The greatness of the United States lies in the interwoven tapestry of its history, found in everything from the ad hoc debates that framed its founding documents, to the intricate jazz compositions that power its cultural soundtrack, to the deeply American notion that everyone deserves a second chance. The threads which bind this national fabric is bound together by patches of spontaneous innovation, creativity and energetic reinvention.
It’s therefore no wonder that Americans cherish the myth that their history’s greatest speech was scribbled furiously on the back of an envelope during a train ride to a blood-drenched Pennsylvania battlefield.
Yet while Abraham Lincoln’s words were likely more deliberately conceived than popularly portrayed, nothing detracts from the power and majesty of the Gettysburg Address. In contrast, the most significant speech of the 20th century was indeed completely improvised, a spontaneous burst of prose and poetry in the immediate wake of nothing less than calamitous national tragedy. And much as the Gettysburg Address forever redefined the Founders’ promise that “all men are created equal,” Robert Kennedy’s extemporaneous eulogy to Martin Luther King, Jr.-- delivered fifty years ago -- can offer a path toward a more just and compassionate next act for a nation adrift in the tides of Trump.
On April 4, 1968, RFK, then a candidate for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, was enroute to a rally in a predominantly black neighborhood in Indianapolis when he heard that King had been assassinated by white supremacist James Earl Ray on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Aboard his campaign plane, when Kennedy heard the news, his head snapped back as if he himself had been struck, then he buried his face in his hands. It is not hard to fathom his feelings at the moment: with America’s cities aflame with racial tension, her generations and social classes riven by the Vietnam War (feelings exacerbated by he still-raging Tet offensive), he was suddenly thrown back five years to another city, in another state as his brother’s arc of history lay fatally interrupted by another sniper’s bullet.
Kennedy and King were not close, with what historians described as a “great barrier” between them. But both men shared moral imagination, an expansiveness of attitude and spirit that sought to reach out beyond normal societal, political, or religious boundaries. People with moral imagination take stands that could get them violently disliked, even hurt where others who are tribal don’t. History has shown that the ones who build bridges across people tend to threaten comfortable, simplistic and long-held beliefs, calling people out of their tribe. If RFK had been nothing more than just another ambitious man running for high office, he might have played it safe, mumbled a few recycled phrases, by so doing offending no one and “protecting his base,” in contemporary parlance.
Kennedy scribbled a few words onto a legal pad, but he mostly just stared out the window. Later, as his car arrived at the rally, his staff anxiously scanned the periphery of the park for snipers. The stakes were more than high. America teetered at the very edge of a precipice. Scarce weeks before, King’s initial foray into the Memphis sanitation strike had spun out of control, with chaos besmirching the movement’s non-violent approach to civil rights that was steadily morphing from bus rides and lunch counter protests to a lack of economic opportunity.
In fact, a divisive selfishness had emerged in the late 1960s that had begun to dominate the body politic. The country had witnessed the Watts riots of 1965 and Detroit burn in 1967 on the nightly news. If 1967 had been the Summer of Love, 1968 brought America the Season of Hate. The anti-Vietnam cauldron was bubbling over, stoked by the heat of the Tet Offensive and the unprecedented prime-time scalding by America’s Most Trusted Man, Walter Cronkite. The civil rights movement had arrived at a bleaker and angrier phase, punctuated by waves of racial violence in urban areas across the country. And Richard Nixon was honing his cynical, yet powerful, appeal to the nation’s bitter undercurrent of selfish resentment, whose targets he would later label the “silent majority.”
The crowd in the park at 17th and Broadway was a mix of white RFK supporters and neighborhood blacks. Mayor Richard Lugar had only been on the job for three months and had warned Kennedy not to go. He was not alone, as Indianapolis police and most of RFK’s own campaign team (including wife Ethel) urged the senator not to go. The exception was John Lewis, a more radical civil rights pioneer who had joined the campaign.
Wearing one of JFK’s old coats and looking shaken, hair tussled, Kennedy clambered onto the back of a flatbed truck to address the crowd. In his hands he clutched a small page of scribbled notes, having turned down a proposed draft ghost-written by an aide. He stepped up to a single microphone before a growingly angry African-American audience that had waited hours in the freezing cold to confirm what many had already heard: that Martin Luther King, Jr. -- their Voice -- had been permanently silenced. And without notes, speaking directly from his heart, a heart that ached from an unimaginable half-decade of grief -- grief for a brother, for a comrade-in-peace, for a nation in turmoil -- Robert Kennedy improvised the speech of his life.
Many had not heard the news about King; they had been waiting in the park for hours, holding “Kennedy” signs. He asked them to put the signs down. “I have some very sad news for all of you,” he said. “And I think some sad news for all of our fellow-citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight, in Memphis, Tennessee.”
The crowd convulsed. People fell to their knees and wept. But as Kennedy spoke they became quieter and moved closer to him. “For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people,” he said, “I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my own family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”
That last sentence, reminding the angry audience that his brother too had been felled by a white man’s bullet, were words that only he could have uttered.
And then came lines that we seldom, if ever anymore, hear in public life, words that lifted the speech from the powerful to the inspiring: “My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote, ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God'."
The reference was inspired. In the wrong hands, citing a sage from antiquity might have appeared pretentious or vainglorious but Kennedy respected his audience's intelligence and handed down the gift of noble thought that had brought him much comfort in his own time of trial. And only RFK, who had sought the refuge of Greek poetry to cope with his personal grief from the tragedy of Dealey Plaza, would have quoted these same poets in the middle of what would have been a political rally.
Many in the crowd had never even heard of Aeschylus. How many today would? Former State Sen. Billie Breaux explained the impact to Indianapolis Monthly: “He seemed to speak to us as human beings and not as people in the ghetto. His sincerity just came through loud and clear.”
As he had done throughout his 1968 presidential campaign, Kennedy took the opportunity not simply to pacify the crowd in his immediate purview, but also to share a communitarian message that embraced all Americans. And, at the core of the speech, you can find universal language: words that could apply to any generation; words that still resonate today.
“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who suffer in our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. . . . Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of his world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”
Throughout his campaign, but most poignantly on April 4, Kennedy drew upon Greek ideals and Judeo-Christian principles, reminding Americans that the only way that our nation could flourish was through pursuit of a common good. Sure, there would always be outliers and extremists who provoked dissension and divisiveness to strengthen their own selfish hands. But the vast majority of Americans wanted our leaders to put aside their labels on occasion, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to reach for a common higher ground. On one of the darkest evenings in American history, RFK reminded us of our potential for greatness, if only we ignored the haters and remembered the Golden Rule.
The speech was itself a prayer, a quiet plea for a shared understanding. Its wellsprings were deep in Kennedy’s own experience, after the murder of his brother, John Kennedy, in 1963; the grief he had carried in the years since; all that he had come to understand about the roots of black unrest, the depths of black frustration with the political process, and the growing focus of black communities on self-determination. In Indianapolis, Kennedy had spoken from the heart, without notes, and expected to leave it at that; he planned to suspend his campaign until after King’s funeral. But John Lewis, among other civil-rights leaders, urged him to keep a scheduled appearance the next day at the City Club of Cleveland, and to use the occasion to make a more pointed case for the principle of nonviolence -- against a backdrop of rioting and looting that had broken out that night in nearly every major American city (one-hundred-and-ten in fact) except, it turned out, Indianapolis.
If the Indianapolis speech was a lament, the speech he gave in Cleveland was an indictment -- delivered more in sorrow than in anger, but just barely. The audience -- mostly white, mostly businessmen -- sat in silence as Kennedy condemned “the mindless menace of violence . . . which again stains our land and every one of our lives” and asked why America should continue to “make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.” He continued, “Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. . . . Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our society can remove this sickness from our land.” He spoke, too, of “the violence of institutions: indifference and inaction and slow decay.” He saw “no final answers.” Yet, he said, “we know what we must do.”
Two months later, it was Kennedy himself lying in a pool of blood dying, and further, the riotous Democratic National Convention with a police mob in Chicago’s Grant Park and, finally, Richard Nixon’s razor thin victory over Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in November that laid bare the cornerstone of western civilization convulsing in turmoil with the whole world watching.
Kennedy, as we know, lost his life to that menace -- as had his brother, as had King, and as have many thousands of other “human beings whom other human beings loved needed,” as RFK. said in Cleveland. We still know what we must do. Kennedy’s question to us, which hangs in the air half a century later, is when we will finally bring ourselves to do it.
Of RFK, John Lewis has said, “Our country would be a better country if he had been elected president and maybe we’d be a little closer to building a beloved world.”
We’ve endured more than half a century of wandering since hope appeared to have taken its final breaths on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, and a few months later, when Robert Kennedy himself perished in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel. More than fifty years dominated by a bi-partisan politics of self-interest, an involuntary conspiracy among the politicians, industry chieftains, culture vultures, and the media, all battling each other to wrest out their own fleeting piece of power, fifteen minutes of celebrity, or pound of fool’s gold.
For the briefest time, when just as Kennedy had famously predicted, an African-American had risen to the same seat of power held by his brother, we thought that we may have finally entered a post-partisan, post-racial world. But it was only after a few months in office -- and a loud, angry, tea-flavored strain of self-interested politics had sucked all of the oxygen from the political debate --that most Americans concluded Barack Obama’s powerful message of healing and unity appeared, in retrospect, to be naïve and unattainable.
Yet, as America’s (and the world’s) current leaders continue to slavishly recite the poll- and focus-group-tested sound bites handed to them by their political consultants, it would be wise for them to pause to remember Robert Kennedy’s improvised moment in 1968. We can continue as a body politic to trade hyper-partisan jabs and appeal to our planet’s most selfish impulses; or we can speak from the heart, without the filter of talking points, and use words that identify and promote a common good -- that appeal to our most compassionate instincts, values that are at the heart of both our common religious traditions and the nature of the American experiment itself.
Improvising can certainly be unnerving, especially for politicians who are trained to be risk-averse. But as a short, slight, young man with a reedy voice and a star-crossed surname proved then, we as a human race desperately need leaders who will step out of their comfort zones, and take a leap of faith by trusting the best of the people.
So, I say to you, go in peace and bend the arc of history to realize what can, and should, be.