Quote of the Day (Robert Kennedy, on ‘Common Qualities of Conscience and Indignation’)

"There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve to death in the streets of India; a former Prime Minister is summarily executed in the Congo; intellectuals go to jail in Russia; and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world. These are different evils; but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings throughout the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.”— U.S. Attorney General, Senator from New York, and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), “Speech at the University of Capetown, South Africa, Day of Affirmation,” June 6, 1966

In his eulogy two years after this address, Ted Kennedy told the mourners in St. Patrick’s Cathedral that his murdered brother “need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life.” 

At least to some extent, the documentary record about Camelot and the cries of scandal-mongers alike ensured for our skeptical age that Robert Kennedy would indeed escape this fate. He could be the most complicated mixture imaginable of idealism and steely-eyed, brass-knuckle determination in pursuit of a goal.

Even so, and despite realizing that a yawning gap frequently exists between words and performance, I couldn’t read the above excerpt from his Capetown address (also known as the “Ripple of Hope” speech) without feeling that something immense was lost when he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet in Los Angeles after winning the 1968 California primary for President.

At some level, the words of politicians do matter. Even when using talented speechwriters, what they choose to say (or not) conveys what they regard as important and indicates some measure of their character.

Kennedy’s words in particular reflect an elevated tone befitting the magnitude of worldwide issues, a responsibility for alleviating “the imperfections of human justice.”

That gravitas, I’m sorry to say, is missing in today’s discourse. You can call this diminished rhetoric a casualty of a Sixties decade that didn’t achieve its lofty goals, of more than a half century of advertising sound bites that left listeners unable to absorb sustained arguments, or of the countless casual cruelties and callousness of Donald Trump.

But it was gone at both parties’ conventions this summer. Forget about that “When they go low, we go high” cry of the Democrats eight years ago. Just think of Barack Obama’s hand gesture to simulate Trump’s obsession with crowd size.

My sadness increased when I heard today that Robert Kennedy Jr. would be suspending his independent campaign and backing Trump for President. It would take a psychiatrist to plumb all the depths and traumas that led the son of the martyred Democratic candidate of the late Sixties to this decisive point in his own misbegotten Presidential race.

But it only takes an ordinary moral sensibility to know that the candidate who won his endorsement not only did not measure up to the job that Robert Sr. sought and Jack Kennedy achieved, but that he corroded the dignity of the Oval Office, widened the gap between rich and poor, and encouraged the forces of evil at home and abroad.

Robert Sr.’s Capetown address—one of the most famous in his short career—inspired inhabitants of Africa—a continent that Trump has dubbed, together with Haiti and El Salvador, as “s—thole countries.”

It is even more astonishing to realize that the crusade that Robert Jr. conducted so fervently these last couple of decades—conservation—was abandoned and utterly forgotten in his support for a former President whose administration took 74 actions that weakened environmental protection, according to an August 2020 Brookings Institution study.

Twenty years ago this month, Robert Jr. published Crimes Against Nature, a polemic with the most pointed of subtitles: “How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy.” If he felt this way about Dubya, then what on earth did he think Trump was doing in his term in office?

In bowing out, he noted that Trump had “asked to enlist me in his administration.” Assume that he does get tapped for such a position. How long do you think before, like so many others who agreed to serve the Former Guy, he awakens one morning to find via X that he’s been fired?

Robert Kennedy Sr. brought conscience with his indignation to the problems of the world and his country. His namesake forgot the conscience part.

His latest choice has dismayed members of his immediate family, who issued a statement rightly denouncing his endorsement as “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.” They understood better than their brother that their father appealed to the best instincts of humanity in general and his countrymen in particular, while Trump has never missed a chance to call forth the ugliest of both. 

But RFK Jr. has also disappointed the millions of Americans who like Robert Sr. have hoped to “wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.” Those sufferings will only increase because of the side with which he's thrown in his lot.