Certainties

In a powerful "American Experience" biography of Bobby Kennedy last weekend, one thought stood out.

Most people as they grow older, a historian said, acquire more certainties. Kennedy, as he aged, threw off certainties. It was a trait that allowed him—slowly but surely—to see the civil rights battle as the crucial struggle it was and the Vietnam War for the disaster it was.

If only today's national leaders had been less captives of their own certainties and more able to learn from the world as it really is. What a better world we would have before us now.