5 RFK pics for a Sat. afternoon...and movie "Bobby" trailer.

[ourbluenation]

What an inspirational American...






http://www.bobby-the-movie.com/

[Avalux]

1. Thank you - wonderful pics.

The fourth one makes me teary-eyed. Did you know the movie was written and directed by Emilio Estevez? What a cast! Can't wait to see it. :hi:

[baby_bear]

2. Thank you, ourbluenation

What a great post. It lifted me up and made me sad at the same time. I saw Bobby in '68 when my dad took me
(age 14) to a rally in our smallish southern California town days before the assassination. I remember my dad giving
me a hair pin to wear on my blouse. When I looked at him quizzically, he said, "It's a Bobby pin!"

Thanks again for the post and the memories.

b_b

[ourbluenation]

9. you're so welcome.

:)

[upi402]

3. i fucking hate conservatives

all of 'em.
no matter fucking what.

[bobbie]

5. Me too...

I want to be inspired by pictures of RFK, but it's hard to be when the fact is the good guys are murdered by the bad guys. So we can't have a good guy as a leader.

[Graybeard]

4. RFK was gaining support from all sectors...

...of American society. He brought together college students,
working men and women, ethnics, rich and poor. He addressed
issues of poverty, civil rights, the war in Nam, bringing
together the union member and the war-protestor. How very
different our America would have been......

[Hepburn]

18. I was in college when RFK was assassinated.

I LOVED him...!! I was at a drive in movie on the night RFK was shot, came home and it was on the news. I sat up all night just staring at the TV....waiting for news about his condition. And when it came, I cried like I cried when JFK was assassinated.

This is a great thread. Thank you for posting it!

[wundermaus]

6. Thank you, he will always be my hero...

I am still idealistic after all these years, although for several decades my hopes and dreams of a better America was hidden away deep in my heart. I was 14 years old when I was laying in my bed listening to Robert Kennedy give his victory speech in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of June 4, 1968. My transistor radio was under my pillow so I wouldn’t disturb my little brother who slept next to me. Senator Kennedy was my hero then, and I was so happy that he was going to be our next president. - the best hope for America to get out of Viet Nam.
I cried with my face into the pillow when I heard he was shot moments later. All the hopes and dreams of America’s ideals died that night .
It wasn’t until Al Gore ran for president in 2000 that I ever hoped to believe again in American’s ideals. It is ironic that President Gore’s presidency was taken from him by fraud and criminal activities and that the judiciary branch of our government was complicit in that coup. And it is even more unbelievable that right wing fascists would subvert our election process a second time in 2004 and that they are now poised to seize complete control of our government. In all my life I have never held my patriotism and idealism and prayers so close to my heart. It is so important that we Americans, in all generations, stand together and confront this attack on our democracy, our liberty, our freedom, and our country. This is not a government of by and for corporations but of free and brave people. People that don’t’ just see things as they are and ask why, but idealists that see things that never were and ask why not.

(originally posted at CGCS May 15 2005)

[IndyOp]

7. Wow - thank you vmaus and welcome to DU...

:thumbsup:

:kick: :kick: :kick: :kick: :kick:

[ourbluenation]

8. He was one of mine as well - who will be our children's Bobby?

Maybe...



it will be interesting to see how this man's life moves forward.

[madokie]

15. Thanks for the pic and reminder that there is in the wings some very good

Men and for that matter Women, just waiting for their turn. Making things happen.

[baby_bear]

10. Your experience is similar to mine

As I posted in this thread earlier, I was also 14 at the time, and though my parents were supporting Eugene McCarthy, I was an ardent Bobby supporter and they admired him very much also. That was a tough time for intelligent Democrats, to choose between those two.

I was asleep in bed by the time Bobby was shot just after midnight June 5, but my mother, knowing my adoration for him, came and woke me up to tell me. I remember it like it was yesterday. Then he hung on for a day and I woke up the morning he died to the sound of "church music" coming from my clock radio, set to a rock and roll station. So I immeditely knew he was dead.

Remember the train? I watched it all. It was before cable, obviously, but I guess the regular stations carried it, all of it. They wouldn't do that now. But there is no one like Bobby now.

Then came August and Chicago. McCarthy lost. The liberals lost. Hope was lost.

A month later my parents split up. I guess the only thing they had in common was the hope that was destroyed in 1968.

I consider it a turning point for my own life and for America.

b_b

[madokie]

14. I remember the night well,

to DU

[EFerrari]

11. Thank you.

:kick:

[upi402]

12. Americans are still good, there are other RFKs. The media has betrayed USA

Today they might spin his murder as a sinister Democrat ploy. Then they'd use it as a launchpad to deify Ronnie Raygun again.

