The Last Words of Robert F. Kennedy
Editor’s Note: This is part of The Atlantic’s ongoing series looking back at 1968. All past articles and reader correspondence are collected here. New material will be added to that page through the end of 2018.
Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles while celebrating victory in a primary for the Democratic presidential nomination. He was a senator from New York, and before that, U.S. attorney general in the presidential administration of his older brother John F. Kennedy. Every anniversary of his death brings new remembrances from his contemporaries.
But the words he spoke in his final months perhaps best capture what he meant to his supporters, and why some still feel the loss, all these decades later, when imagining what might have been had he lived to run against and defeat Richard Nixon.
There he is in March 1968 at the University of Kansas, complimenting William Allen White (“that notorious seditionist,” he quipped), for saying: “If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vision and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.”
He is “an honored man today, here on your campus and around the rest of the nation,” Kennedy . “But when he lived and wrote, he was reviled as an extremist and worse. For he spoke as he believed. He did not conceal
