ROBERT Kennedy, the father of the oddball who now dishonors his name. The one and only Bobby, assassinated on his way to the White House.
There she sat, his mama Rose, in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, already the fourth funeral of a child of hers. She gave birth to him in Brookline, the Massachusetts spelling of Breukelen, around the corner from Netherlands Road where a copy of Franeker’s old town hall stands. Rosary in her fingers, the same one she took with her when she went to that Dutch convent in 1908, 17 years old. The New York Philharmonic played Mahler’s Adagietto, from his 5th symphony.
That was her music. She had come into contact with it when the nuns of Bloemendal sent her to concerts. Mahler, Strauss, a world opened up in Limburg for the daughter of the mayor of Boston.
Rose Kennedy studied in Vaals. She learned to sing the Dutch national anthem there, the day Princess Juliana was born in 1909. In the Netherlands, the Kennedy’s mother gained values that she later instilled in her children, but only Robert really listened well. Read the Greek poets, she said, and Bobby promptly quoted Aeschylus, from memory.
On the way from St. Patrick’s to the Arlington cemetery, two million people lined the railroad tracks, the fourth great train funeral procession in American history, after Abraham Lincoln who hailed from Hoorn, Warren Harding from Beusichem, and Franklin Roosevelt from Oud Vossemeer.
There is a wonderful book about what those people saw, their Agfa photos, their double-8 videos, 56 years ago after Sirhan Sirhan robbed our generation of Rose Kennedy’s third son. The author visited them in their homes, along the railroad tracks, it took him four years.
A Dutchman. Rein Jelle Terpstra.
