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A day to celebrate the legacy of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy
By Tim Roemer, The Mercury News
The
40th anniversary of the assassination of Sen.
Robert F. Kennedy is here. The date June 5
reverberates for many as the day in 1968 that
the Kennedy family lost a brother and many in
America lost hope.
However, in the Irish Catholic tradition of
wakes, rather than mark this as a day of
mourning, I will mark this day as a celebration
of the many rich memories that Bobby Kennedy
brought me - including the inspiration to
dedicate my life to public service.
As an 11-year-old back in 1968 in San Jose, I
vividly remember sitting in my fifth-grade
classroom at St. Christopher's when my teacher
interrupted with a question that would prove to
change the course of my life.
She announced a mock election and requested a
student to serve as the class coordinator for
the presidential primary campaign for Senator
Kennedy; I excitedly volunteered. I had been
following the campaign intently. Kennedy had
even overtaken my idol Willie Mays on the
bulletin board in my bedroom.
Memorable rally
After that first taste of campaigning, I was
hooked. I convinced one of my relatives to take
me to a Kennedy rally at St. James Park, and I
was overwhelmed by his ability to unify diverse
groups of people and to inject hope into their
hearts. My fifth-grade classroom was all white
and uniformly Catholic, but this crowd had
people of all religions, ethnicities,
backgrounds and beliefs. Somehow, though,
Kennedy was able to meld them together with a
common purpose for a common good.
Kennedy beat Eugene McCarthy, both in the
fifth-grade election and in the California
primary. Yet the morning after the June
primary, my mom woke me up for school saying
she had some bad news about Bobby. I was
devastated. Someone had taken my hero.
Though much too short-lived, Kennedy's impact
on me was powerful and enduring. He is the
reason, along with my parents' influence, that
I chose to pursue a life of public service.
He taught me that running for public office was
an honorable profession that gave you the
opportunity to speak for people without a
voice, and to help guide your nation into the
future. He taught me that politics should not
simply be about the self-interest of
re-election, but about making grand proposals
and bringing together different groups of
people to achieve successful results. He showed
me that it was better to fight for high ideals
and risk losing than to coast along, never
rocking the boat, thus never making an impact.
A lifetime study
I have religiously studied his speeches and
wrote a paper in college on his innovative
private-public sector partnership for the poor
in Bedford-Stuyvesant, New York. I have
continuously admired the internal fortitude he
had to take difficult and sometimes unpopular
positions.
I voted in the minority as a pro-life Democrat,
yet always felt it was the right thing to do.
For all his principled bluntness, RFK also
taught me that compromise could be as virtuous
as conviction.
In Congress, I practiced the Kennedy model,
where possible, by seeking common ground with
Republicans to pass laws creating Americorps,
expanding college education loans and allowing
for our military to transition more seamlessly
into the teaching profession. Bobby's brother,
Ted Kennedy, became a friend and partner on
some legislative initiatives.
When the sun rises on June 5 of this year, I
will be thinking about, and thanking, Robert
Kennedy. I am still in public life and I am
proud to say that his words and deeds have
remained a guiding force in my life even
today.
To me, June 5 should not be remembered as the
day a nation lost a young, gifted politician.
Rather, it is a day to celebrate the gifts he
gave to a generation of Americans, a day when a
legacy of truth, conviction and hope was born.
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TIM ROEMER is a former U.S. congressman from
Indiana who served on the Sept. 11 commission.
Roemer, who went to elementary school in San
Jose, is president of the Center for National
Policy in Washington, D.C. He wrote this
article for the Mercury News.
