RFK: Remembering Our Father

[Octafish]

The New York Times asked three of the late Sen. Kennedy's children to write about their father:

RFK: Remembering Our Father



Lessons of the Magnolia Tree
By Kerry Kennedy

Taking ‘No’ for an Answer
By Joseph P. Kennedy II

The Delta in Our Home
By Kathleen Kennedy Townsend

As H20 Man's father said: More than his untimely death, we need to focus on what the life of this great man meant.

[yellowdogintexas]

1. EVERYONE please read the essays linked here

I am reminded again of the great loss our nation suffered when Bobby died

[Octafish]

3. Lessons of the Magnolia Tree

From Kerry Kennedy:

...There was no quality my father admired more than courage, save perhaps love. I remember when one night after dinner he picked up the battered poetry book that was always somewhere at his side and read aloud Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” We listened aghast to the story of the soldiers whose commander orders them to ride into an ambush. They know they will be slaughtered, but they obey the command anyway. My father then explained that he and my mother were going on a trip and challenged us to memorize the poem while they were away. I did not win that contest, but one famous stanza has remained with me:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of death

Rode the six hundred.

You may wonder why a father would ask his expanding brood of what would become 11 children to memorize a poem about slaughter and war. I think there were three reasons. He wanted us to share his love of literature and he wanted us to embrace challenges that appear daunting. But most of all, he believed it imperative to question authority, and those who failed that lesson did so at their peril...

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/opinion/05kerrykennedy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Irreplaceable loss to our country and planet. We need to remember his life in order to carry on his work.

[malaise]

8. Truly beautiful

As an adult, I recognize that the lessons my father taught us children mirrored the beliefs he wanted the nation to embrace — that we must build a system of justice which enjoys the confidence of all sides; that peace is not something to pray for, but something everyone has the responsibility to create every day; and that we must muster the courage to face the truth about ourselves as well as those we consider our enemies.

Profound

[Octafish]

13. He was profound.

"I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil." -- Robert Kennedy

[ColbertWatcher]

2. How people can compare the Bush klan to the Kennedys...

...is beyond me.

Thank you for posting.

[Octafish]

4. Taking ‘No’ for an Answer

From Joseph P. Kennedy III:

I REMEMBER how my father listened with rare empathy to everyone. He paid a lot of attention, for instance, to Putt, an old man who lived in a rest home at the end of Sea Street in Hyannis. A gas attack during World War I had left Putt unable to hear or speak. He spent most every day riding around Lewis Bay in a little rowboat with a five-horsepower engine.

If Putt spotted us sailing to Egg Island for a picnic, he’d pull alongside, and my father would pass him a sandwich, a bag of chips and a beer. Putt would follow the sailboat until we gently beached, and then he and my father would stand together on the sand, their heads leaning toward one another.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/opinion/05joekennedy.html

Here's how I make my conservative associates angry: I say good people try to help others. Evil people try to hurt others.

[seemslikeadream]

5. .........

[Octafish]

9. The Delta in Our Home

Another visit, to Hazard, Kentucky.

THE spring Saturday was lovely. I was on the rope swing, waiting for my father to come home and for all of us to be called to dinner. Usually, on such a warm weekend day, our family would eat outdoors. My father would grill steaks smothered in mustard. But he was returning late from a trip to the Mississippi Delta, where he’d been conducting Senate hearings on hunger. It was 1967, and I was 15.

After the bell rang, I got to the dining room before the others. The long table was set with linen, silver and crystal. Painted portraits of my brothers and sisters hung on the walls. And suddenly, my father entered. He looked haunted and started talking to me, shaking his head in distress as he described the people he’d met in the Delta. “I was with a family who live in a shack the size of this dining room,” he told me. “The children’s stomachs were distended and had sores all over them. They were starving.” He was outraged that this could happen in the world’s richest country.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/opinion/05townsend.html

Good people know how to raise good kids.

[seemslikeadream]

11. good kids

[stevedeshazer]

6. Very powerful

Wow.

[Octafish]

10. Ripple of Hope in the Land of Apartheid

In June 1966 Senator Robert Kennedy made an historic visit to South Africa. It remains the most important visit an American made to South Africa because it took place during the darkest years of Apartheid. The architect of Apartheid, Dr. Verwoerd, was Prime Minister, while Nelson Mandela, Chief Albert Luthuli and other opposition leaders were in prison on Robben Island or in exile. With rare exception, all opposition across the spectrum of black and white South Africa- political parties, the universities, the churches, the arts and the media- were living under the tight control of the National Party and its military, bureaucratic and ideological machinery.

Surprisingly, very few Americans know of this dramatic and important visit by Robert Kennedy, then the Junior Senator from New York, to South Africa from June 4th to the 9th, 1966. He was invited by NUSAS, the anti-Apartheid National Union of South African Students, to deliver its Annual Day of Affirmation Speech to be held that year at the University of Cape Town. He was accompanied by his wife, Ethel Kennedy, and a small number of close aides.

The value of the visit needs to be understood within the context of America's special relationship with South Africa. For many Americans the pictures and news reports coming out of South Africa in the 1960's seemed hauntingly similar to the pictures emanating from the American South during the Civil Rights Movement. The visit emphasized the connections between the fight against racism in the United States and South Africa.

In the late fifties and early sixties, South Africa did not register on the agenda of American foreign policy. In an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times in 1994, at the time of South Africa's historic first democratic election, Anthony Lewis wrote of Senator Kennedy's visit: "In a trip to South Africa in 1966 he challenged the tyranny and fear that then had the country in its grip. At a time when few diplomats visited black townships or entertained black leaders, Senator Kennedy identified with the black majority and with all the victims of repression... he gave many South Africans, black and white, courage to fight injustice- and reason to believe that some in the outside world would care." 1

CONTINUED with links to speech and more:

http://www.rfksa.org/contents/overview.php

www.rfksa.org is amazing.

A paraphrase from memory: "The nation would be a very different place, and also the world, even to this day." -- Theodore Sorensen, in an interview with Thom Hartmann on AAR.

[bleever]

7. Tears of sorrow

mix with tears of joy.

The better day that RFK saw can be ours.

[Octafish]

12. The How.

"It is not enough to understand, or to see clearly. The future will be shaped in the arena of human activity, by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task." -- Robert Kennedy