ARLINGTON, Va. -- Fifty years after his assassination in Los Angeles, family, friends and admirers of Robert F. Kennedy gathered to celebrate his life and remember his call for justice, compassion and peace.
Seventeen speakers, including civil-rights activists and foreign dignitaries, read excerpts from Kennedy's speeches during a service at Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday.
Former President Bill Clinton, a senior at Georgetown University when Kennedy died, also paid tribute to the slain U.S. senator, former attorney general and 1968 presidential candidate.
Kennedy, who had just won California's presidential primary, was shot a few minutes after midnight on June 5, 1968, shortly after delivering a victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel. He died the next day.
His murder, two months after the assassination of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, came as the Vietnam War raged.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the subsequent presidential nominee of a fractured Democratic Party, would eventually lose to Republican Richard Nixon.
Kennedy, 42, left behind his widow, Ethel Kennedy, and 11 children.
His daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, welcomed the thousands who gathered at the Memorial Ampitheater on Wednesday.
"It is tough to lose a parent. It was very tough to lose my father," she said. "Your presence is deeply moving and a tribute to the love that my father inspired. Thank you for remembering. ... Thank you for lightening our burden and lifting our hearts."
During the service, young and old alike read passages from Kennedy's most famous addresses.
Eighty-eight-year-old Dolores Huerta, co-founder of United Farmworkers, quoted from Kennedy's June 6, 1966, speech in Capetown, South Africa: "We must recognize the full human equality of all of our people before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not because of the laws of God command it, although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the [single] and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do."
U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., 78, who marched with King, quoted Kennedy's words to an Indianapolis audience the night of King's assassination: "What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black."
Gun control activist Emma Gonzalez, 18, read another passage from the South Africa speech, addressing "the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of this world's ills -- against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man."
Clinton, who sat beside Townsend during the service, drew parallels between America in the 1960s and the nation today.
"In another time of hope and heartbreak and division, it is important that we remember what he meant to us when we were young," the former president said.
He expressed hope that love would overcome existing barriers.
"We have got to stop hating each other. It is bad for us. And by the way, that includes the members of our clans and our tribes," he added.
Clinton, now 71, quoted from "Ulysses," a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson that Kennedy utilized during his 1968 campaign:
"Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Afterward, Townsend told the Democrat-Gazette that Clinton's message had been appreciated.
"He spoke so beautifully, and I think he captured my father's spirit and the fact that, at every age, we have to keep fighting," she said.
A Section on 06/07/2018