Robert Francis Kennedy (1925-68), US politician, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, the third son of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and wife Rose Kennedy. He studied at Harvard and at the University of Virginia University Law School, served at sea (1944-46) in World War II, was admitted to the bar (1951), and served on the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities (1957-59), when he prosecuted several top union leaders. An efficient manager of his brother John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, he was an energetic Attorney General (1961-64), notably in his dealings with civil rights problems. He became senator from New York in 1965. After winning the Californian Democratic presidential primary election, he was shot at a hotel in Los Angeles. His assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Jordanian-born immigrant, was sentenced to the gas chamber in 1969, but was not executed.
Robert F. Kennedy
Movies
Bobby
Tuesday, June 4, 1968: the California Presidential primary. As day breaks, Robert F. Kennedy arrives at the Ambassador Hotel. He’ll campaign, then speak to supporters at midnight. To capture the texture of the late 1960s, we see vignettes at the hotel: a couple marries so he can avoid Vietnam, kitchen…
Fun Facts
someone cried
Quotes
I'm tired of chasing people.
I've seen despair and hopelessness, and I've seen children who are starving to death in the United States. I mean, not 'I read about children who are starving to death in the United States', but I've seen children who are starving to death in the United States. And, as the reports have said, they will never recover mentally after the age of four.
Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.
All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.
It is not enough to understand, or to see clearly. The future will be shaped in the arena of human activity, by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task.
What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.
I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.
One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.
If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.
I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.
Now I can go back to being ruthless again.
I thought they'd get one of us, but Jack, after all he's been through, never worried about it I thought it would be me.
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.
But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.
The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means.
[1963, on Lyndon B. Johnson] There is so much now to be done-for the Negroes and the unemployed and school kids and everyone else who is not getting a decent break in our society. This is what counts. The new fellow doesn't get this. He knows all about politics and nothing about human beings.
I can understand the Chinese Wall: it was built as a defense against marauders. But a wall such as that in Berlin, built to prevent people from seeking freedom, is almost beyond comprehension.
Bobby was not tough at all. He was gentle. He was a touching person, really. He was wry and very dear. He was interested in everything, curious. He was like a ten year old in a grownup's suit. His shoulders were a little bit hunched. He didn't seem happy in his own skin. - a friend describing 21 year old Bobby
[on his childhood] Going to different schools, always having to make new friends, and that I was very awkward... and I was pretty quiet most of the time. And I didn't mind being alone.
[to hecklers telling him to "Get a haircut!""] I got a haircut!
[as a crowd pressed in on Kennedy