American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

cars on New York Avenue were backed up to Baltimore, thirty miles to the north.

Jackie left her car and led an impromptu march to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, walking with my father and Teddy, Lyndon Johnson, and virtually all the leaders of the free world, twelve abreast.

To this day it stands as the largest gathering of heads of state and foreign dignitaries in American history. Jackie led 220 dignitaries

That night my dad wrote us each a letter urging us to “remember all the things that Jack started—be kind to others that are less fortunate than we—and love our country.”

Two days later, LBJ asked Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act in memory of Jack.

if our measure is the goodwill that the president generated for our country abroad, Jack Kennedy wins hands down, with Franklin Roosevelt a distant second.

Even during his lifetime, Jack’s popularity beyond our shores was unmatched among American presidents in 150 years.

crowd of cheering Germans he attracted in Berlin was greater in both number and enthusiasm than the g...

But Jack inspired the German people with a mes...

Following President Ronald Reagan’s death, anti-tax guru Grover Norquist initiated a national campaign funded by wealthy Republicans to name landmarks after President Reagan in all 3,067 American counties.

for President Kennedy was, both in the United States and abroad, a spontaneous outpouring.

he inspired in a generation of progressive leaders and activists worldwide.

“If your uncle had not been killed or if your father had become president,” Professor Hamid Arabbzadeh of the University of California, Irvine, College of Medicine told me in October 2014, “we would not have seen the rise of Islamic fundamentalism or the global anger against the United States.”

Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way

Camus’s The Plague.

It is neither our position nor our circumstances that define us, according to the Stoics, but our response to those circumstances; when destiny crushes us, small heroic gestures of courage and service can bring us peace and fulfillment. In applying our shoulder to the stone, we give order to a chaotic universe. Of the many wonderful things my father left me, this philosophical truth was perhaps the most useful.

approach the world humbly but with confidence.

After Jack’s death, my dad told me that he intended to leave public life. Perhaps he would become a college president, or teach history and public policy. I am certain that trip abroad in 1964 helped change my father’s mind, and, together with my mother’s steady confidence, encouraged him to gather his strength and continue Jack’s legacy.

tribute to Uncle Jack: “When he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night, / And pay no worship to the garish sun.” The delegates’ twenty-two-minute ovation for my father only rubbed salt in Johnson’s wounded pride.

The problem of pollution was also high on his agenda.

He had always stood up to bullies on behalf of the underdog.

He regularly visited public schools in the poorest neighborhoods, often with us in tow, just to show the young people that someone in high office cared about them.

My father saw the plight of Native Americans as our nation’s original sin and greatest shame.

The gulf between our people will not be bridged by those who preach violence, or by those who burn or loot.”

if he had won, my father would have been the youngest elected president in history, six months younger than Jack when he took his inaugural oath.

Since my father loved to be around dogs, he brought my Irish cocker spaniel, Freckles (a gift to me from the Wexford, Ireland, clan of John Barry, the American Revolution war naval hero), on the campaign trail with him.

Freed from the shackles of political correctness by the hopelessness of his campaign, my father was able to speak truth to the American people, and they loved it. He violated every political rule.

Secret Service protection was not available to presidential candidates (Congress changed the law following my father’s assassination).

dad had refused J. Edgar Hoover’s offer of FBI agents to protect him, knowing that Hoover would use the agents primarily to spy on him for the benefit of LBJ.

reputation for brutality and racism, its ignominy within minority community, and the extreme right-wing disposition of its ultimate commander, Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty, my fathe...

My father spent the day of the California primary in the setting he loved best, along the seashore with my mom and six of my younger siblings, at the Malibu Beach

My dad’s last words were an expression of concern for Paul. “Is everyone okay? Is Paul okay?”

Teddy, who had not slept for several days, delivered the eulogy in a breaking voice. “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life,” Teddy said. “He should be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

All of them believed Robert Kennedy would have ushered in an era of idealism, peace, and justice. Pierre Salinger said, “The passengers on that train could have run the most exciting government this nation has ever seen!”

My father had suggested organizing a poor people’s march on Washington,

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments but what is woven into the lives of others.”