Robert Kennedy and 'the awful grace of god.'

Once, Bobby had been renowned for his prosecutorial zeal. But now, emotionally and politically unable to bring his own brother's killers to justice, he seemed hollowed out, drifting listlessly through his days. In his deepening gloom, he sought counsel - not from a psychiatrist, but in the Irish way, from a priest. Worried about Jackie's state of mind, Kennedy had recruited his old friend, Father Richard McSorley, a liberal Jesuit theology teacher at Georgetown University, to talk with her, under the guise of giving her tennis lessons on the backyard court at Hickory Hill. Jackie confided in the priest that she was plagued by suicidal thoughts. Would she be punished in the afterlife if she committed this mortal sin, she asked McSoley? "Do you think God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself? It's so hard to bear. I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn't God understand that I just want to be with him?"
Bobby too tried to comfort her sister-in-law, but all he could offer her was stoic advice. "Sorrow is a form of self-pity," he told her. "We have to go on." He also chided his colleagues at the Justice Department about their downcast moods. "Robert Kennedy Defeat Despair," proclaimed the headline of a January 9, 1964, article in the New York Times by his friend Anthony Lewis - as if by telling it to the press Bobby could make it true. But Father McSorley realized that it was not just Jackie who desperately needed help.
In a letter he wrote in early summer 1964, McSorley consoled Bobby for his irreplaceable loss: "Your grief goes as deep as your love. Because you were close to him, you received the impact of his rare personality more fully than others. Yours was the inspiration of constant, daily, personal contact." But he then encouraged Bobby to turn grief into action, by picking up his brothers fallen banner. "I look at you as [Jack's] twin spirit," wrote the priest. "No one is in a better position to lead those whose hearts have caught fire from his flame than you."
But it would take time before Kennedy was ready to resume his brother's mission. In the meantime, the man of action found solace in literature and philosophy. It was Jackie who helped guide him this time, giving him a copy of 'The Greek Way', the minor 1930 classic by retired headmistress Edith Hamilton that extolled the glory that was briefly Athens. Kennedy devoured the book during a trip to the island of Antigua in March 1964, retreating to his room in a borrowed seaside villa to read and heavily underline it. The tragedy of Athens - its 150-year reign as a cradle of democracy and art, before succumbing to the corruptions of empire - must have echoed his own gloomy thoughts about the perils of a life devoted to politics. And he took deeply to heart the ancient counsel of the great tragedians whom Hamilton celebrated, particularly Aeschylus - the poet who had once been a warrior, hero of Marathon, a man whose wisdom was born of life's cruel strife. Kennedy found particular comfort in these lines from the playwright; they would guide him through his bleakest days: "He who learn must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls, drop by drop, upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."

Book: 'Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years.'

Author: David Talbot