Tuesday, October 18, 2011

RFK in Indianapolis

The night Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, it fell to Robert Kennedy, then running for the Democratic Party nomination for president, to tell a crowd in Indianapolis the bad news. Speaking from the heart, from little notes, he told the crowd that his family had suffered from such a tragedy. Of course, that was a reference to his brother's death in 1963.
That evening in Indianapolis, RFK quoted the Greek poet Aeschylus (Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget/falls drop by drop upon the heart) and closed by telling the crowd, "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."
Of course, Kennedy's speech came the night after King gave his "Mountaintop" speech in Memphis. An amazing 24-hour period that's highlighted in SUMMER OF '68, which will be out from Da Capo this spring.

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