Issue of the Week: Personal Growth, Human Rights, War, Hunger, Economic Opportunity, Population, Disease, Environment
Robert F. Kennedy, April 19, 1968 (c) 1968-2018 Keith Blume
Tomorrow, June 4, is the 50thanniversary of the day Robert Kennedy won the California primary in the 1968 presidential campaign and was most likely headed for the White House.
The real-politic reasons given for why he may not have, (meaning may not have been nominated, it is clear he would have won against Richard Nixon or anyone in the general election), were not themselves realistic in the real-politic context of 1968. The voter support across the spectrum for Kennedy was unequaled, and the Democratic Party machine aspect of the system was one Kennedy was deeply connected with since he successfully ran his brother’s campaign in 1960. It was the entry of Bobby Kennedy into the 1968 campaign against President Johnson that forced LBJ out of the race in only two weeks. This is unprecedented in US history. Bobby was a force of nature, with a 1968 hurricane at his back. Try to imagine stopping that–now you really would have had a revolution. Political machines are made of people who want to win. Even an unpopular Vice-President Humphrey came within an inch of beating Nixon. Kennedy had proven he had the winning coalition over Nixon, Wallace and whoever. See The Bobby Kennedy Pathway. A factually irrefutable (therefore all the more painful) revisiting of what could have been–and potential pathway for the future. But more on all that another time.
Robert Kennedy was the last best hope of the nation that Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth.”
He was shot just after midnight on June 5, after delivering his victory speech in Los Angeles. He hung on, and the hopes of the nation and the world in many ways hung on, for another excruciating 24 hours. He died early on June 6.
There are no words, perhaps more than ever there are no words, for what this did to the US, to the world and to history. The consequences since have been and are clear, in the US and around the world. We will pursue this further in future posts.
One of the principals of Planet Earth Foundation and World Campaign, a coordinator of the San Francisco Bay Area Students for Kennedy, had just arrived back home in Seattle.
The journey covered in the time from leaving for college in San Francisco at the end of the summer of love in 1967 to returning in 1968 was not one that could be measured in time. The oldest child, who turned 19 on the same day Bobby announced he was running for president (and promptly headed for Market Street Kennedy headquarters to volunteer, subsequently coordinating Kennedy’s speech at the University of San Francisco and accompanying him on stage), returning to a well-heeled right-wing Republican household at that point that did not recognize him in many ways. It was a journey that many of this generation took that year. The required short-haired straight-laced look was gone. Far more important was a radical change in consciousness in becoming a political activist who would soon refuse military induction as a conscientious objector against the Vietnam War, a nearly certain fast-track to a long prison sentence then (a story told before and which will be revisited in more detail in the future.) He took to heart Kennedy’s rejection of a system that allowed affluent students to escape the draft and his time-honored conviction that if conscience required refusal the consequence should be accepted. Perhaps the moniker given him by his fellow students and campaign workers, which the salutations in all the yearbook comments started with—“LSB” or “Little Soul Brother”—his given name forgotten, described most simply, and truly, the measure of the spiritual, social, political and personal transformation. The affluent white boy was now a cultural hybrid, part of the counter-cultural change of the times.
He arrived back at the time of his parents’ 20th wedding anniversary. The writers of this post walked recently on the evening of their 70th in the park next to the place their wedding reception was held, looking across Lake Union at the orange pink hues of the last of sunset against the backdrop of the Aurora Bridge and the majestic Olympic Mountains on the coast. We pondered how during the time since those early post-war years and the start of the boomer generation, the US and the world have gone through unimaginable changes, for better and for worse. And that the return home fifty years ago on the eve of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination was the beginning of an inter-generational journey that would reveal challenges for the next fifty years unimagined then. Again, a journey taken by many.
On the night of June 4, in front of the TV in the den of the family home, late, everyone asleep, crying with unsurpassed joy. Bobby Kennedy was going to be president. All would be well.
Then as the date turned to June 5, as the coverage had just ended, suddenly, back on the air.
Robert Kennedy has been shot.
“Jesus Christ!”–a primal scream. It woke his father who joined him. A start of a long night’s journey into day, and long day’s journey into night, political, personal, darkness, to light, darkness, to light, darkness, to …
The future is with the children, always. Which begins with how they are treated. That mantra will be revisited and expanded on always, of course.
But as the children are becoming and become young adults, they become referred to as youth. And 1968 was a youth-led revolution world-wide.
No one understood this better than Bobby Kennedy.
The phenomena of 1968 had two basic strands, the lines from which can be drawn from then to subsequent events to this moment.
