Forty years ago, I stayed up late to watch the television reports of the Democrat primary in California and watched in disbelief as the tragic scene unfolded on the tiny screen in real time.
On the 40th anniversary of his assassination, four dispatches written by Robert Kennedy for the Boston Post have been found.
Robert Kennedy's 1948 Reports from Palestine
Via The Belmont Club where Richard Fernandez writes
Maybe, having been disillusioned by the hatred and duplicity all around him, RFK was struck by a strange mood of wistfulness. He inserts this strange monologue into his narrative seemingly out of the blue.
Having been out of the United States for more than two months at this time of writing, I notice myself more and more conscious of the great heritage and birthright to which we as United States citizens are heirs and which we have the duty to preserve. A force motivating my writing this paper is that I believe we have failed in this duty or are in great jeopardy of doing so. The failure is due chiefly to our inability to get the true facts of the policy in which we are partners in Palestine.
It was a time before the incessant din of propaganda has since convinced Americans that evil was exclusively Made in the USA. History that is ostensibly written to enlighten is often in practice written to deceive. The most common use of history is to make us misremember the past. What we believe happened, as well as what we believed about RFK may have nothing to do with how things were. Reading his contemporaneous reports is like visiting a country we never knew existed and meeting a man who died twice; once at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan and again by the knife of popular culture. Twenty years after Kennedy left Palestine, Palestine came to him in a Los Angeles hotel.