What We Lost on June 6

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

07 June 16

Today is the most fraught of anniversaries, from D-Day to RFK.

une 6 is always one of the more fraught days on the calendar. The annual anniversary of the D-Day landings in France would be more than enough for one day to carry through history, but June 6 also happens to be the day on which, after lingering for several hours, Robert F. Kennedy died in Los Angeles at the age of, god help us all, 42. 

There are few things more striking at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington than the simple white wooden cross that marks his grave on the small slope next to the larger gravesite of his brother, John. They built a memorial to RFK nearby in 1971, which always struck me as something of a shame. That cross seemed most in keeping with the presidential campaign he ran, and with the man he'd become in the years since his brother's murder.

Heroism is a strange thing in this country. We have to try to honor it, as any people would, while at the same time, not let it become a kind of royalist cult that subsumes our more democratic impulses. But, on this death-draped page of the calendar, when almost 2500 Americans died 72 years ago in Normandy, and when one American died 48 years ago in a hospital in California, the words spoken by Edward Kennedy at his brother's funeral mass seem most appropriate to memorialize all of the dead on this most fraught of anniversaries.

"My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: 'Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not."

And all say amen to that.