A WORLD WITHOUT RFK, 40 YEARS LATER
On June 6, 1968, a sweet dream died with Robert F. Kennedy. A generation lost their last best hope. But even more tragically, ten children lost their father.
Bobby Kennedy never got to meet his eleventh child; his wife Ethel was pregnant with daughter Rory at the time of his assassination. RFK’s daughter would have to grow up knowing her father only through photographs and home movies; through books and stories told by others.
His other children would have only memories of their all-too-brief years together. And his widow now shouldered a tremendous burden: the care and rearing of eleven kids.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was only fourteen when his father died. On the night of June 4, 1968, he had watched the California primary returns on TV and gone to bed early. (His younger brother David, who was in an upstairs room at the Ambassador Hotel, unfortunately decided to stay up late, and saw the horror unfold on live television. The trauma left scars on his heart that never fully healed.)
Within a few hours, young Bobby Jr. and his siblings would be on a plane headed for Los Angeles, barely arriving in time to see their father one last time before he expired.
“I held his hand,” RFK Jr. said later. “His head was bandaged and his eyes blackened. I knew he had little or no chance.”
Saying goodbye to your father in such a way – when he cannot speak, perhaps is unable to hear your words of farewell – leaves an empty chasm inside of a person, an uncertainty which lingers for the rest of your days.
I should know. This is how I lost my father, too.
A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE
Bobby Kennedy Jr. and I share the common experience of having both lost our fathers when we were children. Although my father was not murdered, nor was he running for president at the time of his death, our final memories of our fathers is the same: watching the big strong man we knew, loved and looked up to spend his last hours helpless, kept breathing only by life support devices and a noisy menagerie of machines.
My father died when I was nine. After suffering a ruptured aneurysm in his heart, he fought valiantly for three more months — although we all knew the situation was hopeless. And still he fought, day after day, his life a miserable existence of liquid food, IV tubes, and a silence enforced by the respirator tube in his throat. Even if it was a losing battle and he knew it, Dad was fighting for our sake. He didn’t want to leave his lovely young wife a widow with a bewildered nine year-old girl to raise.
He could fight death, but he couldn’t fight fate. Fate always wins. And so, my mother did her best to raise me (or perhaps I should say we rather raised each other) over the years that followed. Although I certainly didn’t make her job any easier. Much like Bobby Kennedy Jr. and some of his other siblings, I railed at the heavens in my teens and made more than my share of mistakes with drugs and alcohol.
And much like Ethel Kennedy, my mother (stubborn Irish woman that she is) remained devoted to my father’s memory, steadfastly refusing to remarry or even date again. When I asked her why, her answer was always the same: “You can never settle for anything less once you’ve had the best.”
She still idolizes him to this very day, as do I. We still quote his wisdom and witticisms constantly; he’s still a guiding force in both of our lives. We keep him alive in our thoughts and in our hearts. As long as we do not forget him, he lives, no matter how many years pass. And we can still talk to him.
Upon the untimely death of Robert Kennedy’s son Michael on New Year’s Eve, 1997, his eldest brother, then-Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III recalled their father’s 1968 assassination at the funeral. He urged Michael’s three children, ages 10 to 14, to remember their father and speak to him through prayer.
“To little Michael, to Kyle and Rory, you can still talk to your father,” Kennedy said. I’ll never forget those words because my mother once spoke them to me when I was about the same age.
“YOU CAN STILL TALK TO YOUR FATHER”
My mother and father were married for 18 years, up until his death. Their wedding was on January 22, 1963, exactly nine months to the day before the assassination of President Kennedy. I was conceived five years later, about a week after Robert Kennedy’s murder in June of 1968.
This always seemed an odd series of coincidences in our family; especially because my folks were staunch old school Republicans who certainly had no great affection for the Kennedys. My father strongly disliked RFK in particular, and was no doubt mortified to discover his daughter was a true blue Kennedy Democrat practically right out of the womb! (That’s a mystery no one in the family has yet unraveled, believe me.)
Also quite coincidentally, the first time I ever met Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was at a medical science school located right next door to the VA hospital where my father had passed away. I had not been back to the place since the day he died – nor did I ever particularly ever want to see it again – and yet there I was…to meet a person who knew that same painful experience intimately.
To top off this mounting pile of strange coincidences, it just so happened that the man I was about to meet hosts a weekly radio show called Ring of Fire, named for a wonderful old Johnny Cash song. And of course, it just so happens that this song holds a very deep and special significance within my own family.
But that’s another story…one I will share because it connects all of the threads and in a roundabout way, makes my point for me.
THE RING OF FIRE
One of my parents’ favorite songs which stayed on the turntable throughout their honeymoon summer of `63 was Ring of Fire, the latest hit from Johnny Cash. It was love at first listen: my father’s Texas roots made him a sucker for anything with Mariachi horns on it; my mother had always loved the Carter family and correctly predicted this song would be June Carter’s greatest songwriting achievement upon its’ initial release. But more than that, it was one of “their songs,” seeming to describe how they felt about one another.
Actually, the love story of Johnny and June Carter Cash has always reminded me of my parents’ own. In the beginning, theirs was a star-crossed love, too – one that just should never be -and yet simply had to be. Regardless of the odds or outside influences or circumstances or any challenge, these two people were just supposed to be together. Like Johnny and June, they shared an attraction that transcended all logic and convention; a force so powerful it makes you follow its’ will…even if you must pass through a burning ring of fire to finally achieve it.
