[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 72 (Friday, June 5, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5666-S5668]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  BOBBY KENNEDY AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

  Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, on June 6, 1968, at 1:44 a.m., Bobby 
Kennedy passed away. I would like to speak about Senator Kennedy. First 
of all, I just recommend for people in Minnesota and our country a 
wonderful documentary that will be shown this week on TV on the 
Discovery Channel, ``Robert F. Kennedy, A Memoir.'' This was done by 
Jack Newfield and Charlie Stewart. My wife Sheila and I had a chance to 
see 2 hours of this, a preview. It is very powerful.
  I thought what I would do is read from a book which just came out, 
written by one of Bobby Kennedy's children, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy. The 
title of it is ``Make Gentle The Life Of The World.'' This is an 
excerpt from one of Bobby Kennedy's speeches:

       Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many 
     years ago, ``to tame the savageness of man and make gentle 
     the life of the world.'' Thus the title, ``Make Gentle The 
     Life Of The World.''

  Let me just say at the beginning, before quoting from some of Bobby 
Kennedy's speeches, that I believe--this is just my opinion--that the 
Senator who really most lives this tradition, of course in a very 
personal way, but in terms of his just unbelievable advocacy for people 
and the kind of courage and power, the effectiveness of his advocacy 
for people, of course, is Senator Ted Kennedy.
  Behind me is the desk of President John Kennedy, which is Senator 
Edward Kennedy's desk. I can't think of any Senator who better 
represents the words I am now about to quote.
  Bobby Kennedy gave a speech. I believe it was at the University of 
Kansas. He wanted to talk to students and young people. He wanted to 
talk about the way in which we measure ourselves as a people. It is one 
of my favorite speeches, and I quote a part of it:

       Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the 
     health of our children--

  In other words, do we measure how we are doing as a country just by 
the economic indicators.

       Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the 
     health of our children, the quality of their education or the 
     joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our 
     poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of 
     our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. 
     It 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.

  Mr. President, another speech that Senator Kennedy gave is relevant 
to our times:

       There are millions of Americans living in hidden places 
     whose faces and names we never know, but I've seen children 
     starving in Mississippi, idling their lives away in the 
     ghetto, living without hope or future amid the despair on 
     Indian reservations with no jobs and little help. I've seen 
     proud men in the hills of Appalachia who wish only to work in 
     dignity, but the mines are closed and the jobs are gone and 
     no one, neither industry nor labor nor Government, has cared 
     enough to help. Those conditions will change, those children 
     will live only if we dissent. So I dissent, and I know you 
     do, too.

  Interesting words about crime:

       Thus, the fight against crime is, in the last analysis, the 
     same as the fight for equal opportunity, or the battle 
     against hunger and deprivation, or the struggle to prevent 
     the pollution of our air and water. It is the fight to 
     preserve the quality of community which is at the root of our 
     greatness, a fight to preserve confidence in ourselves and 
     our fellow citizens, a battle for the quality of our lives.

  About the importance of work:

       We need jobs, dignified employment at decent pay.

  What many today call living-wage jobs.


[[Page S5667]]


       The kind of employment that lets a man--

  And I add, and I am sure Senator Kennedy would add, a woman----

     say to his community, to his family, to his country and, most 
     important, to himself [or herself], ``I helped to build this 
     country; I'm a participant in this great public venture; I am 
     a man''--

  And, I add, ``I am a woman.''
  The importance of work--
  Community:

       Today, we can make this a nation where young people do not 
     see the false peace of drugs. Together, we can make this a 
     nation where old people are not shunted off, where regardless 
     of the color of his skin or the place of birth of his father, 
     every citizen will have an equal chance at dignity and 
     decency.  Together, Americans are the most decent, generous 
     and compassionate people in the world. Divided, they are 
     collections of islands--islands of blacks afraid of 
     islands of whites; islands of northerners bitterly opposed 
     to islands of southerners, islands of workers warring with 
     islands of businessmen.

  Government:

       Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the 
     immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins 
     of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in a 
     different scale. Better the occasional faults of a government 
     living in the spirit of charity than the consistent emissions 
     of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

  Courage--I think the pages will especially like this:

       It is from numberless, diverse acts of courage and belief 
     that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up--

  Or a woman stands up--

     for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes 
     out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope 
     and crossing each other from a million different centers of 
     energy and daring those ripples build a current which can 
     sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

  These are really beautiful words.
  Mr. President, I had an opportunity about a year ago to travel just 
to a few communities Senator Kennedy visited. I started out in the 
delta, Mississippi, and actually just this past Friday, a week ago, I 
went back to Tunica in the delta, just by myself, mainly to teach 
classes. I went back because there was a marvelous teacher, Mr. Robert 
Hall, who said a year ago at a community meeting, ``I wish you could 
come back around graduation time, because only about 50 percent or just 
a little bit more of our students graduate, and our students need to 
have more hope.''
  In Tunica, the public high school is all African-American, and the 
private schools are all white. So I came back. I landed, and a man 
named Mr. Young picked me up at the airport. He said, ``Before you go 
to the high school, you will be addressing the third and fourth 
graders.'' I say to the Chair, I thought to myself, addressing the 
third and fourth graders the last day of school, like a policy address? 
It didn't sound like this was going to work very well.
  I went to the elementary school, and the third and fourth graders 
were all sitting in the auditorium. A principal, a young man, 
introduced me, and we were high on the stage. I told the principal, ``I 
think I will not stay on the stage.'' I went out to where the students 
were.
  This one young girl helped me out so much, because we were talking 
about education and school and why you like school. She said, ``I like 
it because a good education will help me be all I want to be in my 
life.'' Then 40 hands went up at one time. That is a teacher's dream, 
and these children had all sorts of dreams--doctors, lawyers, 
psychiatrists, professional wrestlers, boxers, football players--you 
name it--teachers, on and on and on. I thought to myself, this is what 
it is about. The only problem is that for too many children, that is 
the way they start out, and then this just gets taken away from them. 
The same spark isn't there later on by the time they get to high 
school.
  I then went to East L.A. and to Watts and went to public housing 
projects in Chicago and inner-city Baltimore and Letcher County, KY, 
and inner-city Minneapolis, Phillips neighborhood, rural Minnesota. The 
point is there are heroines, and heroines are doing great work. That is 
my point.
  The other point is, everywhere I went, I really believe--and these 
are my words, I summarize it--what part of the people were saying with 
a lot of dignity was, ``What happened to our national vow of equal 
opportunity for every child? We don't have it in our communities.'' And 
the jobs--where are the jobs with decent wages? That is what we want to 
be able to do. Just think about Robert Kennedy's words, about the 
importance of work. That is what people are saying today. ``We want to 
have jobs at decent wages so that we can earn a decent living and we 
can give our children the care we know they need and deserve.''

