Sorry to be a downer, but I think this is important to remember. Forty-years ago last Friday Robert Francis Kennedy was assassinated after winning the California primary in the 1968 Democratic Party's presidential primaries.

I honestly believe that his death was the last blow from which this country would not recuperate, ever. His death came in the same year as Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, one year after Malcom X's, two years after his brother John F. Kennedy's killing in Dallas and three years after the assassination of Medgar Evars.

Politically, the 1960s were a brutally violent time in the history of this country. My father worked with him here in New York briefly and he would say that Bobby was the kind of guy that gave hope for reconciliation and peace between colored folks and whites in this country and especially after the violent times of the Civil Rights movement and the War in Vietnam. He wasn't an angel, he would tell me, what with his wire-tapping many of the same black leaders of the CRM.

Yet after all those violent deaths, people lost sight of the sometimes brutal US Attorney General Robert Kennedy and instead set their sites on "Bobby". It was Bobby, not Robert, who was looked upon as the last great white hope. For one, he had vigorously tried to not just desegregate the office of the U. S. Attorney General. He was deeply committed setting an example for all of government by hiring black and latino lawyers and to giving minorities a fair professional chance in his office.

And second, he was the last of the "Union" or "Yankee" Democrats who had a fighting chance at becoming president of the United States. It's an interesting not-so-little detail in the political history of this country that after desegregation, the striking down of anti-miscegenation laws and the Voting Rights act, this country has only one ambiguously "northern stater" as president and that was the unfortunate George Bush I.

Not only that, take a look at any history book and you'll see that the two presidents elected by the Democratic Party in the last 40 years were both from the South : Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

So here's to Bobby Kennedy and to what could have been with him as president of the United States.