"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968) quietly offered up Aeschylus' quotation to a stunned gathering in Indianapolis on the evening of April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Two months later, RFK would be murdered by Sirhan B. Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and Aeschylus' famous quote would serve as his epitaph. Filmmaker David Grubin's (LBJ, Napoleon, FDR) moving profile RFK, from PBS's acclaimed American Experience series, combines insightful interviews with historians, journalists, biographers, and colleagues (including Robert Dallek, Nicholas Katzenbach, Jack Newfield, and Roger Wilkins), as well as RFK's daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, together with excellent archival footage to trace the history of a man whose life played out like a Greek tragedy. A veritable pit bull of an ideologue who worked alongside Senator Joseph McCarthy, waged obsessive wars against Jimmy Hoffa and Fidel Castro, and initially supported the Vietnam War, RFK underwent a slow, but far-reaching transformation after his older brother John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, two days after joining Bobby for the celebration of the younger brother's 38th birthday. Most people, we're told, acquire certainties as they grow older; RFK dropped them, and in his grief he found his humanity, gradually reaching out to the poor and disenfranchised and making a decisive break with LBJ (the two mutually loathed one another) over the escalation in Vietnam. A powerful portrait of a man seasoned by sorrow and tragically cut down before he had a chance to bring his platform of compassion to the White House (a quality that the 1968 winner, Richard M. Nixon, sorely lacked), this is highly recommended. DVD extras include an eight-minute interview with Grubin, and the five-minute featurette "What if RFK Had Lived?" Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)
RFK
(2004) 120 min. VHS or DVD: $24.99 ($54.95 w/PPR). PBS Video. Color cover. Closed captioned. ISBN: 0-7936-9965-7 (vhs), 0-4157-0185-7 (dvd). Volume 20, Issue 1
RFK
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