On the Mindless Menace of Violence
He proposed no specific solutions to the internal division and conflict, but urged the audience to seek common ground and try to cooperate with other Americans.
After several phone conversations with African-American community leaders, he decided to speak out against the violent backlash to the assassination and carry on with a scheduled appearance before the City Club of Cleveland.
Kennedy eventually arrived, and the conversation quickly became heated as leaders accused him of being an unreliable member of "the white establishment."
"[10] He told speechwriter Jeff Greenfield, "You know, the death of Martin Luther King isn't the worse thing that ever happened in the world."
"[9] Meanwhile, in their room, Greenfield and fellow speechwriter Adam Walinsky worked on a formal response to the King assassination with assistance over the phone from Ted Sorensen in New York City.
The senator was in a grave mood; when asked how he thought the White House might accommodate a family as large as his, he responded, "Do you think that is going to be my biggest problem?"
An aide from a phone-equipped vehicle waved down his car and informed him that police believed a sniper might be hiding in a church steeple across from the hotel where he was to give the speech.
[16] Kennedy's appearance had been anticipated; in the week leading up to the address, the City Club sold over 1,400 tickets for people wishing to attend the luncheon event at the Sheraton-Cleveland Hotel.
[19] Kennedy opened by dismissing his own political position and ambition as a presidential candidate and emphasizing the situation at hand,[20] saying, This is a time of shame and sorrow.
I have saved this one opportunity to speak briefly to you about this mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.This statement set the tone of the speech.
[18] After quoting Abraham Lincoln, he portrayed the American public as a people increasingly succumbing to its violent tendencies that undermined its national ideals.
[26] Kennedy described how the United States was becoming increasingly tolerant of violence,[27] from the acceptance of news reports on the Vietnam War,[28] to the frequency of killing in movies and television shows,[29] to insufficient gun control.
[30] He also criticized double standards on foreign and domestic policy, arguing that some Americans support nonviolence abroad but not within the United States while others who denounced riots were responsible for the conditions that had led to them.
[34] Kennedy proceeded to caution that when society tries to "teach" people to hate one another or that an individual is a "lesser man" (alluding to racially prejudiced rhetoric common of other public figures), the likelihood of cooperation decreased while the possibility for violent confrontation increased.
[35] Kennedy listed no specific programs or proposals to address the problems at hand,[20] as he believed there was no single solution that would bring an end to violence.
[40] He finished with an allusion to Lincoln's second inaugural address:[19] Our lives on this planet are too short, the work to be done is too great, to let this spirit flourish any longer in this land of ours.
[41] While The Plain Dealer, Cleveland's major daily newspaper, praised the speech as "timeless" and devoted a significant amount of coverage to it, Kennedy's remarks received relatively little national media attention.
[43][c] After the speech Kennedy took a chartered plane to Washington D.C.[41] As it approached the city, the passengers could see smoke rising from fires started during the riots.
[45] Two days later Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, attended an 8 a.m. Palm Sunday service at New Bethel Baptist Church in the riot zone.
"[48] That evening Kennedy held a televised press conference on the possibility of a domestic Peace Corps-like program to reduce racism in white suburbs.
[49] That evening he held a meeting with his aides over how to get the attention of middle-class whites weary of the civil rights movement in order to relieve the racial tension in the country.
Moving past his previous calls for compassion and an end to violence, he admonished whites to accept and welcome blacks into American society.
"On the Mindless Menace of Violence" has been greatly overshadowed by Kennedy's Indianapolis remarks and largely ignored by scholars,[54] but it is still considered by some to be historically significant.
Mankiewicz wrote that it was "perhaps the best speech Robert Kennedy made during the campaign, and certainly one of the best of his career" and "the most eloquent and memorable of RFK's view of humanity and the threats to its flowering and [...] survival.
[61] Shortly after the 2015 San Bernardino attack, she gave a speech at the Children's Defense Fund's 25th annual Beat the Odds Awards ceremony deploring gun violence and citing Kennedy's words.
[62] President Barack Obama quoted the senator's remarks in an open letter to American law enforcement in the aftermath of the 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers.
[20] Journalist and former White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers wrote about the speech after the Dallas shooting, saying, "Today, [Kennedy's] moving words are still so relevant".
"[64] According to The Weekly Standard, "[I]t played a role in making the word violence synonymous with any lamentable social ill."[65] While many books and movies discuss Kennedy's Indianapolis speech at length, most entirely omit his Cleveland remarks or mention them only in passing.
The most high-profile portrayal occurred in the 2006 film Bobby, when the speech was spoken at the end over both real and recreated footage of Kennedy's assassination in California.
"[66] Following the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007, historian Zachary J. Martin wrote a book about the speech, The Mindless Menace of Violence: Robert F. Kennedy's Vision and the Fierce Urgency of Now, which was published in 2009.
