Bobby Kennedy Quotes

“the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who saw Bobby Kennedy’s constellation of contradictions not as old versus new but as good versus bad. He called his schizophrenic senator the “Bobby twins,” explaining that “the Good Bobby is a courageous reformer. The Bad Bobby makes deals. The Good Bobby sent federal troops down south to enforce civil rights. The Bad Bobby appointed racist judges down South to enforce civil rights. The Good Bobby is a fervent civil libertarian. The Bad Bobby is a fervent wire tapper. The Good Bobby is ill at ease with liberals. The Bad Bobby is ill at ease with grownups.”
― Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

“cautious, but it made Bobby more fatalistic. “Living every day is like Russian roulette,” he said. “There’s no way of protecting a country-stumping candidate. No way at all. You’ve just got to give yourself to the people and to trust them, and from then on it’s just that good old bitch, luck. Anyway, you have to have luck on your side to be elected President of the United States. Either it is with you or it isn’t. I am pretty sure there’ll be an attempt on my life sooner or later. Not so much for political reasons. I don’t believe that. Plain nuttiness, that’s all. There’s plenty of that around.” If he were elected, he added, he surely wouldn’t ride in the kind of bubble-topped, bulletproof limousine that LBJ used: “We can’t have that kind of country, where the President is afraid to go among the people.”
― Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

“Dr. King’s fitting description of the good life, ‘a creative synthesis of opposites.’ ”
― Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

“She probably called to see if you’re still alive,” Hoffa deadpanned. In a voice meant for everyone to hear, Kennedy said, “I’m still alive, dear. If you hear a big explosion, I probably won’t be.”
― Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

“A person, Bobby would tell his oldest daughter Kathleen, could be judged by the enemies he made.”
― Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon

“The first speech, at the all-white but liberal University of Cape Town, remains one of Bobby’s most memorable, beginning with one of his favorite devices of leading listeners in one direction and then taking them somewhere else entirely. “I came here,” he said, “because of my deep interest [in] and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier…a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.” His audience understood instinctively their speaker’s point: that he had not come as a pious missionary but as someone struggling with his own country’s racial shame.”
― Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon