On April 4, 1968, just hours before Martin Luther King Jr.  was
killed in Memphis, Tenn., Robert F. Kennedy ’s presidential
campaign made a stop in Muncie, Ind. He wanted to talk to the
9,000 students who had assembled in the gymnasium at Ball State
University about the meaning of life. “What really is our
purpose in life?” Kennedy asked them before recounting the
suffering of children who were literally starving in
Mississippi. “In the last analysis, the only excuse, really, for
our existence must be that we are to perform some act, do
something on behalf of those who are less well off…. And I think
that you should take this on as a burden.” Politicians did not
usually talk like this. Most campaign stump speeches were (and
still are) designed to appease voters and not challenge them,
let alone demand that they take up a selfless cause. Yet the
students connected with Kennedy. Perhaps it was his idealism,
which seemed to mirror their own. But Kennedy’s ideals were not
young, and they were certainly not the pr