Robert F. Kennedy

[WiffenPoof]

They are advertising an upcoming program on RFK on the ID Channel.

It got me to thinking. What would this world have been like had Robert Kennedy lived?

As for myself, I'm convinced that this world would have been very different.

Every once in a while, I think about RFK and what he meant to so many of us. Mostly, I think about what "might have been." Out of all the losses to this country during my lifetime, I think his was the most devastating...only because he held so much promise during a time when our country was at a crossroads.

Remember all the people that lined the train route as he was carried home? We live in a very different world now.

-P

[SDuderstadt]

1. When I saw the movie "Bobby"...

I was not prepared for the film clip of the funeral train at the end of the movie.

I cried like a baby.

[Zorra]

3. Yeah, me, too.

Just like I did when my dad told me he had died.

Ouch.

[SDuderstadt]

8. Damn it...

now I have tears rolling down my face.

The Kennedys will always hold a special place in my heart.

[WiffenPoof]

9. Sorry...

But I understand how you feel.

-P

[SDuderstadt]

10. No, it's a good kind of...

sad.

Just wondering about what might have been. Remembering a time of great idealism.

[Rowdyboy]

2. Tonight I watched an ETV program on the Freedom Riders....Bobby had a prominent role

as Attorney General obviously. Of the Kennedys' Bobby is the one I've always identified with. He's one of my childhood heroes (shot down when I was 14). We'll never see his like again.

[WiffenPoof]

4. I Think I was 14 too...

I don't know why RFK holds a special place in my heart. I suppose that I could name a lot of people that inspired me and gave me hope. For whatever reason, he stands above them all.

-P

[Rowdyboy]

6. Maybe it has to do with our age...he reached us at that vunerable point

when we first became aware of "current events". He was so much larger than life by 1967/68-its hard to say. But regardless, Bobby holds that place in my heart too. He inspired me and gave me hope too. You're quite correct-he does stand above them all.

[Art_from_Ark]

5. I believe RFK would have won the 1968 election

and then we would have had a chance to have the Great Society without the Vietnam War.

[guruoo]

7. "They got Bobby"...

My mother's scream, that I awoke to on that morning.

[Selatius]

11. I believe they took out JFK because he was threatening to derail a very profitable war.

Tens of billions in war contracts would not have been doled out if he had pulled remaining troops out of Viet Nam by 1965. For the profits to be had, JFK had to be removed. RFK probably posed a similar threat to the defense/security establishment. In the end, he was eliminated as well. To this day, quite a few people think both men were killed by more than just a lone gunman.

[99th_Monkey]

12. I worked for RFK in Oregon & Calif.

Even got to shake his hand once, and look deeply into his clear blue eyes only to realize he was saying to me "Thank you for all of your good work" to me,

I was really on fire for this man, not only because of the resonant hope and trust he engendered with so much of the black community, and not only because of his support for migrant workers and Caesar Chavez's union movement, and not only because of his opposition to the war in Viet Nam, but also because of he always seemed to be a work in progress with the courage to simply listen to what was really going on for real people on the street, in the hood, at the mall, wherever.

When he was shot, I had this image of thousands of tiny seeds getting blown into the wind covering the earth, and I was one of those little seeds, and I hope my life shows it.

[gordianot]

13. It would have been a very different world with Bobby Kennedy but I have one more to consider.

Jerry Litton who died in a plane crash the night he won the Missouri senatorial primary in 1976. I remember his town forums televised across Missouri. no question in my mind he could have become President someday. There are still plenty of unanswered questions about how the crankshaft of his plane broke in half.