Today, Americans will remember DDay and the generation that once was. Twenty four years after that 1944 event, Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel just hours after Drysdale pitched a then-record 58 scoreless innings. Nearly a half century has since passed and many say we continue to fight the same battles that were fought on those fronts - one at the shores of Normandy; the other on the back of pick-up trucks across Route 66. Two months earlier Kennedy gave perhaps his most historical speech in Indianapolis, the only large American city not to riot the evening Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
In early 2009, when I was flirting with the prospect of attending law school, I read "The Last Campaign" by Thurston Clarke. During Kennedy's short-lived campaign, which many had pinned as quixotic, we saw a well-versed student of international affairs, an advocate for capitalism complemented by accountability, and a champion for the underserved. Seventeen years earlier, at the age 25, Kennedy had graduated from Virginia Law School. Now, here I was, just months shy of my 25th birthday and weeks after covering the 2008 election and the inauguration of our nation's first African-American president. I figured there'd have to be something else.
When it began to sink in last winter that I'd have a JD in a few months, I decided to re-read Clarke's book. This time, wrapped up in my bed in East Lansing and on airplane rides for school functions, I used my now customary law school highlighters to point out passages that appeared as pressing today as they were in 1968. I imagine during this upcoming journey, I'll spend many nights thinking of RFK, DDAY and passages that never fail to inspire.
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