Robert Kennedy

Today I saw in the newspaper that Joseph Kennedy the grandson of Robert Kennedy opened his campaign for a seat in the US Congress.  This sent my memory off to the day I sat with my 2 year old son and watched the funeral of Senator Kennedy and it seems a long time ago.
Senator Robert Kennedy was murdered on the 6th June 1968 just a few years after his brother President John F. Kennedy was also murdered.  Robert had worked tirelessly for civil rights and to stop the war in Viet Nam; two things which made him very unpopular with the Establishment.
He had always lived in the huge shadow of his charasmatic elder brother and never believed himself to be liked.   There were many who did like and respect him, though he found it hard to believe.  He endeared himself to African Americans, native Americans, immigrants, the disaffected, the impoverished and the excluded - insisting on opportunities for employment and free health treatment for all the poorest people in the USA.

These were some of the people who lined the 270 miles of train track to watch him being taken to his last resting place in WashingtonDC.

Two days after his murder a state funeral was held in New York City attended by thousands of the great and good and watched by the ordinary New Yorkers.  Afterwards his  coffin was loaded on to a train which was to take him along with his close family members to be interred next to his brother, the President, in Arlington Cemetery in Washington.
The family settled down for the quiet journey to gather themselves together to face the second ordeal of the day.   They were so wrong - they and certainly not security could   have prepared themselves for the next few hours.
Thousands of the people he had been fighting for walked quietly to the railway tracks and stood in silent tribute to say their own 'goodbye'  - lined up for the whole of the 270 miles
 journey to Washington.
The train which had set off at a regular pace soon had to slow down for safety reasons
to such an extent that the funeral was eventually conducted late at night in the pitch darkness.   The first one in the history of Arlington ever to be so.
All that happened over 40 years ago and since then Hollywood has fought hard to spoil his memory - the truth of this we shall never know. Whether he would have carried out all his promises, we shall never know.  Whether he would have been voted in as President, we shall never know.  (They got Nixon instead!).
But an interesting and loving testimony came from the one nearest to him.  One her 80th birthday, his wife Ethel was interviewed on TV and asked why she had never remarried.  She looked genuinely puzzled for a second or two and then said,  'I was married to Robert Kennedy and still am, no man could walk within a mile of him in my eyes, I love him'.

How wonderful for someone to say that of us.