BOBBY KENNEDY’S “AWFUL GRACE OF GOD”

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

Thursday, June 6, 1968, 52 years ago today, I was the perpetually exhausted but deliriously content young mother of my eighth-month-old baby girl and my twenty-seven-month-old little boy. As on every day, that day began at the peak of dawn for me, and even before my first cup of coffee, baby girl needed her diaper changed and little boy a mommy’s handhold while he squirmed on that strange device in the bathroom called “Potty.” All the while, in the kitchen, our new Instamatic Electric Coffee Pot huffed and puffed like an agitated volcano and was piping hot and ready to pour by the time hubby ambled in, his eyes sticky with sleep and tongue thick with terrible news. “Someone shot Bobby Kennedy last night,” hubby said over his shoulder as he walked to the television set in the adjoining living room and clicked it on. My musician husband was driving back to our Long Island home from his gig in a Manhattan nightclub when he heard the news on his car radio—sometime in the wee dark hours of that morning. It was gruesome déjàvu: a fatal bullet to the brain to a second Kennedy in what seemed like the blink of an eye in our young lives.    

Hubby and I were married a scant eight months when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Less than half a decade later, we Americans were still coming to grips with the enormous loss of President Kennedy, and our hopes were pinned on his younger brother Bobby, a candidate for the Democratic nomination of the upcoming presidential election, to resurrect in the White House the Camelot magic of John and Jackie and their adorable Caroline and John-John. Admittedly, there was a fairytale element to our expectations of Bobby that in some ways flew in the face of the sad turmoil that marked the decade, and too much of which persists to this day—crises such as the Cold War, the Vietnam War, civil rights, women’s rights, social unrest, to name just the major few.

What was it about Bobby that instilled such hope for the nation in so many people like me despite the enormous odds stacked against him—that Kennedy son who in the words of his own father was the “runt” of the litter and least likely to bring glory to his powerful political family? That “runt,” like so many others of his kind, whose physical frame barely hefted the weight of his enormously courageous heart, governed by a crafty brain, exhibited real promise of being the best of the brood in the end. Bobby’s track record housed in his gentle and in some ways flawed presence convinced us that he was our David who would slay Goliath—a totally unrealistic probability, most likely, but I believe, as do almost countless others, that Bobby would have wounded Goliath to a degree enough to slow him down—considerably enough that the evil giant just might have expired eventually. I think that Bobby had the power to change hearts and minds and policies, changes that could have nudged the giant toward imminent expiration.    

Bobby loved justice. While he considered civil rights as his greatest cause toward justice, and worked through and around the tangled web of the political system to confront it and right it, his wasn’t always a mature eye on the ways and means of achieving the goal. But he tried. And he never gave up on it or any of his aspirations toward justice. His was an ideological development on full view to those who paid attention—from a young lawyer in the Justice Department fighting the Mafia, organized union miscreants, corrupt politicians, and Soviet agents, to an advocate for civil rights, gun-control, nuclear-weapons control, and voting rights. He also supported ending the Vietnam War with visionary efforts toward an “honorable peace.”

One of his most impressive civil rights actions was in September, 1962, when as Attorney General under President John F. Kennedy, Bobby sent a force of U.S. Marshals and deputized U.S. Border Patrol agents, as well as federal prison guards to Oxford, Mississippi, to enforce a federal court order that allowed the admittance of James Meredith, the first African-American student, to the University of Mississippi. Whites rioted—rebellions fraught with death and injury, a situation that required further federal troops. Through the whole of it, Bobby remained adamant that black students had the right to enjoy the benefits of all levels of the educational system. He didn’t send in federal troops to ruthlessly beat back peaceful protestors to make way for his president to walk across the street and stand in front of a church and brandish a Bible upsidedown for a political photo op. NO! AG BILL BARR! YOU AIN’T NO BOBBY KENNEDY!

Bobby was three months shy of his nineteenth birthday when his eldest brother Joe Jr., was killed in action in World War II. His brother John’s assassination, as well as his brother Ted’s auto accident and serious injury sent Bobby into a period of depression and serious reflection. He came close to losing faith in politics as the avenue of reform and growth for the country. He rallied however, and pressed on, credited to his deep Catholic faith.  

In an interview for “Look” magazine following his trip to Apartheid-era South Africa in mid-1966, Bobby related a story about his confrontation with whites about their policy of disallowing blacks to pray with whites in their houses of worship. The rationalization by the whites was that it was a moral necessity based on Biblical scriptures. Bobby replied, “’What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?’ There was no answer. Only silence,” Bobby said to the reporter.

As a senator, Bobby worked to improve the plight of African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and other marginalized groups whom he called the “disaffected,” the impoverished,” and the “excluded.” He aligned himself with civil rights struggles and campaigners, and led the Democratic Party coalition to eliminate perceived discrimination on all levels, including in the areas of equal access to housing, education, employment, and health coverage.  

Two months before his own assassination, Bobby was campaigning in Indianapolis when he received word of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. In a speech to the gathered

crowd about MLK, Bobby slightly misquoted Aeschylus with the following lines:

“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.”  

Bobby didn’t know he was speaking his own epitaph.©