Fifty years ago today, Bobby Kennedy died. Moments before he was shot, he was being cheered by his supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just won the California presidential primary, and his victory speech near midnight was full of hope and promise. “Now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there” were his parting words. But he never even made it to the hotel exit. With the jubilant ballroom crowd still shouting “Bobby! Bobby!,” an assassin’s bullet struck him down in a narrow kitchen corridor.

Watching on television only ten miles away, I turned off the news and went to bed less than a minute before the shooting. I slept in peaceful ignorance until the morning. Then came the long anxious watch as doctors at the Episcopal Hospital of the Good Samaritan––where I had been born and my father had died––tried to save the fallen leader.

But 26 hours after the shooting, Bobby Kennedy departed this world, and perishing with him was an American future that never happened. Who can say what that future might have been, but after watching Bobby Kennedy for President, Dawn Porter’s riveting 4-hour documentary for Netflix, I have to wonder.

L.A. Times TV Guide cover, June 2, 1968, two days before Robert Kennedy’s assassination in Los Angeles (Jim Friedrich personal archive)

In a time of great division, in an America troubled by violence at home and abroad, Bobby Kennedy was a passionate advocate for reconciliation and healing. Though born to great wealth, he visited the poorest of the poor––virtually invisible in today’s politics––and pronounced their plight “unacceptable.” He appealed not to resentments and fears but to our better natures. Against the darkness of the time, he envisioned an unselfish and compassionate America.

But that is not the America we have in 2018. Our would-be dictator is burning down the house while his shameless enablers say not a word. Instead of dreaming better futures, some of my friends are starting to worry that the end may be near, that the America we believed in is finished. For those who don’t confuse the United States with the Kingdom of God, this need not bring despair. The ingenuity of God will always find a way to make more justice, more peace, and more compassion in a world “so loved” by the divine. But still, the demise of our democratic experiment would be a very sad thing, despite the glee with which the powers-that-be are bringing it to pass. It could have been otherwise. And perhaps, God willing, it still might be.

Bobby Kennedy knew a lot of poems by heart, and one of his favorites was Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” about the hero who roamed “with a hungry heart” in search of his destined home. The journey is long, and the hero, though “made weak by time and fate,” is still determined “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” May these lines so treasured by Bobby bring comfort and courage to us all:

Related post: Is the American Dream a Con Game?

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