"My first time in this Oval Office was in... 1962... I came here... and I had a meeting with my uncle who was President... He was involved deeply, as we all know..."

"... in restoring physical fitness in this country.... At one point during his administration, he challenged Americans to do a 50-mile walk, which I ultimately did. But I remember the day that my father completed his walk. We were staying at Camp David, and my father came in after 18 hours walking on this towpath with his feet bleeding and blisters on them...."

Said RFK Jr. at the beginning of the short speech he made after his swearing in yesterday. I wrote quite a bit about that speech, here, but I did not include that part, and this morning I'm seeing an important reason why I should have. 

RFK Jr. began his remarks with JFK's physical fitness program, and then he extends beyond his uncle to his father, who took the uncle's challenge very seriously, and we hear of his father's wounds — his wounded feet. I think of Christ's wounds, so often detailed in art, and here, we are given grisly details — "bleeding and blisters." RFK Jr. began with a family story — father, son, and holy President — and a grand mission — physical health. 

From that beginning RFK Jr. spoke of how his father came to run for President in 1968. He was urged to lead the "Dump Johnson" movement by this man — to whom he later wrote a note that quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson: "If a single man plant himself firmly on his own ideal, and there abide, the whole wide world will come round to him." 

The long quote I gave you in yesterday's post begins right there, after the Emerson quote that he knew from his father. And that long quote begins with him praying to God to put him "in a position where I can end the childhood chronic disease epidemic in this country." And, he said, "God sent me President Trump." Trump was, he said, "a man on a white horse now." Picturing RFK Jr. riding on a horse alongside Trump, I said:

One might say this is Camelot.... 

My uncle started USAID in 1961 for humanitarian purposes to put our country on the side of the poor....

There is a special mission for Bobby. It's a family legacy.

That's why I needed to come back today and add that new material. Not only was USAID a family mission, but health — the specific job given to RFK Jr. — was also a family mission. JFK founded his fitness program, and RFK walked the 50 miles.  And now Bobby Jr. takes up the mantle.

***

The actual Emerson quote, from "The American Scholar," is: "[I]f the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."

Instincts, not ideal. Isn't that interesting?! It's a speech to the 1832 Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. The quote appears in the last paragraph:

Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is the new importance given to the single person. Everything that tends to insulate the individual—to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state—tends to true union as well as greatness. "I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi, "that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another that should pierce his ear, it is—The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any one but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience,—patience; with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends,—please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. Then shall man be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.