"On the Mindless Menace of Violence" was a speech given by Senator Robert F. Kennedy at the City Club of Cleveland on April 5, 1968, the day after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. He sought to counter the riots and disorder emerging in the United States' cities, and address the growing problem of violence in American society. Kennedy gave no specific solutions, but called upon people to enact change in the future to bring peace.
Contents
Background
Immediately following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4 and his subsequent speech on the matter in Indianapolis, Senator Robert Kennedy suspended all of his Presidential campaign appearances and withdrew to his hotel room. After several phone conversations with black community leaders, he decided to speak out against the violent backlash to the assassination and carry forward with a scheduled appearance before the City Club of Cleveland. He also spoke with Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr.'s wife, offering his condolences and dispatching John Lewis and Earl Graves to retrieve King's body.
That night at the Marott Hotel, Kennedy hosted a meeting with 14 local black leaders. The meeting had been arranged before the assassination by aide James Tolan. The group had debated among themselves as to whether they should hold the meeting. Kennedy eventually arrived, and the conversation quickly turned heated as leaders began accusing him of being an unreliable member of "the white establishment." He lost his temper, saying, "I don't need all this aggravation. I could sit next to my swimming pool. You know, God's been good to me and I really don't need anything. But I just feel that if He's been that good, I should try to put something back in. And you all call yourselves leaders and you've been moaning and groaning about personal problems. You haven't once talked about your own people." The meeting ended with most attendees pledging their support to Kennedy's campaign.
Meanwhile in their rooms, Kennedy's speechwriters Adam Walinsky and Jeff Greenfield began working on a formal response with assistance over the phone from Theodore Sorenson in Dallas. At about 02:30 on April 5, Kennedy discovered Walinsky asleep over his typewriter and Greenfield passed out on his bed. Kennedy personally pulled the covers over Greenfield. The next morning, Walinsky and Greenfield inserted Sorenson's contributions and finished the speech. This was just before Kennedy left for Cleveland, after he had an interview with Jack Paar. During the flight he edited the speech and ultimately decided to talk about the "violence of institutions" inflicted against disadvantaged and disenfranchised peoples.
Kennedy rode into Cleveland in a white convertible. An aide from a phone-equipped vehicle waived 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. Bill Barry, Kennedy's bodyguard, suggested that the senator wait alongside the road while he would drive ahead to investigate. Kennedy angrily dismissed the suggestion, saying, "No. We'll never stop for that kind of threat."
The speech
The speech was delivered during a hotel luncheon to approximately 2,200 members of the City Club of Cleveland, lasting only for 10 minutes.
Summary
Kennedy opened by dismissing his own political position and ambition as a presidential candidate and emphasizing the situation at hand, saying,
He proceeded to talk about the futility of violence, asking,
Kennedy described how America was becoming increasingly tolerant of violence, from the acceptance of news reports on foreign slaughter, to the frequency of killing in movies and television shows, to insufficient gun control. He called for a unilateral "cleaning" of violence in society in order to solve the contemporary problems of the United States. He then criticized public and private establishment, in a speech where he had been invited in order to display his interest in business matters:
Even in the 1960s, these words were radical and potentially controversial.
Kennedy listed no specific programs and gave no specific solutions to the problems at hand, but called upon people to work together to take action. He finished:
The audience gave Kennedy a standing ovation.
Legacy
Though greatly overshadowed by his remarks the day before and less noticed, the speech is still considered to be significant to grasping Robert Kennedy's mindset and understanding violence in American society. Jack Newfield said the speech was "probably the best written text of the campaign, and perhaps of Kennedy's public career." Newfield also asserted that the address was a suitable epitaph for Kennedy himself. John M. Murphy listed the oration as a primary example of a jeremiad.
President Barack Obama quoted his words in an open letter to American law enforcement in the aftermath of the 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers, saying he "lamented in the wake of unjust violence a country in which we look at our neighbors as people 'with whom we share a city, but not a community.'"