CONGRESSIONAL RECORD -- SENATE

July 30, 1968

Page 24118

 Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, in the years ahead, millions of words will be written and spoken about ROBERT KENNEDY. As the volume grows, it will be increasingly difficult to recognize the man who walked and worked among us.

We each know something of the larger-than-life dimensions which are applied to the virtues and faults and activities of men and women in public and political life.

I think we all appreciated the fact that the process had overtaken BOB KENNEDY long before he came to the Senate and to a degree none of the rest of us have ever experienced.

My instinct, therefore, Mr. President, on this occasion, is to speak of the ROBERT KENNEDY we came to know as a human being whose talents and interests and appeal prompted his constituents to send him to the Senate.

I did not know him in his childhood, or his boyhood, or his early manhood. I do not know what he was in those years, or in what ways the influences and circumstances of those years shaped the man who was our colleague. I know only that they produced a man of unusual qualities of heart and mind, a man vulnerable as are other human beings in his weakness and shortcomings, a man it was a privilege to know.

I thoroughly liked the BOB KENNEDY I came to know. He was warm and considerate. He was compassionate. He cared about others. Our working and personal relationships were the relaxed and satisfying kind growing out of mutual respect.

He was shy, and his shyness has been interpreted as aloofness and coldness. He was tough and determined about those things which mattered deeply to him.

He was a fighter -- fired as he believed all Americans should be by the injustices of our time.

He believed it to be his duty to use his life to improve life on this earth.

I miss him, Mr. President, as a man who had much to contribute to that objective, and as a man whose friendship warmed those who were privileged to share it.