  Really, Mr. President, as I think about that travel--and travel in 
any community--this is the focus: On jobs and education, health care, 
earning a decent living, being able to do well for your children. That 
is the focus.
  Different people think about Senator Kennedy's career, Bobby Kennedy, 
and what he stood for, and different people in different ways, to try 
to use that inspiring example to do good work. I want to just raise one 
question before the Senate today, as I feel that this is very connected 
to Senator Kennedy's life and what he tried to do for our country. And 
this is the question. I pose this question for my colleagues and the 
people in the country: How can it be that in the United States of 
America today--not June of 1968--June of 1998, how can it be the 
richest, most affluent country in the world, at the peak of our 
economic performance--we are all writing about how well the economy is 
doing--how can it be that we are still being told that we cannot 
provide a good education for every child, that we cannot provide good 
health care for all of our citizens, that people still cannot find jobs 
at decent wages that they can support their families on, that we cannot 
at least reach the goal of making sure that every child who comes to 
kindergarten is ready to learn? She knows how to spell her name; she 
knows colors and shapes and sizes; she knows the alphabet; she has been 
read to widely; and she or he is ready to learn. And we are still being 
told we can't reach those goals as a nation?
  And how can it be that in our peak economic performance today, one 
out of four children under the age of 3 are growing up poor in 
America--under the age of 3; and one out of every two children of color 
under the age of 3 are growing up poor in our country? How can this be? 
How can it be that we have a set of social arrangements that allow 
children to be the most poverty-stricken group in America? That is a 
betrayal of our heritage. The impoverishment of so many children is our 
national disgrace.
  I just feel--and I am just speaking for myself--as I think back about 
Robert Kennedy's life, he would surely say today that this is not 
acceptable and that we can do better. He would probably say, ``We can 
do betta.'' And I think those words are very important.
  One final point, if my colleague would indulge me.
  I had a chance to speak at a baccalaureate at Swarthmore College this 
last weekend. And I was saying to the students--a lot of people have 
given up on politics. A lot of people, it is not that they don't care 
about the issues, they care deeply, they care desperately, but they 
don't think there is much of a connection between their concerns and 
our concerns. They read all about money in politics, and they just do 
not think it is that important.
  A friend of mine was telling me he was teaching a seminar class on 
electoral politics, and he was talking about Presidential races and 
some of his involvement in the past, and students said, ``Well, that's 
when elections mattered.'' Elections do matter. All of us in public 
service, I think, believe that, even if we have different viewpoints.

  I said to the students--and I want to conclude this way, in just 
talking with young people, not at young people--that I read--and 
certainly this was the case in Swarthmore College--an incredibly high 
percentage of students in our colleges and universities are involved in 
community service, and also high school students. It is not true that 
young people do not care about community, do not want to serve our 
country. There is a tremendous amount of good work being done. The 
problem is that I think many young people say community service is good 
and politics is unsavory.
  I just say today, on the floor of the Senate, to the young people: We 
need you to be mentors and tutors. We need your community service. We 
need you to volunteer at battered women's shelters. If my wife Sheila 
was here, she

[[Page S5668]]

would say, ``Mention that, Paul.'' We need you to be advocates for 
children. We need you to help other children. We need you to do 
community work. When you go on to college and universities and get 
degrees, and you are lawyers and businesspeople, we need you to take 
some of your skills and give it to the community. We need you to do 
that. But we also need you to care about public policy. We need you to 
care about good public policy, and we need you to make sure that our 
Nation does better.
  Mr. President, I want to say today--since I wanted to take a few 
minutes to speak about Robert Kennedy and his life, the meaning of that 
life, to me and I think to many Americans--I think that the final point 
that I would want to make--feels right to me, at least--is to say, 
especially to younger people, the future is not going to belong to 
those who are content with the present. The future is not going to 
belong to cynics; it is not going to belong to people who stand on the 
sidelines; it is not going to belong to people who view politics as a 
spectator sport.
  The future is going to belong to people who have passion and people 
who are willing to make a personal commitment to making our country 
better. And the future is going to belong--these are not Bobby 
Kennedy's words; these are Eleanor Roosevelt's words--``The future is 
going to belong to people who believe in the beauty of their dreams.''
  Bobby Kennedy had many beautiful dreams. His life was cut short, and 
he was not able to realize all those dreams. But his dreams and his 
hope and his work for our country is as important to our Nation today 
as it ever was while he was alive.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. JOHNSON addressed the Chair.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
  Mr. JOHNSON. I ask unanimous consent to address the Senate for such 
time as I may consume.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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