One was signified by the end of the summer of love which devolved into drug addiction and child abuse. Or in May of ’68 in Paris in which some intellectuals on a pedestal could become a small cohort advocating for legal child sex abuse, the ultimate expression of liberation as insanity, who abused children, were sometimes punished, but only later, and more and more today, are being exposed for the disgrace to the human race they were. As we have swung to the other end of the political pendulum today, it is again, gratefully, this same issue that has proven to be the ultimate boundary that holds (Alabama, December 12, 2017, for example), and indeed the global movement in every quarter to end this abuse has increasingly been at the center of seeing children’s nurturing and protection as the core issue in human advancement and sustainability. The above of course are the worst examples, which most adults don’t do and would fight to stop. But a cohort of destructive impulses that have afflicted US and global culture and most adults in other ways–narcissism, consumerism, addiction of every kind, greed, nihilism and focus on whatever makes “me” feel good at the moment regardless of consequence—the larger consequence being the lack of basic needs and rights for so many—have been passed on at new levels of generational lows since 1968.
Conversely, the positive strand of 1968 was and is the activism ever since for social justice, the unselfish, sacrificing, caring for others, striving to create a better world through the efforts to end racism, sexism, homophobia, unjust war, environmental destruction and the class divide, all of which gets better, then worse, then better, then worse, which has been the haunting of humanity and the clarion call for change through history. In the US, young people and students were in the forefront of giving their lives in the civil rights movement and leading the anti-war movement. Around the world in 1968, students and others gave their lives in places ranging from Czechoslovakia to Mexico for basic human rights. The moment of 1968 was in many ways the moment in which the division and rupture could have been part of a great breakthrough in the US, which was by far the richest and most powerful nation on earth, that had an underlying social cohesiveness and prosperity that made that breakthrough out of the unfinished business of inequality more possible. Which by definition would have changed the world. Unless the leaders most willing and able to lead to this next step were all killed.
Progress through the momentum was still made for a while in various ways, still made until today. But not the same as what could have been. Much less what has been lost. And in some ways the uniquely dangerous place we are today in the political and social landscape. And what we face as a species and on this planet in so many ways now that has and will, at best, make the unnecessary pain and risk to life on earth so much worse before we get, hopefully still, to that newer world.
We have arrived at a point where, among other things, last Friday the unemployment rate in the US came in at the lowest since before the 2008 financial crisis–in fact it’s only been this low twice in the last 50 years, in 2000 and–in 1968. But we’re not talking about jobs now that provide at least a middle-class standard of living and security for the vast majority of people. In fact, as a study released by United Way showed the day before the jobs report, nearly half of US families can’t afford basics like rent and food. The global inequality of how many people or companies control how much wealth compared to the rest of the people of the world is unsurpassed in known history. And all the ills and perils that flow from this.
So back to Robert Kennedy’s campaign for president, and its end, in 1968, and the events leading up to it.
It is impossible to explain how Martin Luther King, Jr., could have given what many consider his most powerful speech at Riverside Church exactly one year to the day before he was killed.
And it is impossible to explain how Bobby Kennedy could have given what many consider his most powerful speech at the University of Cape Town exactly two years to the day before he died.
Except that bigger things are at play, however you choose to explain them.
Bobby Kennedy at Cape Town on June 6, 1966 was a revelation. He gave a speech to the world that is still a laser of truth straight to our hearts and minds today. More than ever.
First, to understand that Bobby Kennedy was in a singular league of political celebrity and esteem in the world at that point is critical to understanding what he offered.
First, yes, JFK appointing his brother Attorney General was as nepotism as nepotism can be–utterly brilliant nepotism. JFK needed Bobby and the world may not have survived without this duo, and certainly became a vastly better place, with the two working hand in hand.
Bobby was the virtual co-president with and heir apparent to his slain brother, President John F. Kennedy. JFK was, for good reason after early mistakes, by the time he was assassinated in 1963 (and especially after), the most popular and revered person on the planet. Everywhere on earth, from palaces to shacks, especially among the huge majority of the population that was poor and powerless, his picture was on the wall. His policies were at least as much to the credit of Bobby. As Attorney General, he coordinated threatening the segregationist south with federal troops for only the second time since the end of reconstruction in 1877 (he and JFK ended up doing so twice, in Mississippi in 1962 and Alabama in 1963, after President Eisenhower had first done so in Arkansas in 1957) to enforce the constitution in court-ordered integration of schools. Among other small matters, his secret meeting with the Soviet ambassador at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis saved the world from nuclear annihilation.
Bobby was the next great hope. At the Democratic Convention in 1964 where JFK would have been re-nominated by acclaim for a certain second term, it was Bobby standing in his place as the convention came unhinged and could not be stopped by the standing and cheering and crying that went on seemingly forever. Not even Bobby could stop them, so he could begin his speech. Participants observed that there was a chance, had Bobby chosen to make himself available for nomination, the convention would have stampeded to him (although politically and personally, Bobby never would have considered it at that point), even after LBJ had passed him by days earlier for the vice-president spot. Unsurprisingly, given that Kennedy never wanted JFK to have LBJ as vice-president. And it was in part his fear that his entry into the 1968 campaign would be seen as a personal issue that delayed his entry in 1968, as he and LBJ had no fondness for one another, exacerbated by RFK supporting the Great Society programs and civil rights legislation started by his brother, but opposing the war that was tearing the country apart. One of Bobby’s most impressive traits was to admit mistakes and change. He and his brother had supported the war, and they were wrong, he said. The tragedy of LBJ was that his domestic programs could have made him one of the great presidents, but for the massive escalation of the war–a but for of historic consequence.
But all this was a future unforeseen in 1964. An unelected LBJ president for only months needed to legitimize himself in the election. With the platform of carrying on the martyred JFK’s programs against a right-wing extremist, he was in good shape. It was Bobby, still Attorney General, who many would have preferred in The White House he feared more.
So, at the convention in 1964–the JFK turned LBJ convention by a bullet–the real presence awaited was Robert Kennedy, coming to honor his brother in a special presentation.
As it was, we have on film for all time, the most raw, sensitive, broken hearted young man appearing to gaze at the stars himself, with more than misty eyes, as he concludes about his brother:
“When I think of President Kennedy, I think of what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet. ‘When he shall die, take him and cut him out into little stars. And He shall make the face of Heaven so fine, that the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.”
He left the stage and reportedly headed outside the convention hall to cry, alone. The whole world cried with him.
Two years later he was president-in-waiting. It was assumed he would succeed LBJ in 1972. He would only have been 47 years old. When he was running JFK’s campaign, he was 34. Attorney General at 35. US senator at 38.
In Cape Town on June 6, 1966, he was 40 years old.
He was the only person in the world of his stature, indeed because his stature was quite literally unique, who the apartheid government could not refuse entry to give what they knew at its heart would be a speech against all they stood for.
Two years ago, on the 50th anniversary of the speech, Public Radio International described it in “RFK’s ‘Ripple of Hope’ speech still touches the world, 50 years later”:
“Today marks the 50th anniversary of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s ‘Ripple of Hope’ speech. Delivered at the University of Cape Town on June 6, 1966, during the height of apartheid; most believe RFK’s ‘Ripple of Hope’ address was the greatest speech of his life.
The fact that the trip to South Africa even took place could be considered a minor miracle. The senator’s invitation to speak came from South Africa’s Union of Students. The architect of apartheid — Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd — was the nation’s prime minister, and Nelson Mandela remained in prison on Robben Island. The South African authorities made it clear they would not offer Senator Kennedy any security, many State Department officials were convinced his trip was ill-conceived and doomed to fail.
In his speech, Robert Kennedy spoke for those who were not free to speak. His gave hope to anti-apartheid student activists who had felt alone in their quest for racial equality, and he showed them how their efforts were connected to other civil rights movements underway around the world.
A snippet of his speech gives an idea of its uplift: ‘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, 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 which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.’
Another segment: ‘We must recognize the full human equality of all of our people before God, before the law and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not because the laws of God command it, although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.’
Margaret Marshall, then an anti-apartheid student activist and later to become the chief justice of the top court in Massachusetts, was in the audience that day.
“It made such an impact on me,” Marshall recalls. “I know it made an impact on others and I have essentially carried that message for the rest of my life — if we each just do one small thing when we are faced with evil or oppression or discrimination or inequality. You don’t have to assume that you will be able to change the entire world. It was remarkable, it was breathtaking.”
The message Kennedy sent then remains relevant today.”
Here’s a longer segment from the speech:
“In a few hours, the plane that brought me to this country crossed over oceans and countries which have been a crucible of human history. In minutes we traced the migration of men over thousands of years; seconds, the briefest glimpse, and we passed battlefields on which millions of men once struggled and died. We could see no national boundaries, no vast gulfs or high walls dividing people from people; only nature and the works of man-homes and factories and farms-everywhere reflecting man’s common effort to enrich his life. Everywhere new technology and communications bring men and nations closer together, the concerns of one inevitably becoming the concerns of all. And our new closeness is stripping away the false masks, the illusion of difference which is at the root of injustice and hate and war. Only earthbound man still clings to the dark and poisoning superstition that his world is bounded by the nearest hill, his universe ended at river shore, his common humanity enclosed in the tight circle of those who share his town and views and the color of his skin. It is your job, the task of the young people of this world, to strip the last remnants of that ancient, cruel belief from the civilization of man.
Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the world I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their desires and their concerns and their hope for the future. There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve in the streets of India, a former Prime Minister is summarily executed in the Congo, intellectuals go to jail in Russia, and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world. These are differing evils; but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings throughout the world. And therefore, they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.
It is these qualities which make of youth today the only true international community. More than this I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. It would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress-not material welfare as an end in itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would be proud to have built.
Just to the north of here are lands of challenge and opportunity-rich in natural resources, land and minerals and people. Yet they are also lands confronted by the greatest odds-overwhelming ignorance, internal tensions and strife, and great obstacles of climate and geography. Many of these nations, as colonies, were oppressed and exploited. Yet they have not estranged themselves from the broad traditions of the West; they are hoping and gambling their progress and stability on the chance that we will meet our responsibilities to help them overcome their poverty. …
If we would lead outside our borders, if we would help those who need our assistance, if we would meet our responsibilities to mankind, we must first, all of us, demolish the borders which history has erected between men within our own nations-barriers of race and religion, social class and ignorance.
Our answer is the world’s hope; it is to rely on youth. The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger which comes with even the most peaceful progress.
This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. It is a revolutionary world we live in, and thus, as I have said in Latin America and Asia, in Europe and in the United States, it is young people who must take the lead. Thus you, and your young compatriots everywhere, have had thrust upon you a greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever lived.
“There is,” said an Italian philosopher, “nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” Yet this is the measure of the task of your generation, and the road is strewn with many dangers.
First, is the danger of futility: the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills-against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. Yet many of the world’s greatest movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant Reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal.
“Give me a place to stand,” said Archimedes, “and I will move the world.” These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Thousands of Peace Corps volunteers are making a difference in isolated villages and city slums in dozens of countries. Thousands of unknown men and women in Europe resisted the occupation of the Nazis and many died, but all added to the ultimate strength and freedom of their countries. 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, 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 which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Twenty two years later, as noted before, when one of the writers of this post was coordinating the Campaign To End Hunger in Seattle, another was in Cape Town meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu as the 22nd anniversary of RFK’s speech approached. Mandela was still in prison. But the ripples were about to sweep down the walls of oppression.
Kennedy was a person of his times and ahead of his times. He would soon be seen at Native American reservations talking about the plight of indigenous peoples who had been all but destroyed by the very “discovery” he noted as an example in his 1966 speech. The most anti-political act imaginable at the time. Changing and growing at a speed matching the speed the times did—and do—call for. The classic sexism in his language, the lack of reference to LGBT issues or any lack of inclusiveness at the moment, would have been gone in another instant.
By the time he announced he was running, in 1968, he embodied the winds of change. The writer here who worked on his campaign recalls arguments with fellow students who supported Eugene McCarthy, who had been first to run as the anti-war candidate. The response then and now was that someone whose universe appeared restricted to affluent whites and who was wryly poetic was not what the times called for. He couldn’t win. Bobby could have and would have. He was ruthless, the rap went. In being staff for a few months for Joe McCarthy in his twenties, pressured by his father, in a context of opposing Stalinist communism, then switching after being disgusted by McCarthy’s tactics, to being counsel for the Democratic committee writing the report that led to McCarthy’s destruction, yes. In being a political pro who got his brother elected president in the most high-stakes context there was and is, yes. In wiretapping Martin Luther King attempting to protect both his brother and King under pressure by J. Edgar Hoover, yes. In going after organized crime with a vengeance, yes. In protecting and then increasingly reading the riot-act to his brother for his at best sexually addictive behavior, yes. In protecting black students as part of taking down American apartheid in the south, yes. Good, in addition to being the most popular man on the planet in many ways, who was changing with transparency faster than could be adequately described, who was inspiring needed change everywhere, who was the epitome of the best aspects of a bleeding heart liberal increasingly, who like FDR, was a traitor to his class turned tribune of the underclass, he knew how to play hardball when needed to get things done.
Like FDR, he was pragmatic idealist, not an ideologue. Bobby wasn’t an orthodox liberal in some ways, and some of his ideas may well not have worked. Like FDR, he would have tried whatever did work–moving fast to meet the basic needs and rights of people and the nation and the world, creating real equality, in keeping with the authenticity of who he was.
