[Music]
ADAM FRANKEL: RFK's speech after king was killed is one of the most moving speeches
you'll ever read or listen to or see.
ROBERT LEHRMAN: He was coming to a rally.
People were coming to show support for him.
They didn't know that Martin Luther King had been assassinated.
He was on the plane, they found out, the speechwriter wrote something.
He thought of some stuff that he wanted to say.
ADAM FRANKEL: When he first announced it, there are just gasps in the crowd.
RFK: I have some very sad news for all of you and I think sad news for all our fellow
citizens and people who love peace all over the world and that is that Martin Luther King
was shot and was killed in Memphis.
[Gasps] ROBERT LEHRMAN: Bobby Kennedy had to do what
most of these speeches never touch on.
He had to worry about what kind of violence, what kind of demonstrations there would be
in Indianapolis where he was speaking and what could he do to prevent that.
RFK: We can do well in this country.
We will have difficult times, we've had difficult times in the past, and we will have difficult
times in the future.
It is not the end of violence.
It is not the end of lawlessness and it is not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this
country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice
for all human beings that abide in our land.
CHARLTON MCILWAIN: Bobby Kennedy as the attorney general worked very closely with Martin Luther
King and so he felt like this was in part his responsibility.
This is just genuine.
This is just heartfelt.
This is him, talking to a nation.
A man who had on his own done a lot in working for civil rights and with many of these folks
who were gathered, activists and so forth.
ROBERT LEHRMAN: He has to establish a connection with people in the audience and how does he
do that?
He does something that politicians really never like to do which is to delve into the
horrible moments of their private lives.
RFK: For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with—be filled with hatred
and distrust of the injustice of such an act against all white people, I would only say
that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling.
I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.
ROBERT LEHRMAN: That's the kind of line that you would never hear in a political speech,
but what he was trying to do was say, look, race isn't always at the base of these tragedies,
though of course in that time it was.
CHARLTON MCILWAIN: He really puts it out on the American public that, hey, y'know, we've
got 2 ways we can deal with this.
RFK: You can be filled with bitterness and with hatred and a desire for revenge.
We can move in that direction as a country in greater polarization.
Black people amongst blacks and white amongst whites filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort as Martin Luther King did to understand and to comprehend.
ROBERT LEHRMAN: What he meant to do was be honest, use his personal life for a good end,
try to be sensitive to the audience, so what has impressed me about that speech is not
the language part of it or the great rhetorical technique, though there is some, it's what
is said about his character.
Y'know, what he was willing to do to try to dampen the threat of violence and how moved
he was by the moment.
ADAM FRANKEL: The famous thing about that speech is the result.
While there were riots across the country in major urban areas that night, there were
none in Indianapolis and that's gotta be attributed at least in part to Robert Kennedy's speech.
I'm CHARLTON MCILWAIN.
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