    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
    [June 6, 1993]
    [Pages 814-815]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Memorial Mass for Robert F. Kennedy in Arlington,
    Virginia
    June 6, 1993

        Father Creedon, Mrs. Kennedy, the children of Robert Kennedy, and
    the Kennedy family, to all the distinguished Americans here present, and
    most of all, to all of you who bear the noble title, citizen of this
    country: Twenty-five years ago today, on the eve of my college
    graduation, I cheered the victory of Robert Kennedy in the California
    primary and felt again that our country might face its problems openly,
    meet its challenges bravely, and go forward together. He dared us all.
    He dared the grieving not to retreat into despair. He dared the
    comfortable not to be complacent. He dared the doubting to keep going.
        As I looked around this crowd today and saw us all graced not only
    by the laughter of children but by the tears of those of us old enough
    to remember, it struck me again that the memory of Robert Kennedy is so
    powerful that in a profound way we are all in two places today. We are
    here and now, and we are there, then.
        For in Robert Kennedy we all invested our hopes and our dreams that
    somehow we might redeem the promise of the America we then feared we
    were losing, somehow we might call back the promise of President Kennedy
    and Martin Luther King and heal the divisions of Vietnam and the
    violence and pain in our own country. But I believe if Robert Kennedy
    were here today, he would dare us not to mourn his passing but to
    fulfill his promise and to be the people that he so badly wanted us all
    to be. He would dare us to leave yesterday and embrace tomorrow.
        We remember him, almost captured in freeze-frame, standing on the
    hood of a car, grasping at outreached hands, black and brown and white.
    His promise was that the hands which reached out to him might someday
    actually reach out to each other. And together, those hands could make
    America everything that it ought to be, a nation reunited with itself
    and rededicated to its best ideals.
        When his funeral train passed through the gritty cities of the
    Northeast, people from both sides of the tracks stood silent. He had
    earned their respect because he went to places most leaders never visit
    and listened to people most leaders never hear and spoke simple truth
    most leaders never speak.
        He spoke out against neglect, but he challenged the neglected to
    seize their own destiny. He wanted so badly for Government to act, but
    he did not trust bureaucracy. And he believed that Government had to do
    things with people, not for them. He knew we had to do things together
    or not at all. He spoke to the sons and daughters of immigrants and the
    sons and daughters of sharecroppers and told them all, ``As long as you
    stay apart from each other, you will never be what you ought to be.''
        He saw the world not in terms of right and left but right and wrong.
    And he taught us lessons that cannot be labeled except as powerful

    [[Page 815]]

    proof. Robert Kennedy reminded us that on any day, in any place, at any
    time, racism is wrong, exploitation is wrong, violence is wrong,
    anything that denies the simple humanity and potential of any man or
    woman is wrong.
        He touched children whose stomachs were swollen with hunger but
    whose eyes still sparkled with life. He marched with workers who
    strained their backs for poverty wages while harvesting our food. He
    walked down city streets with people who ached, not from work but from
    the lack of it. Then as now, his piercing eyes and urgent voice speak of
    the things we all like to think that we believe in.
        When he was alive, some said he was ruthless. Some said he wasn't a
    real liberal, and others claimed he was a real radical. If he were here
    today, I think he would laugh and say they were both right. But now as
    we see him more clearly, we understand he was a man who was very gentle
    to those who were most vulnerable, very tough in the standards he kept
    for himself, very old-fashioned in the virtues in which he believed, and
    a relentless searcher for change, for growth, for the potential of heart
    and mind that he sought in himself and he demanded of others.
        Robert Kennedy understood that the real purpose of leadership is to
    bring out the best in others. He believed the destiny of our Nation is
    the sum total of all the decisions that all of us make. He often said
    that one person can make a difference, and each of us must try.
        Some still believe we lost what is best about America when President
    Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were killed. But I ask
    you to remember, my fellow Americans, that Robert Kennedy did not lose
    his faith when his own brother was killed. And when Martin Luther King
    was killed, he gave from his heart what was perhaps his finest speech.
    He lifted himself from despair time after time and went back to work.
        If you listen now you can hear with me his voice telling me and
    telling you and telling everyone here, ``We can do better.'' Today's
    troubles call us to do better. The legacy of Robert Kennedy is a stern
    rebuke to the cynicism, to the trivialization that grips so much of our
    public life today. What use is it in the face of the aching problems
    gripping millions of Americans, the American without a job, the American
    without health care, the American without a safe street to live on or a
    good school to send a child to? What use is it in the face of all the
    divisions that keep our country down and rob our children of their
    rightful future?
        Let us learn here once again the simple, powerful, beautiful lesson,
    the simple faith of Robert Kennedy: We can do better. Let us leave here
    no longer in two places, but once again in one only: in the here and
    now, with a commitment to tomorrow, the only part of our time that we
    can control. Let us embrace the memory of Robert Kennedy by living as he
    would have us to live. For the sake of his memory, of ourselves, and of
    all of our children and all those to come, let us believe again, we can
    do better.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:13 p.m. at Arlington National Cemetery.
    In his remarks, he referred to Rev. Gerard Creedon, missionary to the
    Dominican Republic and celebrant of the Mass.