Here is the post from World Campaign ten years ago, on the 40thanniversary of Kennedy’s speech at the University of San Francisco during the 1968 campaign shortly after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 19, 2008:
“Forty years ago today, on April 19, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, during his campaign for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, spoke at the University of San Francisco, two weeks after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. The speech was coordinated at USF by Keith Blume, co-founder of World Campaign. The speech was billed as a major address on poverty, minorities and economic opportunity. Kennedy was interrupted by a handful of anti-war demonstrators who wanted immediate unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam. Kennedy said he disagreed. He strongly supported ending the war, but in a way that met social needs at the root of the war, such a land reform, and that brought all parties to the table for negotiations. The vast majority of the overflow crowd at USF agreed with Kennedy, and when he asked if anyone wanted to hear the speech he came to give, the overwhelming response was yes. In his prepared remarks released just before the event, Kennedy said that violence in America in response to racial and economic injustice was not the answer. This would bring ‘death, not life’, Kennedy said. ‘So it has already proven across the face of America. It must and will be met with the full force of the law. But that is just the beginning, for grievance and despair cannot be banished or suppressed by force. Rather, our first task is to build a community of purpose. Now ask if there is work to be done; for the answer is that the inventory is infinite. We need new housing and new schools, new public facilities and public services…we must ensure that these projects provide jobs for all, especially the residents of the poverty areas in which they are to be undertaken.’ Kennedy concluded by saying that when all Americans regardless of identity or background could say, ‘I share in a great creative enterprise in the life of this nation, then America’s promise of equality will be truly fulfilled’.”
One of the best pieces written about Bobby recently was by Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic four weeks ago: “What If Robert F. Kennedy Had Become President?”
The most important thing about the article is that Gilbert wrote it. She’s a millennial woman, London-born, DC-based journalist, a highly intelligent and perceptive observer of culture and politics in her articles in The Atlantic (agree with her or not—we usually do), a feminist, of a generation far removed from 1968 and Bobby Kennedy.
Her article focuses on the new Netflix documentary series on Kennedy. Here’s some excerpts:
“The most surprising thing about Bobby Kennedy for President, a new four-part documentary that debuted Friday on Netflix, is how every frame of archival footage of Robert Kennedy seems to feature a hundred people trying to touch him. As he tours different neighborhoods in New York, a sea of hands reaches out to make contact. During one drive through a campaign stop, a newscast reports, ‘he was touched, trapped, and at one point torn from his car.’ …
It’s an odd, Beatlemania-esque phenomenon to be sparked by someone who in interviews is more awkward, stilted, and even nasal than you might imagine. But that strangeness is unpacked by the filmmaker Dawn Porter in Bobby Kennedy for President, which sells itself as a docuseries about Kennedy’s 1968 campaign but is really about his significance within politics. Kennedy, through Porter’s interviews and wealth of archival footage, comes across as both mesmerizing and clunky. He’s ferociously ambitious but deeply empathetic. He’s the runt of his dazzling family, but also someone predestined for greatness: In a voiceover from the very first scene a broadcaster states that “no American in this century has ever been so likely to be president as Robert Francis Kennedy.” The question you’re constantly mulling while watching is how different America might be if his supposed destiny had been allowed to play out.
Porter interviews former Kennedy aides and activists in his orbit, who recall his trips to rural communities assailed by poverty. Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, describes initially thinking that Kennedy was only making these visits to get some positive press coverage. But she was startled by his focus. “Robert Kennedy was not who I thought he would be,” Edelman says. “He was listening, and he was learning.”
What’s apparent throughout the film is how many of the problems Kennedy spoke up about during the 1960s continue to divide America today. In 1968, the year of Kennedy’s presidential run and assassination, the country seemed riven by violence. January saw the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and subsequent protests raging at home. At the end of that month, the journalist Pete Hamill wrote a letter to Kennedy imploring him to run for president, which Hamill reads from in the series. “I don’t think we can afford five summers of blood,” Hamill had written. “If you won, the country might be saved.” In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Porter includes archival footage of Kennedy breaking the news to a largely black crowd in Indiana, and quoting Aeschylus. What the country needs most now, he tells them, isn’t more division and hatred, but “love and wisdom and compassion toward one another.” …
The best moments in the film are the handful of scenes that offer some impression of Kennedy as a person rather than as a figurehead, or a scion. In one, he puts his young daughter on the phone with the deputy attorney general during a call about desegregation in Alabama. In another, he defends the reputation of his family dog, Freckles, whose name has been unexpectedly besmirched by one of Kennedy’s rivals. On his first day in the Senate in 1965, Kennedy spies his brother Ted and grins broadly, practically skipping over to say hello.
