What Will Someday Come to Pass

The saddest thing about Teddy's burial at Arlington on Saturday is that there were no brothers left to say what he said for RFK.

I couldn't go to school the morning after Robert F. Kennedy was killed. I had gone to sleep the night before, pleased that he had won the California primary, only to wake up learning that he was gone. It was a weirdly haunting recall of what is to this day my very first memory of watching television, seeing Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed in a live broadcast. Again, the world beyond my comfort zone seemed to be a horrible place. It wasn't until a day or so later, when Edward M. Kennedy eulogized his slain brother, that I could gather myself to go back to school. Much has been made of Teddy's emotionally strained voice in those moments, but it was his actual words that brought me around. Perhaps the saddest thing about Teddy's burial at Arlington on Saturday is that there were no brothers left to say what he said then -- but it's alright because, thanks to them, we can simply say it to ourselves:

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world.

Eulogy of Bobby Kennedy
Ted Kennedy delivering the closing part of the eulogy at the funeral of his brother Bobby, using excerpts from Bobby's famous speech to the students of a South African university in 1966.