June 8, 1968

Do you remember what you were doing on June 8, 1968?

If you are reading this, some of you now are Googling the date and are rewarded with information about the funeral of Robert Kennedy, Bobby.

I have just watched a wonderful documentary of pictures taken from aboard the train that carried Bobby's body back to Washington, DC for burial.

One Thousand Pictures is the name of this wonderful documentary, shown on HBO, that is filled with pictures from 1968 and follow-up interviews given 43 years later.

So I do remember what I was doing, I the junior in HS that was deciding to join the Peace Corp after graduation.  

Much to the chagrin of my parents, my friends and I were gathered around the TV to watch the funeral and weeping.

Here is the ending excerpt from Edward Kennedy's eulogy.  The full eulogy can be found here.  Edward Kennedy Eulogy

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American Society.* 

Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live."

That is the way he lived. That is what he leaves us.

 

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:

"Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not."