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Some Faraway Disaster
After Dallas, she had the soothing hand, the understanding heart. "There was in those days," TIME Correspondent Hugh Sidey remembers, "a sense of urgency about him, almost as if he were sliding off some horrible precipice toward some faraway disaster. There was an irresistible compulsion to do everything and try everything. That is when he began to shoot rapids and climb mountains." This compulsion, an almost existential need to dare the elements, combined with a lifelong love of physical exertion, prompted him to lead the first ascent of the Yukon's 14,000-ft. Mount Kennedy, named for his brother, and plunge, during a 1965 canoe trip down the Amazon, into piranha-infested waters. A group of Indians cried anxiously that he was risking his life. "Have you ever heard of a United States Senator being eaten by a piranha?" he asked, and swam on.
The voice, the humor and the casual grace evoked memories of another man and a happier time. But Bobby was always his own person. Jack could get somewhere without really trying. Bobby ("the Runt") could not, or thought he could not, and thus tried all the harder. Perhaps this is what inspired in other men such unyielding loyalty and such unquenchable hatreds, neither of which Jack ever evoked to such intense degree. Because of the family tradition, it was inevitable that some day, if not in 1968, then 1972, Bobby would run for President. As a Senator, John Kennedy explained the family mystique: "Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, my brother would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, Teddy would take over for him." In the end, Bobby, with his merry, energetic wife and his happy band of children, created a charisma of his own.
Pain Which Cannot Forget
Never an intellectual, Bobby nonetheless read a great deal, particularly after Dallas. While Jack would read simply for delight, Bobby would always choose a writer who had something practical to tell him. Aeschylus, who introduced the tragic hero to literature, was his "favorite poet." On the death of Martin Luther King Jr., he used the lines: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." Asked once why he strove so hard, Kennedy again quoted from Aeschylus: "When the height is won, then there is ease."
Bobby never reached the height, nor found the ease for which he quested. Rocking across Nebraska in a train, he mused on all the things that he wanted to do and all that he felt he could do: reconcile the races, summon the "good that's in America," end the war, get the best and most creative minds into government, broaden the basic idea of the Peace Corps so that people in all walks of life would try to help one another. He was ambitious, but not for himself. He ended his musing: "I don't know what I'll do if I'm not elected President." As his body lay in St. Patrick's Cathedral, there was agreement on one point. Whoever became President would always have known that Robert Kennedy was around. So would the nation. So would the world.