Idealism, refashioned

It's an address that stands clearly in the Kennedy rhetorical lineage, particularly the talk Bobby, by then a presidential candidate, improvised on the night of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. He had flown to Indianapolis for a campaign rally in an all-black neighborhood. Informed of King's murder as he exited the plane, the candidate was urged to cancel the rally. He refused and, on arriving at the hall, discovered that the enthusiastic, capacity crowd was unaware of the tragedy that had occurred in Memphis. It fell to him to ad lib a speech informing them. It surely was one of his best, spontaneous and heartfelt, and it included this passage:

"My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once 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's speeches throughout 1968 were studded with that sort of unforced and unselfconscious erudition, spoken alike to college students and migrant farm workers. In his campaign's kickoff address at the University of Kansas, the antiwar candidate explained and apologized for his role in his elder brother's early decisions to increase the American role in Vietnam. He put it this way: "Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom. ... Now, as ever, we do ourselves best justice when we measure ourselves against ancient texts, as in Sophocles: 'All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and he repairs the evil.' The only sin, he said, is pride."

What today's chattering heads on CNN and Fox News would make of references to Aeschylus and Sophocles is anybody's guess. But imagine where Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign might be if she'd said something similar about Iraq back in New Hampshire.

There's a certain irrepressible American vulgarity that makes a fashion of every idea and a commodity of every ideal. Still, there's something more to the current "Kennedy chic" Obama has helped foment than nostalgia for glen plaid, repp stripes and oxford cloth. There's a hunger for generational change and for an end to postmodern irony. Sorensen, at 80 an unreconstructed and unapologetic idealist, spoke to that youthful hunger when he chose this bit of 19th century American poetry (by Arthur Hugh Clough) as his book's epigraph: "Say not the struggle nought availeth/ The labor and the wounds are vain."

How John F. Kennedy is that?

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com