A Man of Moral Courage

On this day, 43 years ago, Robert F. Kennedy was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

“It seems the good they die young. I just looked ’round and he’s gone,” Dion sang in 1968. The poignant song, “Abraham, Martin and John,” written by Richard Holler, felt like a stab in the heart every time it played on the radio that year. Abraham Lincoln had been the first American president to be assassinated; President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963; and civil rights leader Martin Luther King was shot in April of 1968. Then came Bobby. Robert Francis Kennedy had just won the all-important California primary in his bid for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Wounded after addressing supporters in Los Angeles, he died the next morning, on June 6, 1968.

Following a Requiem Mass in New York, his body went by train to Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. So many mourners lined the railway tracks that the train was delayed and Bobby was laid to rest near his brother John, during an unusual burial at night.

The youngest Kennedy brother, Ted, had quoted him earlier in the day, during a eulogy. “As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: ‘Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.’ ”

Dion sang, “Didn’t you love the things that they stood for? Didn’t they try to find some good for you and me?” Bobby Kennedy’s determined and stalwart stand on racial equality changed America. He found some good for all of us.

–Jayne MacAulay