RFK: Finally resting in peace

Forty years ago tomorrow, the world was stunned and many lives like mine were shattered when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.

Last night in St. Paul, MN., some of the healing finally began.

Sen. Kennedy died a day later on June 6, but everyone knew before that the end had come. And so many had feared it would end this way. There was no other candidate like him. He could speak forcefully and honestly to crowds of farmers in Indiana and urban dwellers in south Central LA. As a Time magazine essay by senior correspondent Hays Gorey noted 20 years ago, he could speak on law and order to both crowds of different skin colors, and not sound racist or moralizing. He was blunt more than he was political. And we adored him for it.

Most of all, he left voters feeling they had been heard, he left voters feeling inspired and he left voters feeling there was a definite direction of hope out of Vietnam and the nation's troubling race relations.

The hope of change is a powerful thing, as Americans re-discovered last night in St. Paul, MN.

O, how long the wounds have remained open. O, how good the balm finally feels.

"No one could be indifferent to him," Hays wrote of Bobby's campaign that he covered for its 82 days. "The people who came to support him saw him as a way to escape the frustrations of their lives. They wanted a fighter, someone willing to take a swing, to challenge old assumptions. These people were often at odds with one another: black against poor white, steel-mill hand against welfare recipient. Bobby Kennedy was all they had in common."

Hays noted that Loudon Wainright, a Life magazine columnist, was all prepared to hate Sen. Kennedy when he and Hays sat down with the RFK entourage in a restaurant after one 15-hour campaign day. You see, Kennedy only entered the presidential race after Sen. Eugene McCarthy exposed LBJ's political weakness in the New Hampshire primary. Some saw Bobby as a shameless, ruthless opportunist.

But Hays said Wainright wilted when Bobby spoke of the hurt in the eyes of a black 12-year-old when he learns there is no opportunity for him in the American Dream. Yet there was more than ample opportunity for that youngster to go to Vietnam and die. Bobby wanted to change that injustice and more.

Last night, almost 40 years to the date Bobby was taken from us, his mantle finally was taken up by another Democrat, offering the hope of change out of war and liberation from the shackles of race and political partisanship. And most appropriately, it came from a man, Sen. Barack Obama, who was one of the kids that Sen. Kennedy would take time to talk and listen to, carressing the back of their heads, in his visits to ghettos, barrios and rough, rustic Appalachia.

Bobby must have been proud last night.

Obama's speech rekindled the Kennedy idealism that not even Bobby's brother, Teddy, could summon in enough force to unseat then-incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 nomination. Incredibly, it has taken 40 years for a Democrat to pick up Bobby's mantle and generate the kind of hope and fervor long thought dead and over which many of us still mourned.

Mario Cuomo, while electrifying the 1984 Democratic National Convention, never could put his name on a presidential primary petition. Bill Clinton had a great one-on-one style with people. But the length of his speechmaking was the stuff of violating the 8th Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

It was Obama last night, from the podium, amid 17,500 screaming people in a St. Paul arena, who finally picked up Bobby's mantle and electrified the crowd and the nation with the same kind of idealism and hope that Kennedy sparked four decades ago.

Read how historian and writer Thurston Clarke -- in his new book The Last Campaign, Robert F. Kennedy and 82 days That Inspired America -- describes the first speech in Bobby's run, held at Kansas State University:

"He urged his audience to consider 'the young men that we have sent there(Vietnam); not just the killed, but those who have to kill; not just the maimed, but all those who must look upon the results of what they are forced and have to do,' and to consider 'the price we pay in our own innermost lives, and in the spirit of this country.'

"This was why, he said, 'war is not an enterprise lightly to be undertaken, nor prolonged one moment past its absolute necessity.'

"Hays Gorey, of Time, called the electricity between Kennedy and the K.S.U. students 'real and rare' and said that 'a good part of it is John F. Kennedy’s, of course, but John Kennedy … himself couldn’t be so passionate, and couldn’t set off such sparks.' "

Does any of this ring familar after Tuesday night?

Yet as history tells us, Bobby still did not have a clear road to the Democratic nomination despite winning California and South Dakota that fateful night 40 years ago. Barack's road is not clear to the presidency. At the moment, much depends on how Sen. Hillary Clinton reacts in the coming days.

Still, there was something just as historically important last night as a major party nominating the first black man(bi-racial actually) for president. It also was about Bobby. No, not the controversy over the Hillary Clinton comment last week. Someone had finally picked up his mantle after four long decades of a Democratic Party wandering in the wilderness of misdirected idealism. Like Bobby, Barack has made idealism practical again.

We can indeed seek a newer world ... and a better one.

The admiration of Bobby among Hispanics like myself is deeply rooted. He walked the walk. He was there to help Cesar Chavez end his 25-day fast for non-violence by taking Holy Communion with him. He held congressional hearings in California counties where sheriffs liked to bust the heads of UFW protestors seeking a better wage and working conditions. In one famous exchange, Bobby asked a local sheriff if he knew the law. The sheriff said "yes". Then Kennedy referred him for future reading of a document called the U.S. Constitution. The place erupted in cheers.

And at the end, it was Mexican kitchen workers at the Ambassador Hotel who Sen. Kennedy chose to greet on his way out, after already winning the California primary. Obama's fate with Hispanic voters remains to be seen this fall, but I believe he will make the connection.

Rest more fully in peace now, Bobby. We miss you more with each passing anniversary. We love you even more when we re-read your words as you quoted the poets and watch video footage of the masses of people straining to touch your hands.

But now we get to remember you more regularly in the words of a new candidate who -- in paraphrasing the beautiful eulogy by your brother at your funeral -- has seen wrong and is trying to right it, seen suffering of families in the health care system and is trying heal it, has seen war and is trying to stop it.

O, please, may the healing continue.