I think every American who grew up during this time was deeply touched by the Kennedy family, whether they knew it or not. I was six in 1968.

I was a month old when Ted Kennedy entered the senate

so Ted has been a fixture of my government for almost my entire lifetime

I’d say he certainly affected my life in ways that I don’t know about

Thank you Mr Kennedy

Sounds like your dad was a pretty special guy. He’d be proud of his daughter.

I wish our “leaders” could be so fearless.

Excellent comment, btw.

At 62 now I was politically conscious to see the red scare after the end of the Great War morph into the monster America has become – the nuclear stand off with the USSR, the cold war, the proxy wars with the horrible tragedy of SE Asia, the assassinations of brilliant leaders, the rise of unfettered free market crony capitilism, the end of jim crow which was alive and well in this country through too much of my life, and the dominance of the national security state at the service of global corporations.

I have lived through the destruction of the American dream, replaced by a marketing of debt servitude as the new freedom, when in fact it was a kind of slavery hardly different from the plantations of the south. I have seen the nations of Europe who have been waring for a millennium led by kings and despots come together a stand up a system which supports it’s citizens without crushing freedom. It’s not perfect, but it’s not domination by the state, the communism and “socialism” which we were made to fear. We have seen the French ridiculed despite the fact that the French on any objective analysis have better lives, work less, have better health, better health care, better food, free and better education, longer lives, lower infant mortality, higher literacy, less poverty, longer vacations, guaranteed maturity benefits, in general a higher standard of living by any metric.

We need to have a dose of truth and realty as Ted mentions in that speech. America has gone astray and is NOT fulfilling her promise of the founding documents.

One of the ironies of the time that I had not noticed until this video was the narrative of complacency and apathy in the signature year of the 1960s. Yes there was great apathy but that was because it was the backdrop to hard-fought changes in American society. But the apathy was more numbness from the shocks of the civil rights movement, assassinations, a glorious war going quickly bad, the exposure of poverty in the midst of plenty, an airing out of all of America’s dirty laundry. The information was overwhelming, causing withdrawal or rage. A common mood of we who grew up in the 1950s was that in hammering “American values” into us as a “defense against Communism”, we had be lied to. It was a major discovery of hypocrisy, the shock of which persists in the current cynicism.

It is also curious to me how even Kennedy framed the blind rage that erupted in the cities after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King as a tactical mistake of some unnamed leaders. It was a rhetorical defense of a shaken establishment of which he was one of the more forward-looking leaders, but it reflects the disconnection inherent in even the best of noblesse oblige. That should be humbling to anyone on this blog who has not experienced firsthand discrimination, poverty, fear of hatemongers. It is this disconnection more than the psychological condition of apathy that we should worry about. Without having the framing of the discourse to say it, that’s what Senator Kennedy (or his speechwriter, or both–I hear the cadences of Theodore Sorenson in the speech) was struggling to talk about – the disconnection of peer experience, the exclusion implied in the word “exclusive community” or “exclusive neighborhood”, valued then and now as the place to live, work, and bring up kids.

Thank you, Jane for finding this. It is one of an exceptional collection of clips from Senator Kennedy’s career. And as striking as the news coverage of the Kennedy and Nixon healthcare plan in which the Nixon plan sounds like the Baucus plant except Baucus’s covers 65% instead of Nixon’s 70%.

I wonder.

What a world it would be …

DW

Dave Chappelle finds racism in Boston “specific”. E.g., Irish on Italian. Now racism in the South, he says, “is magnifique”.

Not much has changed.

Ted Kennedy was a great learner and a great teacher. He worked hard.

We need more like him.

Thank you for finding this speech, Jane, and for sharing your experience.

There were many families who were uprooted for standing up in those days.

I often think of what a different world we would be living in if John and Robert Kennedy and MLK would have lived to comb grey hair.