F. Kennedy, his wife, Jacqueline, and children, Arabella Kennedy (stillborn on August 23, 1956) and Patrick Bouvier Kennedy (who died from respiratory distress syndrome 39 hours after his birth on August 7, 1963). An eternal flame flickered behind the gravestones. Their son, John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a 1999 plane crash along with his wife and sister-in-law. His remains were cremated and the ashes were scattered off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.
Teddy Kennedy, the Lion of the Senate, and the eldest Kennedy, Joseph, a courageous airman who died during World War Two, are buried at Arlington and prayers were said for them, too.
It was a somber and emotional afternoon.
As the alerts on people’s phones jerked them back to the present, it was impossible to miss the contrast between these moving scenes and the mayhem in the Oval Office.
Remembering the Kennedy brothers, the discussion was of courage and morality, of caring and compassion. It was about standing up against tyranny and doing what was right.
It was no great surprise that RFK Jr. was not among the family members visiting his parents’ graves on Thursday. Trump’s administration is not in the Kennedy tradition. Nowhere close. As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Junior continued his dismantling of public health infrastructure by axing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices this week. This panel was responsible for reviewing scientific evidence and making recommendations of implementing U.S vaccine policy. Junior cited “conflicts of interests” but it appears the main conflict is that these experts recognize the safety and importance of vaccines while Junior–not a scientist, nor a physician–has questions.
RFK may have left us nearly six decades ago, but his words live on: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
RFK said these words in 1966 at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
It was a memorable line. And it means more now than ever.
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