Excerpt

"With all he had striven for smashed in a single afternoon, he had an overwhelming sense of the fragility and contingency of life. He had never taken plans very seriously in the past. He could not believe in them at all now. 'Who knows if we will be here next week?' If things were worth doing, they were not to be deferred to the precarious future: so he would protect his family, his friendships, his reading from the exactions of public affairs. At the same time he knew he was a child of fortune as well as of fatality -- that he had enjoyed far more freedom and happiness than most people, far more opportunity to enlarge his choices and control his existence. This made his obligation to help all who had been wronged the more acute and poignant. Robert Kennedy at last traveled in that speculative area where doubt lived. He returned from the dangerous journey, his faith intact, but deepened, enriched. From Aeschylus and Camus he drew a sort of Christian stoicism and fatalism: a conviction that man could not escape his destiny, but that this did not relieve him of the responsibility of fulfilling his own best self . . . Life was a sequence of risks. To fail to meet them was to destroy a part of oneself."

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