It is difficult to imagine the words he spoke to that crowd under those circumstances being spoken by any politician today. For one thing hours had passed since Martin Luther King's assassination and no one in the crowd of horrified listerners had yet heard. Today their cell phones would have chirped with the news within minutes of King's passing. But 1968 was a different time. Not so different in reality as in imagination. But in 1968 the only people with the technology of personal cell phones and instant text messages were Dick Tracy, Mr. Spock, Scotty, Bones and Capt. James Tiberius Kirk. Since 1968 we've come a long way in technology, but not in politicians.

I wish you could have known Bobby Kennedy, if you were too young to know him. I wish you could know what it felt like to admire this guy alive. He was growing before our eyes. It was like watching Eddie Haskell become Lawrence Olivier. The runty kid brother of the first Irish Catholic president -- who proceeds to name his runty kid brother Attorney General! -- Talk about chutzpah! Talk about cajones!

Bobby Kennedy's reputation was nasty at the time his brother named him the nation's top prosecutor and defense attorney. Everyone saw him as the president's legal attack dog. Bobby went after Jimmy Hoffa, but he also had once worked for Sen. Joe McCarthy's anti-communist committee staff. Bobby seemed snarly and opportunistic, like the insecure younger brother of the president. Which he was. Until Friday, Nov. 22, 1963.

And they wonder why we hate Dallas.

By spring of 1968 Bobby Kennedy had transformed. He had become everything his brother represented but more. More human. More destined. It was like watching Jesus stirring. Every word, every look seemed to talk directly to us, whoever us were. We can joke about Bill Clinton being the first black president, but Bobby Kennedy was the first black nominee. When he died it crushed white and back America in a way we have not shared together since, because no one like him has died since. Because no one like him has lived since.

On April 4, 1968 Kennedy told a stunned audience that Martin Luther King had been killed, apparently by a white man, "For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man." And who could hear that without buckling at the knees?

And then he quotes a Greek poet Aeschuylus (that would be S-Kool-us in hip hop) and this is what the dude wrote,"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." Bobby Kennedy quoted that to a mostly black crowd in a midwest ghetto on the night Martin Luther King died.

Bobby Kennedy was not ashamed to share what he learned. He trusted his audience. He trusted himself. In 1964 during the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City, Bobby Kennedy quoted Juliet in describing his brother. "When I think of President Kennedy, I think of what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet:," Bobby said, quoting,""When he shall die take him and cut him out into stars and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun."

We have been squinting into the garish sun since Bobby joined the stars that make the face of heaven so fine that we can scarcely believe that he once walked among us, and that if he had lived, he would have been elected president, not Richard Nixon.

An American tragedy? Yeah, I suppose we could call it that?