As she later told the story, her song describes the personal hell Carter went through as she wrestled with her forbidden love for Cash (they were both married to other people at the time) and tried to deal with Cash’s personal “ring of fire” (drug dependency/alcoholism):
One morning, about four o’clock,I was driving my car just about as fast as I could. I thought, ‘Why am I out on the highway this time of night?’ I was miserable, and it all came to me: “I’m falling in love with somebody I have no right to fall in love with…I thought to myself, ”I can’t fall in love with this man, but it’s just like a ring of fire.”
They both knew what was percolating between them, said Johnny:
“We knew what was going to happen: that eventually we were both going to be divorced, and we were going to go through hell. Which we did. But the ‘ring of fire’ was not the hell. That was kind of a sweet fire. The ring of fire that I found myself in with June was the fire of redemption. It cleansed. It made me believe everything was all right, because it felt so good.”
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A 1968 performance of “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash at the Opry.
LOVE AND LOSS
Johnny and June were finally wed on March 1, 1968. A little more than two months after their 35th wedding anniversary, June Carter Cash died on May 15, 2003.
Many believe that when June left this earth, she seemed to take Johnny’s spirit with her. He would linger only four more months (Cash passed away on September 12, 2003), but despite his own ill health, honored her wish of continuing to perform to the end. At Johnny’s last concert, he performed Ring of Fire and dedicated it to June, reading a statement about his late wife that he had written shortly before taking the stage. He spoke of how June’s spirit was watching over him and how she had come to visit him before going on stage. He barely made it through the song.
It wasn’t the first time Johnny Cash had known the pain of separation from one he so loved, nor was it the first time he’d spoken of feeling the presence of the departed. He’d walked with ghosts nearly all his life. That’s why the man dressed in black.
Back in 1944, when Cash was only 12, he witnessed his older brother Jack get pulled into a whirling table saw in the mill where he worked. Jack was cut almost in two and suffered for over a week before he died. On his deathbed, Jack said he had visions of heaven and angels. Decades later, Cash spoke of looking forward to meeting his brother in heaven. He wrote that he had seen his brother many times in his dreams, and that Jack always looked two years older than whatever age Cash himself was at that moment.
Perhaps that’s who Johnny was thinking of when he sat down with his younger brother Roy to co-write I Still Miss Someoneso many years after their brother Jack’s death.
WE STILL MISS SOMEONE
I Still Miss Someoneappeared on the same 1963 album with Ring of Fire – the record that never seemed to leave my parents’ turntable. His music was always part of the soundtrack of our lives, and I vividly recall wearing the grooves out of I Still Miss Someone for months after my father’s death. Over and over it played, those lonely guitar strains and Cash’s haunting voice echoing throughout the house. So deeply engrained was that song, I can still hear it; can call it up at will and the memories inevitably follow.
Although it’s a song I will always associate with the death of my father, I Still Miss Someone just as easily applies to the loss of any loved one, whether through physical death or separation. It speaks to the tie that binds; a love that never dies; a memory that lives on over decades, perhaps even lifetimes. And it captures the emptiness we all feel inside when that person is severed from us…a space that is never fully filled again…and years later we realize that even after all this time, we still miss someone.
For some reason, that old song has been stuck on my mind for the past couple of days. Perhaps the 40th anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s death reminded me of losing my own father, or maybe it was somehow brought to the surface after visiting with the late Senator’s son in Dallas a few days ago. Whatever the reason, the song was in my thoughts and just would not go away. As it has so many times in my life, it seemed to be calling out to me again.
So I finally dug out the album, gave it another listen, and thought about how this song might have touched Bobby Kennedy’s heart after losing his brother Jack in 1963 (believe it or not, JFK loved country and western music and probably had a few Johnny Cash records in his collection). I wondered how the Kennedy brothers’ widows and children must have felt when they heard this song on the radio a few years later. I Still Miss Someonewas a crossover hit in the `60s, with cover versions by other artists penetrating every genre’ of music (from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Fairport Convention and Ray Charles) – anywhere your radio dial landed back then, you were likely to hear it.
This song may have echoed the feelings of so many Americans who lost the boyish 42 year-old man they had looked to as a kind of unlikely surrogate father figure in 1968. RFK had represented a collective hope: that by electing him, we might somehow replace the president we lost – the symbolic father figure of our nation itself.
But that dream died, too, forty years ago today. And we still miss the man RFK was just as much as we miss the dream he represented.
We know that Johnny Cash always admired the Kennedy brothers, and that he was personally devastated by their deaths. So we don’t think he’d mind too much if we published a slightly altered version of his immortal lyrics in this tribute, changing the “I” in the last verse to a collective “we.” Because we all get the blues at times like these, and we all still miss someone.
I STILL MISS SOMEONE
Lyrics by Johnny Cash
(From the album Ring of Fire, released November 1, 1963)
At my door the leaves are falling
A cold wild wind has come
Sweethearts walk by together
And I still miss someone
Oh, no I never got over those blue eyes
I see them everywhere
I miss those arms that held me
When all the love was there
I wonder if he’s sorry
For leavin’ what we’d begun
There’s someone for me somewhere
And I still miss someone
I go out on a party
And look for a little fun
But I find a darkened corner
‘Cause I still miss someone
Oh, no I never got over those blue eyes
I see them every where
I miss those arms that held me
When all the love was there
And I wonder if he’s sorry
For leavin’ what we’d begun
There’s someone for us somewhere
And we still miss someone
And we still miss someone.
We all still miss you, Bobby Kennedy. Your wife and kids miss you. Your family and friends miss you, too. The whole damn country misses you. But most of all, this world misses you…and after 40 years, we realize that we need you more than ever.
Front page of the New York Post depicting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the bier of his father. June 7, 1968.
Copyright RFKin2008.com.
