TIME、RFK暗殺20年後の評価
TIME誌1988年1月11日号は、1968年を特集していて、その中で(当然ながら)RFKの暗殺についても扱っています。
1968 Like a knife blade, the year severed past from future - TIME
この記事の中で、RFKがもし暗殺されなかったらどうなっていたかに触れた個所。
What if Bobby Kennedy had lived and been elected President? It can be argued that Sirhan Sirhan's nihilistic gesture changed American history more profoundly than any other event since the death of Franklin Roosevelt. Without Sirhan, would there have been no Nixon, no Watergate, and possibly therefore no Jimmy Carter, and possibly therefore no Ronald Reagan? The long historical tumble of the past 20 years may have begun in that hotel serving pantry. Of course, that sort of hypothesis is merely a fantastic antiworld. Such speculations are idle and infinite.
RFKの暗殺は、フランクリン・ルーズベルト大統領の死以来最も深くアメリカ史を変えた出来事だったという評価。
暗殺がなければ、ニクソンもなく、ウォーターゲートもなく、ジミー・カーターもいなかった可能性がある。そして、レーガンもいなかったであろう。
この文章の前の二つの段落が以下のものです。
Tom Hayden, a leader of S.D.S. and now a California state assemblyman, may sometimes have shared the radicals' feelings of cynicism and contempt for Bobby Kennedy, at least while Kennedy lived. But Hayden went to St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City and wept at Kennedy's casket, holding a Cuban fatigue cap in his hand. The year had many legacies, but the assassinations were among the most important and were the hardest to bear. They altered history and broke something essential in the national morale -- they broke hope. "The best leaders of our time were dead," Hayden says now. "They had been murdered. That is the heart of the tragedy. By 1968 I knew I was part of an apocalypse, which is different from the early idealism. You feel you are carried by events that are out of your control."
Hayden thinks Kennedy would have won the Democratic nomination in 1968 and then gone on to defeat Richard Nixon in November and served two terms in the White House, leaving office in January 1977. Richard Goodwin worked as an adviser and speechwriter for both John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. He remembers talking to Bobby on the night he was killed. "He believed," recalls Goodwin, "that he probably wouldn't get the nomination. He was sure that Johnson would do anything to stop him." Goodwin shared Kennedy's pessimism at the time, but now, 20 years later, says the nomination could have been won. The way the Chicago convention evolved and erupted, Goodwin reasons, would have played to Kennedy's strengths.
ボビーは68年の大統領選に勝ったかもしれない。生きていれば。
この記事の中で興味深かったのは、キングやRFKなどのヒーローが消え去った後のアメリカは何を喪ったのか?という設問にこたえる下に引用する文章でした。
Perhaps it is an immature impulse to wish for heroes. In the early '80s many of the young adopted the oldest American President, Ronald Reagan, as a kind of hero -- not a moral or political hero exactly, but rather a sort of hero of attitude, not a leader so much as a prince of nonchalance. That sort of hero does not nourish much, or perform the hero's function of inspiring people to be better, to do better.
この中で、ヒーローの役割は、より善くなること、より善いことをする事へと人々を触発すること、という定義に胸を打たれました。
日本でこういう議論は聞いたことがありません。少なくとも私は。
キング牧師もRFKも、よりよくあること、よりよく生きることに向かって人々を触発し、それを求めようという意欲を掻き立てる力があったんだと、改めて感じました。