Inspiration for today’s America - Robert Kennedy 50th anniversary

Fifty years ago today, Robert F Kennedy, the 42-year-old Democratic presidential candidate, was assassinated just after midnight at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Five years earlier, his brother John F Kennedy met the same, sorry fate in Dallas.

Both deaths provoked huge outpourings of grief. Three days after he was assassinated, Robert Kennedy’s funeral took place in New York. His coffin was later taken by train to Washington for burial. The cortege had an unexpected audience.

More than 1m people stood along the railway tracks to salute a man who had faced down the South’s segregationists and promised so much more. He confronted rather than encouraged demons.

The great, public processes provoked by those killings — the conspiracy theories, the what ifs, the romanticism around a lost leader — continued for decades. Today, those who voted for either Kennedy look back on a time incomparable to the political landscape in today’s America.

It is always necessary to winnow the imagined from the real; wishful thinking is not a crime, but it is hardly a reasonable policy either. The Kennedys were not by any means faultless, but compared to today’s White House incumbent they seem heroic Caesars. As America remembers today, maybe it might recover some of the idealism that defined the Kennedy decade and replace fear and bile with hope.