Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: On Anniv. of RFK’s Death, Tribute to Public Service

Yesterday, June 5, marked the 43rd anniversary of the tragic assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

His daughter, our very own contributing RP, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, spent the weekend paying tribute to the virtue of public service.  In a speech before the The Women’s Network, Townsend shared her thoughts on the meaning of her father’s legacy:

In 1968, as you all remember, my father was running for president. David Frost asked Ronald Reagan and my father a question. I’m going to ask you that same question and give you thirty seconds of silence to think about how you’d answer that question, okay? The question is, “What is the purpose of life?” Think about how you would have answered it, okay?

Both Ronald Reagan and my father came up with good answers, and answers that rooted in the American tradition. Ronald Reagan said “The first thing is you have to reproduce yourself. Of course my mother [of ten] did a really good job on that one. And then he said what we really need in this country is individual freedom. We’re based on a belief in the Judeo-Christian belief of individual salvation and so what we need is individual freedom within the extent of the law. That was his answer. That makes a certain amount of sense. We talk about freedoms, we’re clelebrating Franklin Roosevelt’s four freedoms.

But I think Ronald Reagan missed something. My father said the first thing you do, you need enough food, clothing and shelter. If you don’t have that, that’s not a worthwhile life. But after you do that, you have to help others. You may have no shoes, but there’s always somebody else who has no feet. Our responsibility is to help others.

What had happened in 1968 when my father lost the election is we moved away from a sense that we’re all in this together, we’re part of a larger community, and we have to help one another. [We moved to] A belief only in ourselves, individualism. That started to dominate our economic system, which wasn’t there before. Milton Friedman, Allen Greenspan, who only thought: “What can we do for me?” Ayn Rand. And that has been a destructive economic system. We hear the rhetoric: “We want to cut taxes to create wealth”. Well, wealth for whom? Wealth for the top two percent of Americans. Wealth for the rest of Americans has not gone up in thirty years. What we’ve done is focused on wealth and not on worth. It means our country is weaker of this bad ideology which we have to change, and that’s what Democrats need to do.

For the entire speech, transcribed by Blue Bluegrass blogger Bob Layton, click here.

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Coincidentally (?) , Townsend entered the patheon of the American intellectual zeitgeist yesterday as well. She was featured as a clue in the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle:

106 Down: “Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, to J.F.K.”  Five letters.

I didn’t say it was a remarkably difficult clue…