J.F.K., Tragedy, Myth
“My favorite poet was Aeschylus.” So said Senator Robert F. Kennedy,
speaking to a traumatized crowd in April of 1968. Kennedy had come to a
poor black neighborhood in Indianapolis to make a routine campaign
speech, but learned en route that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been
assassinated; it fell to the New York senator to announce the dreadful
news. As he struggled to find appropriate language for the day’s
carnage—which, of course, would inevitably have recalled to his mind,
and the minds of his audience, the assassination of his brother John
five years earlier—it was to Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” that Kennedy turned,
the grand trilogy about the search for justice in a world filled with
metastasizing violence. In the verse he quoted, the Chorus of city
elders ponders the meaning of violence and suffering:
Kennedy concluded his remarks with an exhortation to heed the wisdom of the ancient classics: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” That the savageness could not be tamed was demonstrated, with a dreadful Greek irony, three months later, when Kennedy himself was murdered. The lines he cited on the night of King’s death were used as the epitaph on his own tombstone.
Kennedy concluded his remarks with an exhortation to heed the wisdom of the ancient classics: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” That the savageness could not be tamed was demonstrated, with a dreadful Greek irony, three months later, when Kennedy himself was murdered. The lines he cited on the night of King’s death were used as the epitaph on his own tombstone.
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