US Senator Robert Kennedy had a love of which Ancient Greek philosopher, and what was the relevance of this?

Answer: Robert F Kennedy was one of America’s youngest Attorneys General on his appointment to this high office in 1961.

He relentlessly pursued organised crime in America, when the FBI’s head J. Edgar Hoover said that it did not exist in the US.

On the day that Martin Luther King Jr was shot dead in Tennessee, in April 1968, Kennedy was due to address a crowd of largely African Americans. Unscripted, he gave what was one of his greatest speeches, and one which will go down in American history.

To a shocked audience who had just received the news of King’s killing, he said, ‘For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed …’

One of Senator Kennedy’s most revered poets, and indeed that of his brother President John F Kennedy, was the Ancient Greek philosophy Aeschylus.

Among his favorite of the poet’s verses was, ‘God whose law it is that those who learn must suffer. And even in you sleep pain that can’t forget falls drops by drop around the heart.’

It was said that the poem gave him some comfort in his enormous grief over the death of his brother who was shot in November 1963.

Tragically, like his brother, Robert Kennedy fell, like Dr King, to an assassin’s bullet in 1968.

Source: General Historical Texts

More at: History

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