Adam Walinsky
1937 – 2023
Attorney, speechwriter and aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy. A proponent of peace, a passionate advocate for civil rights and progressive social policies, whose eloquence and idealism equaled his directness and pragmatism. He was perceived by many to have been to RFK what Ted Sorensen was to President Kennedy. Many of his words and phrases will live in perpetuity. He is credited with primary authorship of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s eulogy of his brother, delivered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 8 June, 1968:
My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him, and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others, will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him, ‘Some men see things as they are and say, why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?’
Click on this title for AARC Board member David Talbot’s remembrance: Adam Walinsky, Restless in Peace