The most indelible minute of Bobby Kennedy for President, though, doesn’t feature Kennedy at all. Instead it’s when Lewis [U.S. Rep. John Lewis], the civil-rights icon who once served as a campaign aide for Kennedy, breaks down while describing the pain of losing his friend. “I think I cried all the way from … L.A. to Atlanta,” Lewis says, pausing to regain control. “I kept saying to myself, what is happening in America? To lose Martin Luther King, and two months later … it was too much.” If Kennedy remains at something of a distance in the film, his influence on others is impossible to ignore. The final line in the series is Kennedy quoting Tennyson. “Come my friends,” he intones. “‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
It’s noteworthy that an African American woman made this film. Dawn Porter was only two when Kennedy died. She became more and more connected to the importance of Kennedy in her community, and to history, as she got older. Half the people alive today were born after that time, she’s noted. Her film is an effort at bringing that time back to life for those who weren’t there. She succeeds marvelously in doing so. Just the graphics and music in the opening alone are a work of art that take you to the heart of the man and the times. You have to see the scenes with thousands of people grabbing at Kennedy. Everywhere he went, endless seas of people, white, black, brown, all reaching for him.
Two days ago, Maggie Astor wrote in The New York Times, “How Robert Kennedy’s Assassination Changed American Politics”:
“Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for president in the grand Senate Caucus Room on March 16, 1968, declaring that the United States, mired in war and riven by racism, ought to “stand for hope instead of despair.”
Eighty-one days later, he celebrated victory in California’s Democratic primary with an ebullient speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and walked off the stage into a pantry, where he was assassinated in front of news cameras and screaming supporters.
In a year that seemed determined to shake Americans’ confidence in the foundations of their society, Kennedy’s death at 1:44 a.m. Pacific time on June 6, 25 hours after he was shot, was one of the biggest inflection points. Sirhan Sirhan’s bullets not only demolished the hope for a savior candidate who would unite a party so fractured that its incumbent, President Lyndon B. Johnson, had decided not to seek re-election. Coming just two months after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they also fueled a general sense — not entirely unfamiliar today — that the nation had gone mad; that the normal rules and constants of politics could no longer be counted on.
Fifty years is ample time for romanticized narratives to develop, and so they have. Kennedy’s rougher edges have often been sanded, and the volatility of the 1968 campaign has been glossed over, creating an alternative history in which electoral victory was inevitable and his promises certain to be kept, if only he had left the ballroom by a different door.
Certainly, there is no denying that history would have been different if Kennedy had survived to win in November, and especially if he had managed to fulfill a campaign pledge to quickly wind down the Vietnam War.
“If he gets to be president, then there’s no Nixon,” said Peter Edelman, a professor at Georgetown University’s law school who worked as a legislative assistant to Kennedy. “I know this as much as anybody could know, because he was gone, but he had every intention of ending the war right away.”
“And of course then there’s no Watergate,” he added.
This is the rosiest version of what could have been: plausible, but unprovable. Perhaps the better question is not what would have happened if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated — inherently speculative — but what did happen because he was.
His death had a powerful and immediate effect on the American political psyche, intensified by its proximity to King’s. Why, many people asked, should they continue to pursue change peacefully, through the ballot box and nonviolent protest, when two of the biggest evangelists of that approach had been gunned down?
Over the course of five years, starting with the killing of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, assassins had “robbed the country of three of its most prominent and promising leaders, leaders who represented change,” said Ross Baker, a distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University. “I think the most immediate reaction was despair and a sense that perhaps the democratic experiment was in the process of failing.”
The despair was particularly acute among African-Americans, many of whom had put their faith in Kennedy after losing King.
“On the part of African-Americans, there was a sense that if any white politician was in their corner, it was Robert Kennedy,” Dr. Baker said.
[Read The New York Times’s original reports of Kennedy’s assassination.]
In fact, in the hours after King’s assassination, it was Kennedy who broke the news to a mostly black crowd in Indianapolis and, speaking emotionally and without notes, had urged them not to turn to violence in response.
In the days that followed, riots erupted in Washington, in Chicago, in Detroit and Baltimore — but not in Indianapolis.
Nearly half a century later, Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who marched with King and campaigned with Kennedy, sobbed in an interview for Dawn Porter’s documentary “Bobby Kennedy for President” as he recalled the loss that followed.
“I think I cried all the way from L.A. to Atlanta,” Mr. Lewis said. “I kept saying to myself, ‘What is happening in America?’ To lose Martin Luther King Jr. and two months later Bobby.” He apologized, burying his face in his hand. “It was too much.”