[deutsey]

13. Something I wrote about Bobby on DU four years ago

(PS: You also might want to donate to the RFK Memorial: www.rfkmemorial.org)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/02/07/27_rfk.html

RFK: A Reflection on True American Leadership
July 27, 2002
By Dwayne Eutsey


"At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to moral leadership of this planet."
— RFK announcing his presidential candidacy, 1968
Robert F. Kennedy is a personal hero of mine.

For me, RFK (or Bobby, which seems more appropriate to me) embodied the best qualities of authentic American leadership. Until his abrupt murder, Bobby’s pragmatic idealism inspired a nation ripping itself apart to come Together - and it still speaks to us now in a time when corrupted, illegitimate power has such a stranglehold on our country.

Unlike what lamely passes for leadership today, Bobby was the real thing. The inclusive vision of America he proclaimed emerged from a conscience deepened by personal tragedy and moved by the suffering of oppressed people he encountered around the world. Instead of simply talking about compassion, Bobby demonstrated it. He was a true uniter: he brought together anti-war activists and veterans; Hispanics, inner city blacks, and rural whites; young and old; the affluent and the poor. And he was truly one of the most eloquent, impassioned political orators America has ever heard.

It’s easy to canonize Bobby as some sort of liberal saint, but I think to do so is to remove from him his most appealing and enduring trait: his humanity. Bobby’s humanity, as flawed and as noble as any character from the Greek tragedies he loved so much, defined his kind of “anti-political politics,” to borrow a phrase from Vaclav Havel, the former Czech dissident (and current Czech president). He was driven by neither focus groups nor ideology, but by a politics that grew from the heart.

As Ted Kennedy said in eulogizing his fallen brother, Bobby “need not be idolized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life. 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.”

It’s this Bobby, the “good and decent man” who wanted to lead America back to its moral center, that I hope will shine through in a promising new television movie about him on FX later this summer. Perhaps, in stark contrast to what we currently have in the White House and on the Hill, “RFK” may help remind us that we should expect (or even demand) more of our leaders than that they look like someone we’d like to drink a beer with.

Perhaps it will remind us that our leaders should defend the principles of liberty that are the very foundation of our society. As Bobby said in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War, our leaders should acknowledge that “debate and dissent are the very heart of the American process,” and that those who attempt to repress these American values do not understand what this country is all about.

Perhaps the movie will help us to recall that true leaders do not run away when our country is in danger; instead they stand with their fellow citizens as Bobby did on the night Martin Luther King was assassinated. He was the only white public official who stood in a black neighborhood as riots erupted across America, and he helped to defuse the volatile shock of the crowd with these extemporaneous words:

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who will suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

Maybe it will remind us that there are values underlying authentic patriotism that run much deeper than flag-waving nationalism and economic self-interest, as when Bobby said:

“The gross national product ... measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

I know that’s a lot to expect from a television movie, especially one that will be broadcast on a cable network affiliated with arch-conservative Rupert Murdoch. However, despite the current darkness shrouding our political landscape, the spirit of Bobby, the heart of what he hoped for and believed in about America, still shines out like an eternal flame in this darkness.

And with that light to guide us, perhaps we can, to paraphrase Bobby, stop looking at the way things are and ask in despair “Why?” And instead we can start dreaming again of things that never were and dare to ask, “Why not?”

[ourbluenation]

16. That was beautiful. This one line really does sum him up for me...

"...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."

He wasn't a saint or super-human. He was flawed like the rest of us, but he was a good and decent man in his core. Thx .

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

17. Great pics. Here's an article in today's Observer on "Bobby"

Emilio Estevez had wanted to make a film about Bobby Kennedy for 10 years. The subject meant a lot to him. When his family first moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1969, his father took young Emilio on a pilgrimage to the Ambassador Hotel and told him about Kennedy, and all they had lost. Later Sheen would play Bobby Kennedy in The Missiles of October, make a career out of portraying presidential figures, and work tirelessly, off screen for the Robert F Kennedy Memorial Foundation.

'We need Bobby Kennedy's voice now more than ever,' Estevez said, taking up the mantle, when Bobby was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival. 'I believe we unravelled spiritually and culturally after his death.' He issued a startling call to arms. 'It is incumbent upon Lindsay Lohan's generation to re-engage with the political process, to sex it up and make it chic again,' he said. Estevez admits that his own efforts in that direction have not been entirely smooth. For many years he suffered such terrible writer's block over the script for Bobby that his brother was sent round by their parents to check on his mental health. Charlie Sheen ripped up the 30 pages Estevez had stalled over, and told him to start again. 'You have to do this,' he told him. 'It's your life's work.'

(...)

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/screen/story/0,,1922661,00.html

[glitch]

19. It still hurts. nt