Listen Now Access the recordings of Robert F. Kennedy's program. Club Introduction Read the transcript of the club introduction of Robert F. Kennedy. Club Speech Read the transcript of Robert F. Kennedy's speech. Club Q & A Read the Q & A for this program. Related Links Our guide to the best links related to this program.

Mr. Chairman, I want to say that I'm doing my own individual best to make my state the largest state. Distinguished guests at the head table and ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted to be here, I'm delighted to come and have an opportunity to visit with all of you. To many friends, as I look out in this audience, I think of the poll that a national business magazine took recently of a group of 400 businessmen of who their favorite political figure was in the United States and who they would like to see run for president, and I received one vote. I'm the only politician in the United States that can take all his supporters to lunch at one time. But I think, as I look at you, and I think of the Senate and how much I enjoy the Senate of the United States and all my colleagues there. I was ill a short time ago and they sent me a message through the majority leader. They said they hoped I would recover, and the vote was 43 to 41. But I'm pleased to be here. I'm out here to hold some hearings on Indian affairs and to ensure that there is no effort to and no success in the "Draft Kennedy" movement, taking place here in the state of California. I think my brother, Teddy, is much too young to run for president of the United States, but I'm pleased to be here. I'm pleased to be back to The Commonwealth Club.

Recently a young poet was jailed for inciting a demonstration against the verdict of a court, which had found another young agitator guilty of various disruptive activities. At his trial, the young poet declared that freedom of speech and of the press is freedom to criticize. Just as the rights of the Communist Party were protected by the United States Supreme Court, he contended, so his rights to demonstrate must also be protected. He's defied the court and he declared his intention to again organize demonstrations as soon as he was free. The defendant was not from Berkeley, or from San Francisco State. He was a young Russian named Vladimir Badovsky. The trial took place in Moscow and the record was smuggled to the West by Pavol Litinov, the grandson of one of the oldest heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution.

This is a remarkable series of events. One American court decision, one small aspect of the freedom that we take for granted here in this country, cut through all the suspicions and all of the lies, all of the propaganda of the Communist state, it inspired these young men to risk years of hard labor in Siberia and to help subvert the vast power of the once unquestionable domination of the Communist government. In another sense, however, it is not so remarkable at all. From the beginning, we have known, as George Washington said, that the preservation of liberty is finally staked on the American experiment. We would be, as Jefferson said, the best hope of all mankind. And so it has proven everywhere I have traveled around this globe, in great world capitals, but also in tiny villages. I have seen men looking to the principles, far up into the very words of our history, to find inspiration in their own struggles for freedom. Even Ho Chi Minh, who began the Vietnamese war against the French, he began by quoting not Marx, not Lenin, but the American Declaration of Independence.

Now we are in a year in which we elect a president of the United States; it is a year of debate and of argument, of political battles and personal clash. The most urgent problems of our own society, from the war in Vietnam to the smoldering discontent in our cities, will be weighed and analyzed, and solutions offered. Yet this is a year in which America must examine not only the candidates, but also the country - must ask not only who will lead us, but also where we wish to be led. We must look not only to immediate crises, but also to the nature and the direction of the civilization that we wish to build, that we wish to take part in. The great national debate must not become a contest of only particular programs. We need discussion, we need understanding of the most basic and far-reaching goals of American civilization. But we have been told by cabinet officers and commentators, by journalists and citizens, that America is deep in the malaise of spirit, and dividing Americans from one another by their age, their views, and the color of their skin. We have fought great wars, made unprecedented sacrifices at home and abroad, made prodigious efforts to achieve personal and national wealth. Yet we ourselves are uncertain of what we have achieved and whether we like what we have accomplished.

Now demonstrators shout down government officials and the government drafts protestors; anarchists threaten to burn the country down, and some have begun to try. While tanks have patrolled American cities and machine guns have been fired at American children, a poet proclaims that throat-cutting time is growing nigh and we're going to be ready while a National Guard general speaks calmly of plans to use heavy weapons in the city of New York. Our young people turn from the Peace Corps and public commitment of the early 1960s to lives of disengagement and sometimes despair, turned on with drugs and turning off from America. Truly, we seem to fulfill the vision of Yeats: "things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Entangled abroad and embattled at home, America searches for answers, not just to specific programs, but to the great question, What do we stand for? Where do we want to go? Do we stand for our wealth? Is that what is important about America? Is that what is significant about the United States? Asked better perhaps, are we really so wealthy?

