Adam Walinsky, Restless in Peace
I just heard that Adam Walinsky, a speechwriter and aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy, died in November at age 87. The news came as a shock to me because the Adam I knew was forceful and sharp-witted and blunt-spoken and also full of feeling. I thought he would go on and on.
I guess the New York Times obituary writers thought so too, because they still haven’t published anything about Walinsky’s passing.
Adam is known, among many other things, for writing the famous “ripples of hope” speech with Dick Goodwin that Senator Kennedy delivered in June 1966 to students in apartheid South Africa. “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice,” Kennedy said. “He sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression and resistance.”
I met Adam at his home in suburban New York when I was interviewing people for my 2007 book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, which documented RFK’s private search for the truth about the assassination of his brother. Adam was tough and smart and his eyes also welled up with tears at the memory of Bobby Kennedy. I liked him immensely.
Years later, in 2019, Adam and I collaborated on a public statement that incriminated national security officials, abetted by organized crime figures, in the violent deaths of both Kennedy brothers, as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X – the four killings of American leaders in the 1960s that tragically altered the course of U.S. history. The statement was signed by members of the Kennedy, King and Malcolm X families, as well as by doctors who worked on the mortally-wounded President Kennedy (and saw with their own eyes the medical evidence that he was struck by bullets from the front and back), as well as by G. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel of the House Assassinations inquiry in the late 1970s and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Only the Washington Post deemed this major public statement, which called for a new investigation into the four assassinations, newsworthy.
When I first interviewed Adam about RFK’s hidden search for the truth about Dallas, I immediately knew that what he told me was historically important. It still is. Here’s what I wrote in Brothers:
Adam Walinsky was a young Yale Law graduate who had briefly served in RFK’s Justice Department before going to work in his Senate office as his legislative assistant. With his crusty demeanor, keen intelligence and soft heart, Walinsky quickly endeared himself to the senator, who relied on his sharp young aide to keep him current on the most important new books, articles and ideas. “I was his intellectual valet,” smiled Walinsky.
Walinsky shared Dick Goodwin’s skepticism about the Warren Report, whose ballistics theory he found “completely tortured and strange.” But, following his boss’s lead, he learned to keep his suspicions about Dallas to himself. Goodwin, on the other hand, “would talk openly about the assassination,” said Walinsky, launching into an imitation of his distinctive mumbling growl. “It was the CIA, the Mafia… The senator would be in the room or around. But he was always extremely guarded. One of the things you learned when you were around Kennedy, you learned what it was to be serious. Serious people, when faced with something like that – you don’t speculate out loud about it. You might ask a question. That’s all. It’s a matter of mental discipline.”
Until he could win the White House, Kennedy was convinced, there was nothing he could do to solve his brother’s assassination.
Adam Walinsky