National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, today we remember Robert F. Kennedy, whose life was brutally, savagely cut short 50 years ago.

Robert Kennedy was a Presidential candidate, a U.S. Senator, a Member of this Chamber, an Attorney General, a naval officer, a father, a son, a husband, and a brother, but more than all of that, he was a beacon of hope amidst turbulent and difficult times in our Nation, and he was an inspiration to generations of Americans.

Speaking at his brother's funeral, our former colleague Senator Ted Kennedy said that Robert Kennedy ``need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.''

I was inspired by his efforts to right wrong, heal suffering, and stop war--inspired enough that when I became a U.S. Senator and was assigned an office that happened to be the former office of Robert F. Kennedy in the Russell Building, I proudly pointed out to visitors that here, in my office, once sat the great Robert Kennedy, who did in fact see wrong and tried to right it, suffering and tried to heal it, and war and tried to stop it.

In May 1968, I was in sixth grade. I was an 11-year-old out in Oregon, and Bobby Kennedy, as we affectionately refer to him, was campaigning in my State. He was going very quickly from community to community, delivering speeches in one high school after another. My sixth grade teacher announced that he was going to give a speech at David Douglas High School--my future high school, except I was only in sixth grade, and I had never set foot in the halls of that high school. He was going to give a speech the next night.

My father was a mechanic. He worked very hard. He was off in the evening, quite happy to settle in, watch the national news, read the newspaper, and reflect on the news of the day.

I came to him, and I said: I understand Robert Kennedy is giving a speech, and we can go see him.

My father said: It is the end of the day, Son. I just don't feel like going out again.

At that moment, I wish so much that I had said: I think I will go down to that high school, find my way down to that high school I had never been to, and see him speak, but I didn't, and it is one of the things I have regretted all my life.

When he was campaigning in Oregon and going from high school to high school, he went also to some iconic places.

Here he is in the surf near Fort Stevens. Fort Stevens is a place I used to camp as a kid. It has a historic shipwreck, the wreck of the Peter Iredale. Now it is pretty much rusted into the sand and disappeared, but I can imagine Robert Kennedy walking and seeing that wreck as he was on this beach.

He went out to Baker County, OR. This is an iconic photo of him on the runway, with the mountains in the background, with his dog. There is a version of this picture that Ted Kennedy gave to me the month before he passed away, and you can see here the snow-covered mountains in the background and walking down the runway in one of those few moments of peace and reflection in between his speeches all across the State.

When Senator Ted Kennedy gave me this picture, he also wrote me a letter. This was in July, a month before Ted Kennedy passed away. He said:

I've always loved this photo of Bobby and his dog Freckles taken in Baker City, Oregon, on May 22, 1968.

He said he has a copy of it hanging in his office. He knew a little bit from our conversations that Bobby had been an inspiration to me, and he wrote:

I know that Bobby played an important role in shaping your political views, and I thought you'd like to have a copy of the photograph for your Senate office as well. I only wish I could give it to you in person.

I do have that photo proudly displayed on my Senate office wall, and it is a reminder of the very special feelings we had about the campaign. We had war abroad in Vietnam in 1968. We had riots at home over the war. We had deep, deep civic tensions between the generations. There was a sense that his leadership and his ability to bridge the divides among races and genders and classes could, in his words, ``bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and countrymen once again.'' Those words have resonance for today, where our divisions are so deep.

Anyone who spent much time paying attention to Robert Kennedy's life knows that his life was full of contradictions. He was a man of wealth, well educated, and could quote poets like Tennyson and philosophers but who also had an unmatched ability to touch the hearts of, and fight for, the poorest among us. He was a ruthless enforcer of the law who never thought twice about taking on organized crime or foreign dictators but had a heart of tenderness and could spend hours playing with young children. He was a younger brother who stood in the shadow of his older sibling, but he stepped out of that shadow to inspire us and to run for the Presidency of the United States.

Bobby was raised in a family that recognized the privileges it had, the advantages it had from its history, its affluence, its connections, but also recognized that with all that they had, they had an extra responsibility--a sizable responsibility--to use those advantages to help others. That, too, is something that is worth all of us thinking about.

Whether it was the fight for civil rights, championing the poor and destitute living in Third World conditions in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, challenging South Africa's students to stand up against apartheid, or organizing the end of war in Vietnam, his life was dedicated to helping others.

When our Nation seemed poised on the brink of tearing itself apart, there was Bobby Kennedy, preaching a message of love, wisdom, and compassion toward one another--a message of reunification, a message of reconciliation. But with all of this, his efforts to take that vision to the Presidency--that vision of wisdom, compassion, and reconciliation--never happened because that opportunity was cut short by an assassin's bullet. That happened just after Bobby Kennedy left Oregon and flew to California, just 2 weeks after I had the opportunity to see him speak in a high school gymnasium and didn't seize the moment to do it.

As Bobby Kennedy said in his speech to the City Club of Cleveland, ``Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great,'' but we cannot let that stop us from working together to seek and build a new world.

We will never know whether Robert Kennedy would have succeeded in his election to be President or exactly what would have flowed from a second Kennedy administration. We can only speculate on how our Nation's history might have been changed and how different our country might have been with his vision, his inspiration, his effort to tackle the issues of poverty, the issues and challenges of war, the issues and challenges of division in our Nation.

One thing we know for sure, the world has been a lesser place these last 50 years because Robert F. Kennedy is not in it, but his thoughts live on. In this institution, Members of the Senate should carry those thoughts forward on these important issues he addressed--of war, poverty, bigotry, discrimination, and ensuring opportunity for all.

In his speech to students in Cape Town, South Africa, Robert Kennedy said: ``Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.''

That is advice we need now more than ever--that we need to work to create those ripples that together can create a mighty current to set our Nation back on track. When it comes to war, we now have not one but many--a war in Afghanistan based on false assumptions, a war in Iraq based on false information, wars in Africa, Syria, and Yemen for which the issue of authorization has never been debated on the floor of this Senate, despite the constitutional call to do so.

When it comes to prosperity, despite our Nation's enormous growth and wealth over the last four decades, we still have people suffering in Appalachia, in Mississippi, in our inner cities, and in our rural towns. Because income equality has surged over four decades, we have seen that workers' wages are flat or declining while the cost of everything goes up from healthcare to housing to the cost of a child attempting to attend college.

While we may have come a long way from the firehoses and dogs turned against peaceful protesters demanding voting rights and civil rights, a long way since Attorney General Kennedy crusaded for civil rights, calling in the National Guard to register the University of Alabama's first African-American students--while we may have come a long way on that trail, we still have a long way to go, as we saw in Charlottesville last year, as we have seen through the last several years of campaigning, an administration in which the temptation too often has come from the Oval Office to denigrate different groups of Americans, whether they be African Americans or Haitian Americans or Latin Americans or women Americans or Americans with disabilities or Muslim Americans. When we hear that, let us remember the vision of America, of equal opportunity, and stand with our brothers and sisters in any given group, arm to arm, hip to hip, and say: Here in America, we believe in the vision that is indivisible, that we cite in our Pledge of Allegiance, that recognizes we come from a tremendous number of backgrounds, but together, with those talents, those differences, we have a nation of greater strength, greater beauty, and greater opportunity for the future.

Fifty years after his passing, I think it is of value to all of us to reflect on the lessons of the life of Robert F. Kennedy--his hope, his optimism, his fierce determination to fight the battles to make the world a better place.

RFK was famous for regularly quoting the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, saying:

Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.

I think it is up to all of us, each and every day, to dream of the things that have never been here in America but could be a greater, more beautiful, stronger, more prosperous, more hopeful America and say ``Why not?''

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