Half a million American children suffer from serious malnutrition, and I have seen of them, some of them, I have seen personally some of them starving in the state of Mississippi, their stomachs bloated, their bones and their bodies scarred, many of them retarded for life. Up to 80 percent of some Indian tribes are unemployed. And the suicide rate among the high school children is shockingly high, dozens of times the national average. For the black American of the urban ghetto, we really do not know what its unemployment rate is, because from one-fifth to one-third of these adult men in these areas have literally dropped out from sight, uncounted and unknown by all of the agencies of government, drifting about the cities, without hope and without family and without a future. By these standards, we are not so rich a country. Truly we have a great gross national product, almost 800 billion dollars, but can that be the criterion by which we judge this country? Is it enough? For the gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife and television programs, which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. And the gross national product, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither wit nor courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our duty to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America, except why we are proud to be Americans. Is it then that, is it then our wealth or is it our military power that we stand for in the United States?

Beyond our borders, we have become the greatest force in the world. Some have even spoken of us as the new imperial power. Even if we should desire such a role, it is no longer possible, as the history of the last 20 years has so unmistakably shown. The day has passed when a country can successfully rule distant lands by force. The issue for us is whether we will live as an island in the midst of a hostile world community or whether we will be joined with other independent nations in search of common goals. We must understand this, because so much depends on what is going to happen in the future as to whether this concept is clear to us. Other countries will associate themselves with us, not because they will be forced to, but because they find in our acts and in our policies a common interest and an understanding of their own ideals and their own aspirations; an understanding of the values that they can respect and admire; an understanding of the values that they can strive to emulate; thus consideration of our wealth and our power brings us full circle to the question with which we began: What do we stand for? Nor should we be surprised, for this is the most powerful and constant lesson of all of history.

The wars and the conquests, the politics and the intrigues of state are soon covered by the years. The triumph of Athens, the empire of Rome, the march of armies, the names of governors - all these did leave some imprint, but it is the ideas and the statutes, the plays of Sophocles and the philosophy of Plato that endure most vividly shaping and enriching our lives to this very day. The mastery of transient events, our accomplishments, our victories will ultimately matter far less than what we contribute - all of us - in this country to the liberation of the human spirit. That is what we have always stood for in the past, that it is what we must stand for at the moment. That is what has given us our unique position, our unprecedented strength. That is why, in fact, we are proud to be Americans.

For two hundred years, America has meant a vision of national independence and personal freedom and justice between men. But whether it will continue to mean this will depend on the answers to difficult and complex problems. It will depend on whether we sit content in our storehouses, dieting while others starve, buying eight million new cars a year while most of the world goes without shoes. It will depend on whether we act against crime and its causes and wipe the stain of violence from this land. It will depend on whether we can halt and can reverse the tide of ever greater centralization in Washington and return the power to the American people in their local communities. It will depend on whether we can turn the private genius of industry to the service of great public ends, using comprehensive tax incentives to help industry create the jobs, train the workers and build the housing, which all of the efforts of the federal government have, so far, failed to do. It will depend on whether we still hold, as the framers proclaimed, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, or whether we will act as if no other nations existed, flaunting our power and flaunting our wealth against the judgment and desires of neutrals and allies alike.

It will depend on whether men still believe, as de Gaulle said at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, that this great nation, the United States, does not act in small ways. But whether like Athens of old, we forfeit sympathy and support alike-and ultimately our own security-in the single-minded of pursuit of our own goals and our own purposes. These are the questions to debate in this election year. This is the true agenda, which faces not just the contenders for office but all of the American people. This is what we must really examine in this election year; to meet and master these challenges will take great vision and will take great persistence. But that seems to me to be the responsibility of the great political parties of this country. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln just 100 years ago, we must know where we are and whether we are going before determining how to get there.

In this, the most dangerous and yet the most challenging period in our history, this is what is so desperately needed. Vietnam, the crisis of our cities - these matters can and will be resolved. But the larger question of whether we have advanced our civilization and the cause of freedom will depend on our own morality and our philosophy and our commitment to our ideals and to our principles. These precepts must guide us again as the great debate begins or if we do have the will, the vision, and the courage to create and to hold fast, to be shaping ideals which men follow, not from the enslavement of their bodies, but from the compulsions of their own hearts. If we do this, then we know that men will stand with us at home and abroad among our friends and even in the camp of our adversaries. For it is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands matched to reason and principle that will determine our destiny. This is the pride, this is the pride and even the arrogance of America, but it's the experience and it is the truth. And, in any case, it is the only way that we can live. I thank you.

Read the Q & A >>

Generously funded by: