His father was instrumental in the election of president john f. Kennedy. Bill green served as a congressman in 1976, during which time he took on the Oil Companies and helped defeat the Oil Depletion allowance. He became the meir of philadelphia the mayor of philadelphia and i am pleased to say i was in his administration. He took on on a lot of special interests, and actually implemented the first deadly force policy in the united states. He also said a lot of interesting things i wont repeat here. About the worst legislative body in the free world. [laughter] we always had a debate i might also add that his son helped fight back the wholesale closers of the the library branches. Without further ado is made privilege to welcome bill green. [applause] we were great friends and worked together ohad workedtogether oni was the mayor and has done more for the city than you could imagine. He ran the schools from the park, he headed all of those institutions and more and was a Pulitzer Prize winner for the philadelphia inquirer. [applause] iem pleased to be part of the presentation. As you will probably find out some of the most memorable and have used days of my life were my time i spend with Robert Kennedy. Let me begin by offering praise during his book, Bobby Kennedy the making of a liberal icon. What he offers us in the book is the result of Extensive Research including previously unpublished reports and the newly released materials from the Kennedy Library and access to people that other authors didnt have most notably. He made his career as a New York Times bestselling author including the buck satchel. His many books on railroad car workers in areas come to life with the readers not only because of the deep research but also as captivating style. He also runs the bostonbased Health Coverage fellowship that helps the media do a better job reporting on health issues. The making of a liberal icon is not a valentine. But hivalentine. But his strength, compassion and courage shine through any perceived shortcomings with each trade as i would say is admiring portrait. The book has drawn praise from jefferson biographer jon meach meacham. The book review praises in this fashion we are at his death for bringing back the young president ial candidate who for a brief moment instilled hope for the future the fearful america americans. But we will never know for uncertainty, not from a thousand books, is what might have been. No one can say. Nixon, watergate, vietnam, no one knows. But i do know this, from the crushing pain that followed his brothers death, she emerged and even the more compassionate man. As president , he would admit his mistakes. The war would be the last resort. We would talk to our adversaries and listen to them containing Nuclear Weapons would be a major urgent focus and he would be welcomed around the world. He would fight the corrupt and fight most of all the forgotten those stuck in urban ghettos mostly black, those in the hollows across the land and those picking the crops. They would see it in his face and that is what might have been. Robert kennedy said we can do better. He was right. Never have those were then so true as they are this night. Youve written a great book and im pleased to introduce you to my fellow philadelphians. [applause] what i would like to do in trying to introduce Bobby Kennedy to you and i assume how many people in the room have lived through the campaign and 68 . Im going to call all of you appear to tell your stories. [laughter] i would like to take you through the moments in his life that are indicative talking changed and who he was in critical time and the first one starts off in 1957. His friends and first boss senator joe mccarthy died in a town called appleton wisconsin. He was a senator that basically saw a communist behind everyone in the state department. He shows up at the airport in Green Bay Wisconsin with an enormous plane and off the plane steps 19 senators mostly republican and mostly conservative. All of them do what the dignitaries do when they get off planes because of the limousines and they are whisked away to wisconsin. The airport after that gets quiet. When theres the notion no one else is going to get off the plane, one last person does. Since there is no limousine to take him to the airport come he gets a ride from a reporter at the Madison Wisconsin newspaper. At the funeral in the church she watches from up in the loft and while the dignitaries are over here and Bobby Kennedy is over here but he managed to do after the Service Anybody could ask him to be obliged he got them covering the funeral to bleed valve of the story. Because he was a kennedy he generally got his way. What that story does, without moment does it says two things to me about who he was back then. One thing it says is that he was a loyal friend of joe mccarthy who understood he was his dads friend but gave him his first job and in the era when much of america thought communism was a huge threat, so did Bobby Kennedy and he thought there was only one person in washington standing up against the communists. So while jack kennedy said to stay away from the funeral, he did what he often did in those days. He ignored it and was going to stand up for his buddy. So you could say i dont know what you think of joe mccarthy that you could say there was something noble about his being there when there was a potential risk. The other half back then was that he was a realist. Bobby kennedy that new he wanted his brother to be president and might someday run for office himself, he went to the funeral and showed up but he barnwell was going to make sure that nobody was going to see him. So the two sides, the loyal side, back to Bobby Kennedy was then and thats who america was then in the conservative era of eisenhower. So he starts out as the ultimate cold warrior just like his dad was. I want to take you from the year 1957 to the moment that i think if he had any single epiphany moment in his life come it was 1963. Bobby kennedy on a november day 1963 had come home from work at the Justice Department with a couple aides. He had a swim at his pool at estate just outside of washington in virginia settling back to have a great lunch and eventually go back to work. At that moment when he started it was the half went to the white house. There were more than there were in the Vice President s residence that was a contention for Lyndon Johnson. But any time the phone rang it was not good news. It was one of the people Bobby Kennedy hated in the world, fbi director j. Edgar hoover. And he describes it as monotone and says in a voice your brother has been shot. At that moment changed his life. He lost his brother, best friend anin the whole sense of purpose. Hed been close enough at the time they were both in their 20s but the idea that jack kennedy was gone was a world changer for him and get something happened. They were totally distraught and somebody had to take charge. Bobby kennedy for the next month gave out assignments to the family. You will take care of mom and break the news to dad just had a stroke. You will do all these things that need to get done. He went to the white house and decide whether or not it would be an open casket. He held up a hand of Jackie Kennedy and john and caroline when they were devastated. Bobby kennedy helped the country going through a morning more profound. That was quite an extraordinary thing he managed to do given how devastated he was. When the family started pulling it back together and went back to work and the country ended their period and started to pull it back together, Bobby Kennedy lost it. He went from the next seven months to something today we would describe as a clinical depression and that is rendered 50 years later like it happened moments ago. He would go to work and couldnt sustain attention in the meetings at the Justice Department. He lost his sense of what he was doing in the world and debated about whether he should become a College Professor and i am convinced he would have made a miserable professor and never thought about it but everything was on the table. He debated whether she should take his inheritance and travel around the world with this wife and kids. He debated a lot of things and what he ended up doing is running for senator from new york and it wasnt until the middle of the campaign he started coming out of this depression. It was at that moment he realized he could lose which could have been a first he started having a sense of two things. He did have something to contribute and people were responding to him not because he was the surviving brother but because he was Bobby Kennedys brother and had something to offer. Have something to offer. When he was coming out of his depression as it was suggested, he came out a different person. At the suggestion he was reading tragedies and this is a guy that for entertainment generally played a touch Football Game and that is what he considered his distraction. He was now reading about the kind of hubris he realized they were thinking it was the world to do with what they wanted and suddenly crashed around him. He came back into the world with a kind of empathy that he never quite had before. I suspect if i interviewed everybody in the audience, we are all between tough and tender but the dialogue in his days started out waiting for the tough side and started speaking empathetic to the underdog in a way that he had never really done before so in 1963, he came out of this miserable experience and it was a good thing because he had to find a new role for himself. Its who Bobby Kennedy was and as we look around and get excited about the candidates running for president today i want to take you to one night in the campaign. When i ask you a question tonight just say indiana. [laughter] if you pick a state they wouldnt want to have a contested primary he had no idea on anything going on. He was a massachusetts or an wod brad guy, senator from new york and this was all new territory. One night in the indiana prima primary, he was about to fly to indianapolis to go to an important rally in the middle of the city. When he landed in indianapolis, he was told Martin Luther king had been shot and killed. The mayor of indianapolis went on to become a powerful u. S. Senator and had one powerful piece of advice which was you will not go and hold a rally that was scheduled partly because im worried whether you are going to come out alive and you will create a riot just by being there. In 1957 when they taught him not to go to the funeral he said thank you, thats great advice and he proceeded to go out and do it all along. He ends up having his Police Escort pilaf just before he gets to the getgo and he stands up on the back of a flatbed truck and for the next five minutes, he gives one of the great speeches of his life in the history of the american political oratory. He is telling the audience that night, several hundred people, telling 90 of them for the first time that their leader has been killed, Martin Luther king is gone. You can hear if you listen on youtube to the speech from that night. You can hear gasps from the audience that people are devastated. But he proceeds for the first time in his life to talk about what it was like to lose his own brother and the anger he felt when jack kennedy had been killed. He said our temptation is to want to strike out when Something Like that happens but we have to do the opposite. We