has it been that long?

dear reader,

I originally started this note “dear robert kennedy.” Then I quickly saw how hard it was to “write a letter to” someone who you, you know, revere. So I switched it up. And as an aside, yes, this *is* the new format. All posts are now a letter to someone, something, or you.

I can’t believe it’s been 40 years since that night at the Ambassador in California when RFK was assassinated. Now, clearly, I wasn’t alive back then. In fact I missed it by quite some time. But RFK, his life and death, has markedly shaped who I am. At some point between senior year in high school and graduation from college I became a huge fan of RFK. I’m talking own-over-twenty-books, read-hundreds-of-articles, know-speeches-by-heart,- obsessed. The Kennedy brothers appeal to a lot of people because of their aura, glamor, and maybe the hearkening back to some golden age. There’s some of that for me, but more so, I always identified with RFK. He was the scrappy younger brother. He couldn’t measure up to big brothers Joe or Jack. He was smaller. He lacked the polish. By grades he wasn’t as smart. But holy shit was he scrappy, passionate, fiery and loyal. He was, by all accounts, the very definition of tenacity. He was torn to shreds by his brother’s death and blamed himself. He was completely fatalistic. Anyway, for many reasons, the character of bobby kennedy has always captured me wholly. And forty years ago today, he was assassinated in a kitchen.

Now there’s so much to rfk. And it’s painfully hard to try and tear away the mythmaking to get at the man. His faults, his fatal flaws, and not just lionize him as perfection. So I want to stay focused on a couple of things.

1) The line his brother quotes of bobby, who’s actually quoting Shaw, is epic. We should all strive for it:

“Some men see things as they are, and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?”

We limit our own possibilities. This, more than many things, is a fatal problem. We fail to re-imagine. We accept. We only go lower. Rarely higher. This quote gave me goosebumps when I first heard it. It does no less today.

2) A favorite blog, eotw, linked to this video today. While watching it I almost spit up. It’s a youtube video (below) of brother teddy’s eulogy of bobby. They put various pictures against it. Like the post, I didn’t care much for the pictures. But I love this speech. So I played it while I ate lunch at my desk today. I looked up every 20 seconds or so while I listened on my headphones. Towards the end, I look up and I almost choked. There was a photo of me. Seriously. They were a bunch of habitat for humanity photos, and there was a photo of a group of college kids hunched over in front of the house they had helped just build. At Rutgers I was part of a group that went to FL to help out for a week during spring break. (one of my very best memories, by the way) And somehow, that photo ended up in that person’s pile as he was making the video. Ridiculously random.

If that picture was on any random video, I would have thought it hilarious. On a RFK video. That I view on the 40th anniversary of his death. Sometimes life is nuts like that.

Anyway, if you haven’t read up on brother bobby ever, today is a good day. This newsweek article by the author of my favorite biography of RFK is a great place to start.

JFK gets all the love. But RFK is the one that helped shape me.

love,
surya