Robert Kennedy died on June 6, 1968, at the age of forty-two. He lived through a time of unusual turbulence in American history; and he responded to that turbulence more directly and sensitively than any other political leader of the era. He was equipped with certitudes of family and faith – certitudes that sustained him till his death. But they were the premises, not the conclusions, of his life. For he possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an “experiencing nature.” History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a “representative man” in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.
He never had the chance to fulfill his own possibilities, which is why his memory haunts so many of us now. Because he wanted to get things done, because he was often impatient and combative, because he felt simply and cared deeply, he made his share of mistakes, and enemies. He was a romantic and an idealist, and he was also prudent, expedient, demanding and ambitious. Yet the insights he brought to politics – insights earned in a labor of self-education that only death could stop – led him to see power not as an end in itself but as the means of redeeming the powerless.
