The Wit and Wisdom of Ted Kennedy - Bill Adler [15]
—Eulogy for Robert Kennedy,
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York,
June 8, 1968
My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to 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. 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 some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.”
—Eulogy for Robert Kennedy,
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York,,
June 8, 1968
I often think of what she [Jackie] said about Jack in December after he died: “They made him a legend, when he would have preferred to be a man.” Jackie would have preferred to be just herself, but the world insisted that she be a legend too.
—Eulogy for his sister-in-law,
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, May 23, 1994
John [Kennedy, Jr.] was a serious man who brightened our lives with his smile and his grace. He was a son of privilege who founded a program called Reaching Up to train better caregivers for the mentally disabled. He joined Wall Street executives on the Robin Hood Foundation to help the city’s impoverished children. And he did it all so quietly, without ever calling attention to himself. John was one of Jackie’s two miracles. He was still becoming the person he would be, and doing it by the beat of his own drummer. He had only just begun. There was in him a great promise of things to come.
The Irish Ambassador recited a poem to John’s father and mother soon after John was born. I can hear it again now, at this different and difficult moment:
“We wish to the new child
A heart that can be beguiled
By a flower that the wind lifts as it passes.
If the storms break for him
May the trees shake for him
Their blossoms down.
In the night that he is troubled
May a friend wake for him
So that his time be doubled,
And at the end of all loving and love
May the Man above
Give him a crown.”
—Eulogy for his nephew,
John F. Kennedy, Jr.,
July 1999
Rose [his mother] is the finest teacher we ever had. She made our home a university that surpassed any formal classroom in the exciting quest for knowledge. With her gentle games and questions, she could bring the farthest reaches of the university to our dinner table, or transform the daily headlines into new and exciting adventures in understanding.
—Speech at Georgetown University,
October 1, 1977
The thing about being a Kennedy is that you come to know that there’s a time for the Kennedys. And it’s hard to know when that time is, or if it will ever come again.
—Quoted in Time magazine, January 10, 1969
John Kennedy referred to the age in which we live—an age when history moves with the tramp of earthquake feet, an age when a handful of men and nations have the power literally to devastate mankind. But he did not speak in despair or with a sense of hopelessness.
—Speech, Trinity College Historical Society
Bicentennial, Dublin, Ireland,
March 3, 1970
From my vantage point as the youngest of the nine Kennedy children, my family did not so much live in the world as comprise the world. Though I have long since outgrown that simplistic view, I have never questioned its emotional truth. We depended on one another. We savored food and music and laughter with one another. We learned from and taught one another. We worshipped one another. We loved one another. We were mutually loyal, even as we were mutually competitive, with an intensity that owed more to joy than to an urge for domination. These values flowed into us on the energies of Joseph and Rose Kennedy.
—True Compass: A Memoir, 2009
From the windows of my office in Boston … I can see the Golden Stairs from Boston Harbor where all eight of my great-grandparents set foot on this great land for the first