Today would be Robert Francis Kennedy's 90th birthday, November 20th, 2015. Killed at the age of 42, he has been gone now six years longer than he was alive. In the forty-eight years since we've not only seen a rightward lurch in American politics but (of late) the wholesale debasing of our political discourse. As a U.S. Senator from New York and a presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy had the rhetorical ability to distill complex social ills into coherent moral stands. Whether he was talking about apartheid in South Africa during his trip there in June 1966, breaking a fast with Cesar Chavez in Delano, California, expressing the nation's grief after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed,...
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