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ZQ000016.TXT
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1993-06-10
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THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release June 6, 1993
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
AT MEMORIAL MASS FOR ROBERT F. KENNEDY
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington, Virginia
8:13 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Father Creedon, Mrs. Kennedy, the
children of Robert Kennedy and the Kennedy family, to all the
distinguished Americans here present, and most of all, to all of you
who bear the noble title, citizen of this country. Twenty-five years
ago today, on the eve of my college graduation, I cheered the victory
of Robert Kennedy in the California primary, and felt again that our
country might face its problems openly, meet its challenges bravely,
and go forward together.
He dared us all. He dared the grieving not to retreat
into despair. He dared the comfortable not to be complacent. He
dared the doubting to keep going.
As I looked around this crowd today and saw us all
graced not only by the laughter of children, but by the tears of
those of us old enough to remember, it struck me again that the
memory of Robert Kennedy is so powerful, that in a profound way we
are all in two places today. We are here and now; and we are there,
then.
For in Robert Kennedy we all invested our hopes and our
dreams that somehow we might redeem the promise of the America we
then feared we were losing; somehow we might call back the promise of
President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and heal the divisions of
Vietnam and the violence and pain in our own country. But I believe
if Robert Kennedy were here today he would dare us not to mourn his
passing, but to fulfill his promise and to be the people that he so
badly wanted us all to be. He would dare us to leave yesterday and
embrace tomorrow.
We remember him, almost captured in freeze-frame,
standing on the hood of a car, grasping at out-reached hands, black
and brown and white. His promise was that the hands which reached
out to him might someday actually reach out to each other. And
together, those hands could make America everything that it ought to
be -- a nation reunited with itself and rededicated to its best
ideals.
When his funeral train passed through the gritty cities
of the Northeast, people from both sides of the tracks stood silent.
He had earned their respect because he went to places most leaders
never visit, and listened to people most leaders never hear, and
spoke simple truth most leaders never speak.
He spoke out against neglect, but he challenged the
neglected to seize their own destiny. He wanted so badly for
government to act, but he did not trust bureaucracy. And he believed
that government had to do things with people, not for them. He knew
we had to do things together or not at all. He spoke to the sons and
daughters of immigrants and the sons and daughters of sharecroppers,
and told them all, as long as you stay apart from each other, you
will never be what you ought to be.
He saw the world not in terms of right and left, but
right and wrong. And he taught us lessons that cannot be labeled
except as powerful proof. Robert Kennedy reminded us that on any
day, in any place, at any time, racism is wrong; exploitation is
wrong; violence is wrong; anything that denies the simple humanity
and potential of any man or woman is wrong.
He touched children whose stomachs were swollen with
hunger, but whose eyes still sparkled with life. He marched with
workers who strained their backs for poverty wages while harvesting
our food. He walked down city streets with people who ached, not
from work, but from the lack of it. Then as now, his piercing eyes
and urgent voice speak of the things we all like to think that we
believe in.
When he was alive, some said he was ruthless, some said
he wasn't a real liberal, and others claimed he was a real radical.
If he were here today, I think he would laugh and say they were both
right. But now as we see him more clearly, we understand he was a
man who was very gentle to those who were most vulnerable; very tough
in the standards he kept for himself; very old-fashioned in the
virtues in which he believed; and a relentless searcher for change,
for growth, for the potential of heart and mind that he sought in
himself and he demanded of others.
Robert Kennedy understood that the real purpose of
leadership is to bring out the best in others. He believed the
destiny of our nation is the sum total of all the decisions that all
of us make. He often said that one person can make a difference, and
each of us must try.
Some still believe we lost what is best about America
when President Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were
killed. But I ask you to remember, my fellow Americans, that Robert
Kennedy did not lose his faith when his own brother was killed. And
when Martin Luther King was killed, he gave from his heart what was
perhaps his finest speech. He lifted himself from despair time after
time and went back to work.
If you listen now you can hear with me his voice telling
me and telling you and telling everyone here, "We can do better."
Today's troubles call us to do better. The legacy of Robert Kennedy
is a stern rebuke to the cynicism, to the trivialization that grips
so much of our public life today.
What use is it in the face of the aching problems
gripping millions of Americans -- the American without a job, the
American without health care, the American without a safe street to
live on or a good school to send a child to? What use of it is it in
the face of all the divisions that keep our country down and rob our
children of their rightful future?
Let us learn here the simple, powerful, beautiful
lesson, the simple faith of Robert Kennedy: We can do better. Let
us leave here no longer in two places, but once again in one only:
in the here and now, with a commitment to tomorrow, the only part of
our time that we can control. Let us embrace the memory of Robert
Kennedy by living as he would have us to live. For the sake of his
memory, of ourselves and of all of our children and all those to
come, let us believe again, we can do better.
END8:21 P.M. EDT