RFK’s Moving Words on MLK’s Death Still Apply Today

It was on this day, in 1968, that Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed. The moving words he spoke in Indianapolis the day Martin Luther King was gunned down two months before his own death, still apply today – even more so in the face of polarized riots across America that had their genesis in the fifties.

Kennedy’s reflection in the following moving words, tell us that it is time for people around the world to reflect upon them now – over five decades later. For who among us is at all happy about the direction in which this world has been heading since the deaths of JFK, MLK, and then RFK? These heinous acts were not chance events, but deliberate acts designed to end any chance of peace and instead, bring about never ending war in what has become an elaborate Hollywood movie set of grand proportions.

Leaving office, President Eisenhower warned the people of the United States about the Military Industrial Complex for a reason: the food they need for their survival is war, the threat of war, and the creation of enemies abroad to justify their existence. The Military Industrial Complex makes enormous profits from war where just one contract can deposit billions of dollars into their self-serving coffers. Wars, as General Smedley Butler will tell you, are fought not for national interests, but greedy corporate interests. Do you think they care at all for the many people killed, and the hardship and poverty caused in wars they planned themselves?

Thinking about this, let us reflect on these most important words Bobby Kennedy so eloquently spoke from the back of a flatbed truck on April 4, 1968:

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. On this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.

For those of you who are black – considering the evidence evidently is, there were white people who were responsible – you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

…We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization – black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.

…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 and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

…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.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

What the American people did not know at the time was that a conspiratorial group plotted behind the scenes to bring about the “savageness of man” so that peace and love and compassion would be blotted out of the human mind.

Since then it has been very difficult for many Americans to remember Bobby Kennedy’s moving words and heartfelt call for love and peace to replace hatred and fear because the truth about his death, and the death of his brother, remains caught in a web of lies, rumor, disinformation, misinformation, conjecture, ‘conspiracy theories,’ cover-ups, trickery, and deceit. When Bobby Kennedy decided to run for president in the hope of finding out who killed his brother, it was perhaps his death sentence.

However, his death also brought a flicker of light to shine, dimly at first, on the truth well hidden for all these years. Hours before he died, Bobby Kennedy was handed a clue about his brother’s assassination by former L.A.P.D. Det. Sgt. Gary Wean. After years of writing and research since then, Gary Wean wrote:

The only thing in this world that can bring the country back to sanity is bringing out the truth – the whole truth and nothing but the truth for the entire people of the country to see and to know that there is nothing, nothing at all left hanging over their heads.

Although Gary Wean did his best to bring this truth to public awareness, and even to a hundred senators, no one wanted to hear. In following posts, I will attempt to bring out this truth again by enabling dead men to speak from their graves.

Full transcript of Bobby Kennedy’s speech:

I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. On this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it’s perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.

For those of you who are black – considering the evidence evidently is, there were white people who were responsible – you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge.

We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization – black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill-be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond and go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poem, my favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own de-despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

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 and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

(Applause)

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past. And we will-we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it’s not the end of disorder.

But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.

With…

(Interrupted by applause)

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.

Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

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