Spring turned to summer, and a seething nation boiled over. In July, the police and black snipers engaged in a firefight in Cleveland. In August, fearing unrest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the government deployed National Guard troops with license to “shoot to kill.”
As the party nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, an emblem of the status quo, for president, chaos reigned outside the convention center. In the streets of Chicago, the police and National Guard battled protesters with tear gas and clubs.
Thurston Clarke, author of “The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America,” said a direct line could be drawn between Kennedy’s assassination and the social breakdown of August 1968. “What happened at the Democratic convention, which was terribly wounding for years to come — I can’t believe there would have been that kind of protest and that kind of violence if Kennedy had been the presumptive or actual nominee,” he said.
As one segment of a disillusioned populace turned to violence, another retreated from politics altogether.
Kennedy’s death “really did persuade many people to seek private solutions, to retreat, to achieve a kind of personal redemption, and that had a very, very long-lasting effect on American life,” Dr. Baker said, pointing to the Back to the Land movement and cult phenomena like Jonestown. “People just turned away from the public square and said that any kind of national reconciliation and progress was hopeless through the political process.”
Voter turnout in 1968 was only slightly lower than in previous elections: 60.7 percent of the voting-age population that year, compared with 61.4 percent in 1964 and 62.8 percent in 1960, according to the Census Bureau. But moving forward, it fell off a cliff, into the mid- and low 50s, and didn’t rebound for decades.
When Mr. Clarke was promoting his book in 2008, he said, he spoke with many readers who told him that Kennedy’s death “still haunted them.”
“I heard again and again that they felt the loss of Bobby Kennedy more keenly even than the loss of John F. Kennedy,” Mr. Clarke said. “That they felt the country would have been even more different had Robert Kennedy been president than if John F. Kennedy had lived.”
This morning, on one of the few remaining iconic television programs in America, Sunday Morning on CBS, the cover story was “Remembering 1968: Robert F. Kennedy and a generation’s loss”:
“The events of that one-of-a-kind year 1968 cast a shadow to this day, not least the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy 50 years ago this week. Our Cover Story is reported by Jim Axelrod:
When Robert F. Kennedy stepped from the stage at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, his walk through the kitchen moments later would become the violent bookend to one of the most turbulent stretches in American history.
Just three months earlier, Kennedy had announced he would take on the sitting president from his own party. “I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulty of challenging an incumbent president, but these are not ordinary times,” he said.
A short while later, with anti-Viet Nam War sentiment spiking, President Lyndon Johnson pulled out of the race. And just four days after that, Kennedy announced to a shocked crowd in Indianapolis that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed in Memphis.
Finally, a few minutes after midnight of June 5, 1968, America faced the murder of yet another Kennedy.
Journalist Pete Hamill, who helped subdue Robert Kennedy’s assassin, says the wound America suffered that night has yet to heal.
“It’s a story of what might have been,” he said. “Not about what happened, but what we lost when it happened.”
“What did we lose?” asked Axelrod.
“Hope.”
“I want the Democratic Party and the United States of America to stand for hope instead of despair.”
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the oldest of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 children, says her father gave people hope and lifted them up. She says people found that hope in the questions her father was asking: “We have this great wealth, $800 billion a year. We have all of this military power. And yet, how do we use it? What do we do with it?”
“‘How do we make moral choices? How do we help our fellow human being?'” Townsend said. “That is the most meaningful thing you can do.”
And it was their faith in the answers he offered that helped him build a coalition that’s implausible, if not impossible, to imagine today. “He could speak to white working class men and women because they trusted him that he would fight for them, and he also fought for African-Americans,” said Townsend. “If you talked to those who met him, you never sensed that he felt he was better than you. He was with you.”
The story of Bobby Kennedy, as his loyalists tell it, is a tale of transformation, from hard-charging law-and-order young attorney hunting Communists on Joe McCarthy’s staff in the early 1950s, to social justice warrior by the late sixties.
“He was not just a speaker; he would listen to what people were saying, after the great wound of his brother’s assassination,” said Hamill. “And he understood, I think, that part of him, although he came from the Irish, part of him was Jewish, part of him is Latino.
“For somebody that’s famous as he was, he was living his life, not performing it.”
A young senator from New York, he used his bold-faced name, fame and political capital to focus on the forgotten … as when, in April 1967, he visited Mississippi to see the rural side of poverty.
When asked how his trip to the Delta came about, Marian Wright Edelman laughed, “By a miracle.” Edelman, a young lawyer working with the poor in Mississippi, was right there with Kennedy, and knew his power with the people he was meeting.
“In most shacks, you would see Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy’s pictures,” she said.
But Edelman says she was not prepared to like him, because – as attorney general – Kennedy had authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963.