have to come together as people in this audience and as a country in this moment of trauma. What happened that night in indianapolis was quite extraordinary. In a country that night when there were race riots in more than 100 cities and washington part of the city was burned down that night there was one city in america that had the population that stayed peaceful that night and the city was philadelphia . Indiana. [laughter] so indianapolis stayed peaceful that night because Bobby Kennedy found the Pitch Perfect tone to go into the ghetto and use, and it was predicted when much of the Civil Rights Movement in the early days had given up on Bobby Kennedy ever getting what was going on in the Civil Rights Movement. There was one person that had faith in him and said we have to stick with this guy. Hed been told of the day Martin Luther king and he was proven right giving the speech i think Hillary Clinton and donald trump and burdock obama tried to deliver but they all looked for just the right tone after dallas, baton rouge, st. Paul. I can say without any hyperbole he was the most popular and in the ghettos across the country when he campaigned for the next several months there was a sure sign that said it all. There are not many politicians that they would have said that about in 1968 so i want to take you to why we should still care about him half a century after his death and i think that many of us have spent the last 50 years looking for somebody that is able to do and places a country that was overridden with racial issues come equally stressed out by what was going on overseas in that case the war in vietnam Bobby Kennedy is on the cusp of pulling together the kind of coalition that we had never seen in this country. It was the coalition that supported him in his early days as a cold warrior. It is a coalition of the blacks that were sent to him and stayed peaceful in indianapolis. It was the coalition that back then no politician ever spoke to. Bobby kennedy was the only one who went to california, the only politician who went to california and a stud with cesar chavez during the hunger strikes and reached out in a way. He was bringing together the groups we dream about today. He seemed on the verge of becoming precisely the top liberal or if you prefer to attend are conservative but i think we are still searching for in america. Before we open up for questions, one of the most tender moments ive heard anybody describe he was in those leaders years talks about what happened after his dad died. Would you mind reintroducing me. [laughter] i will tell you a couple stories about that. When president kennedy died, my father didnt want to go to washington because he didnt want to interfere or intrude in everyones sorrow and my mother said to him you should go down there. He went down to the white house and came home and told me the story as he was walking up to the second floor and bobby came down from the first, they took one look at each other, they both cried and went down the steps. Bobby kennedy really was extremely grateful to my father and i had that experience because when my dad died a month later, Robert Kennedy on Christmas Eve last in virginia while he came to philadelphia at december 24 for my fathers funeral and he brought with him a letter from Jackie Kennedy that he basically got him the day before that was as beautiful as you would ever want to see. He heard while i was here interested in running in my seat. I got a call and he said to me i understand you want to run for your fathers seat. [laughter] i said thats correct. He said i sent Kenny Odonnell up there. He looked at the situation and i know a lot of the organizations are lined up against you. But if they take you on i want you to understand we will be in. I said to him to ask you a couple questions and he said yes. I said what does we will be in explicitly mean and he said if they take you on, kennedys will crawl over your district. Now this is several months after Bobby Kennedy came to 15th and chestnut and there were 30, 40,000 people going from 19th street to 13th street and it was a mob scene. Even during the period i said can i tell and he said told them all. What he was really saying is you can tell them im the surgeon generalsurgeongeneral, too becat going to lose this. Bobby wouldnt be in favor of doing anything but making sure in every way he could. The last question he asked was do you need money and i said i dont think so. Friends of my fathers ask me in this contest and he said if you dont have enough, you write the check and it. I would like you to come see me in washington. I went to washington, walked into his office, and i almost couldnt control myself. Never until this minute had i seen a face thats sad. He was absolutely crushed, heartbroken but not so much he couldnt be at my mothers fear or say i said to him i cant tell you what this means to me. A lot of people my father helped guard against me coming at you with all thats going on in your life are for me and he put his head down as head dont you know what your father did for my brother . Dont you know what your father did for my brother . It wasnt by the 3,031 votes when people printed my father for producing that victory my father would laugh at home and say people win, politicians win primaries and the help he was to the kennedys was 1960 at the democratic convention. Im talking about john kennedy, not Robert Kennedy, but you cant talk about one without the other. They werent like that. What he did for my brother in 1960, thats a line for the rest of his life for the highest compliment he could see to anybodys what was done for john because they werent like that to the point where Ethel Kennedy describes the cliche th