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Two of history’s great rhetoricians – Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert F Kennedy – were assassinated 50 years ago. Their words have resonance today, writes Benjamin Ramm.
By Benjamin Ramm
Popular volumes of great speeches celebrate the mastery of the art of persuasion. These tomes are full of rhetorical flourishes, of stirring appeals to universal ideals, with elevated cadences and effortless assurances. But two of the most significant rhetoricians of the 20th Century, both of whom were assassinated 50 years ago this year, delivered speeches that were infused with doubt, with a self-reflective, questioning quality, and which expressed an intimate vulnerability.
On 4 April 1968, the day of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, Robert F Kennedy was campaigning in Indiana for the Democratic nomination. He was notified of Dr King’s death on landing in Indianapolis, where he was scheduled to rally support. Instead, Kennedy delivered an extraordinary unscripted eulogy, which drew on his own personal trauma – the assassination of his brother five years earlier – and the classical writers that helped shape his outlook.
“My favourite poet is Aeschylus”, Kennedy told the audience, before quoting a version of Edith Hamilton’s 1930 translation of Agamemnon:
In our sleep,
pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
Kennedy actually slightly misquoted the text, replacing ‘despite’ with ‘despair’. (In the recording, amid the sobbing in the crowd, you can hear him pause at ‘des’, as if unsure of the second syllable). As Christopher S Morrissey has written, it is difficult to know “whether he misquoted deliberately, fortuitously, or infelicitously” – but his tempering words had a powerful effect. Unlike in 110 other US cities in which there was rioting, the crowd in Indianapolis dispersed quietly.
The morning after King’s death, Kennedy spoke in Cleveland, Ohio, about “the mindless menace of violence”. He decried not only the violence of the bullet or the bomb, but “the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay”, and the alienation that leads us “to look at...