Still, there Kennedy was, in Mississippi, putting poverty on the map.
“He was just shocked” by what he saw, said Peter Edelman, a Kennedy aide, who would meet Marian on that trip, and later marry her. “You see children with swelling bellies, with running sores, and he said to me, ‘I’ve been in third- and fourth-world countries and I haven’t seen anything as terrible as this.'”
Marian said, “I watched him interact with children. And the thing that I grew to like most about him and to see that he was really absorbing it, was his touch. He would rub a child’s cheek, and that meant a lot me.”
[Full disclosure: As noted before, Lisa Blume, co-founder of World Campaign, co-principal of Planet Earth Foundation and executive producer of nationwide public service campaigns for the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) Program as part of The Campaign To End Hunger, consulted with Marian Wright Edelman and the Children’s Defense Fund years ago on issues of child welfare and rights. Peter Edelman, became president of the National Center for Youth Law, which joined the principals as an amicus curiae in a personal case on behalf of the best interest of sexually abused children heard by the Washington Supreme Court and won unanimously with the precedent-makng decision written by the chief justice.]
A little more than a year after that trip, Bobby Kennedy was gone.
Pete Hamill is still haunted. So taken by RFK’s potential, he had written him, begging him to get into the race, thinking Bobby Kennedy uniquely positioned to address the divisions in America:
“Dear Bob, I had wanted to write you a long letter… The fight that you might make would be the fight of honor,” he wrote. “If you won, the country might be saved.”
Kennedy would campaign with that letter in his jacket pocket.
Reading that letter now, Hamill says, “I regret the part I had in making, if I did, in making him make the choice [to run]. Because of a young dope with a pistol.”
“You do think about that part of it?” asked Axelrod.
“I do.”
“Did he ever express his own fear that he, too, might be assassinated?”
“Never. Never.”
“You think it was in there, he just didn’t talk about it?”
“I think it was in there,” Hamill replied. “Because when I saw him that night, there was a kind of look on his face that was, I knew this was gonna happen.”
Decades later, “how” Bobby Kennedy died is still raising questions. Last week, two of his children called for a new investigation into whether there was a second gunman.
Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 am on June 6, 1968. He was 42 years old. But what’s being marked this week is the meaning of his life.
Fifty years ago Robert Kennedy was eulogized by his brother, Ted, who quoted a theme of RFK’s campaign: “Some men see things as they are and say, Why? I dream things that never were and say, Why not?”
A train carried his body from New York City to the nation’s capital. Crowds lined the train tracks, and waved, and cried.
“That train ride was supposed to be three hours, and instead it turned almost seven hours,” said Townsend. “Two million people came out. African Americans in Baltimore singing the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ Nobody organized this; it was spontaneous.
“What did he have that touched so many people? His love, his courage, and his ability to relate.”
There are plenty of people in this country who find the story of the Kennedys an exercise in grand-scale mythmaking.
But this Sunday morning, there are many others marking, and mourning, the night half a century ago when what may have been the brightest spark of political hope in their lifetimes was extinguished.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said. “It’s hard to know exactly what heals. There’s pain that lasts for 50 years. It’s enormous sadness, enormous sense of loss. I’m not a believer that time heals all wounds, at all; I think the wounds stay for a long time.”
The writer here who had worked for Bobby Kennedy’s campaign struggled in a coma-like state to get to his job as a construction worker for the summer in the days following the assassination. The job was a characteristic favor exchanged by next door neighbors of the upper-class of the time, an upper-class very different, however, than the aristocracy that bestrides Seattle and the globe today. That’s an important follow-up to come, as promised.
Sitting astride a steel beam on the new building in Seattle that at the time was the tallest west of the Mississippi, in a scene reminiscent of the depression era photos of workers on such buildings in New York, the extraordinary view, available only during the time of this construction, seemed spiritually empty, a landscape of death.
The veteran workers—the classic image of the working class—who sat next to him, knew he had worked on Kennedy’s campaign. They would vote for Nixon, or Wallace, or Humphrey.
But they all said, to a man—“I would have voted for Bobby.”
The landscape grew brighter and more empty, simultaneously.
As Bobby’s daughter, Kathleen, said, some wounds may never heal.
But the lessons are the one thing that the universe requires.
To quote once again, Bobby Kennedy on the night Martin Luther King, Jr, was killed:
“My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus, and he once wrote:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.”
Words for each and every one of us.
Avoiding necessary pain causes unnecessary pain. It can only be avoided so long. The only question is, what price are we willing to pay, and to make others pay?
Remembering Bobby Kennedy’s face when he touched a suffering child should answer that.