{"id":2745,"date":"2018-03-16T02:42:19","date_gmt":"2018-03-16T09:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=2745"},"modified":"2018-03-16T02:42:19","modified_gmt":"2018-03-16T09:42:19","slug":"the-making-of-a-tough-minded-liberal-fifty-years-ago-this-march-the-new-republic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=2745","title":{"rendered":"“The Making of a Tough-Minded Liberal–‘Fifty years ago this March'”, The New Republic"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Richard D. Kahlenberg, November 1, 2017<\/p>\n

Fifty years ago this March, Robert F. Kennedy commenced a campaign for president that political junkies and romantics still obsess over. In just 82 days between March 16, 1968 and June 5, 1968, the country witnessed a stunning series of events. The younger brother of slain president John F. Kennedy challenged his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, for the Democratic presidential nomination. Days later, LBJ withdrew from the contest. In early April came the brutal assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., followed by urban rioting in 125 American cities. Ultimately, in June, a second Kennedy brother would be assassinated.<\/p>\n

In between, Kennedy raised the possibility of an inclusive populist political coalition of working class whites and working class blacks, the likes of which have not been fully replicated since. These groups came together, at a time when they were at each other\u2019s throats, to support an idealistic yet tough candidate. After Robert Kennedy was assassinated, his voters lined the railroad tracks of the train that bore his body from New York to Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n

Those train tracks are the image with which Chris Matthews, the loquacious host of MSNBC\u2019s Hardball<\/i>, begins and ends his book, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit<\/a><\/i>. Matthews describes the people: \u201cyoung, old, black, white, men and women, few well-off, all caught up in their shared devastation.\u201d These warring groups were, he writes, \u201cmassed along the tracks on that hot early summer day, holding American flags and saluting, waiting to see him pass.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 1968 campaign was the culmination of a remarkable 42-year life that Matthews chronicles with considerable insight from beginning to end. The challenge for the author is that the basic contours of Robert Kennedy\u2019s story are well known: his comfortable \u00a0upbringing as the seventh child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy; his role in helping his older brother Jack get elected to Congress, then the Senate, then the presidency; his leadership as Attorney General fighting for civil rights and advising his brother in the Cuban Missile Crisis; RFK\u2019s election as a U.S. Senator from New York in 1964; and the final campaign for the presidency four years later. Matthews\u2019s special contribution is to focus in on two powerful influences on RFK\u2014his father and the Catholic Church\u2014both of which arguably contributed to Kennedy\u2019s unique blend of compassion and toughness.<\/p>\n

The family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, is the clear villain in the book. A notorious anti-Semite who, as the U.S. Ambassador in London, sought to appease Adolph Hitler, the imperious father is shown to be constantly meddling in his children\u2019s lives\u2014from distracting them during puts on the golf course to attempting to dictate when they should run for public office. Joseph Kennedy is a particularly cold father to his small son Bobby, the altar boy. \u201cIn the eyes of his demanding dad, he simply lacked the qualities the father believed to be of any value,\u201d Matthews writes. \u201cFrom childhood on, Bobby showed a large heart and generous spirit, both traits believed by Joe Kennedy to count for nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Young Bobby Kennedy craved his father\u2019s approval, once racing \u201cso hard to get to dinner on time, in desperate fear of the senior Kennedy\u2019s wrath, that he smashed his head into a glass wall he thought might prove a shortcut.\u201d At just five-foot-ten and 165 pounds, RFK tried out for and made Harvard\u2019s football team, something neither of his brothers had done. \u201cThe boy his father had called a \u2018runt\u2019 was showing him who he had become,\u201d Matthews writes.<\/p>\n

Years later, RFK, by then a U.S. Senator, asked the child psychiatrist Robert Coles to lunch to talk about the effects of child poverty. Matthews says, \u201cColes found that his host\u2019s questions about child development\u2014about fathers and sons, about kids who don\u2019t easily fit in, about trying always to prove oneself\u2014seemed, really, to be about himself.\u201d Coles told Matthews that given his upbringing, RFK \u201cknew vulnerability alongside privilege and power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bobby Kennedy\u2019s second major influence\u2014during his childhood and in later years\u2014was the Roman Catholic Church. Bobby was the most devout of the Kennedy sons, which earned him the special approval of his mother. He attended St. Paul\u2019s boarding school <\/b>for just two months, before leaving in part because both he and his mother \u00a0didn\u2019t like the school\u2019s exclusive reliance on the Protestant King James Bible. Years later, Jackie Kennedy would quip, \u201cI think it\u2019s so unfair of people to be against Jack because he\u2019s a Catholic. He\u2019s such a poor Catholic. Now, if it were Bobby, I could understand it.\u201d When dating, Bobby was attracted to another devout Catholic, Ethel Skakel, who was considering becoming a nun. \u201cHow can I fight God?\u201d he asked a friend.<\/p>\n

Part of being Catholic in those days was being an outsider. Although raised amidst great wealth, Bobby was taught about the mistreatment of Irish immigrants who had faced employment signs reading \u201cNo Irish Need Apply.\u201d At Harvard, he resigned from the Spee Club when it blackballed a fellow Irish Catholic. When Kennedy did a stint with the U.S. Navy as a seaman, he wrote a friend that his shipmates had \u201ca lot of something that a lot of those guys at Harvard lacked.\u201d He saw the New York Times <\/i>as an \u201canti-Catholic\u201d newspaper.<\/p>\n

Kennedy\u2019s Catholicism also fueled intense anti-Communism. Senator Joe McCarthy (for whom Kennedy would work as lawyer) drew an \u201call-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity.\u201d Catholics were particularly irate about the way in which Eastern Europe had been lost to Communists. In a personal note, Matthews says, \u201cI grew up hearing that call to American Catholics to rally against Communism,\u201d and recalls his Irish Catholic mother intensely watching the Army\u2013McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t rooting for the army,\u201d he quips.<\/p>\n

These two influences\u2014the domineering father and the Catholic Church\u2014helped shape Kennedy\u2019s tough liberalism. On the one hand, the father\u2019s values seemed to have instilled in the son an impatience with softness and elitism. As manager of his brother\u2019s political campaigns, and as a foe of corrupt union leaders like Jimmy Hoffa, RFK developed a reputation for \u201cruthlessness.\u201d When he worked on Adlai Stevenson\u2019s 1956 presidential campaign, Bobby Kennedy perceived that Stevenson couldn\u2019t seem to make hard decisions and noticed that he \u201ctalked over people\u2019s heads\u201d at campaign stops. Kennedy developed a \u201ccontempt for liberals,\u201d Matthews writes, and actually ended up voting for Eisenhower.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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At the same time, RFK\u2019s deep identification as a Catholic outsider in Protestant America\u2014and as a sometimes mistreated son\u2014also helped him develop a strong sense of compassion, especially as the civil rights movement began to build. During his brother\u2019s 1960 presidential campaign, RFK called a Georgia judge to help gain Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s release from jail. As Attorney General, Kennedy raised money from union leaders to bail civil rights activists out of a Birmingham jail. He connected black struggle with the struggle of Irish-Americans, suggesting that if America could elect an Irish Catholic president, it would elect a black president within 40 years.<\/p>\n

It is sometimes said that there were two Bobby Kennedys divided by time: the ruthless Bobby prior to John F. Kennedy\u2019s assassination in 1963, and the newly compassionate Bobby who suffered the tremendous pain of losing \u201cthe brother he had idolized, to whom he had given so much and with whom he had worked so hard.\u201d Bobby began reading poetry and became a more vocal tribune of the underprivileged in the years after Dallas. He expressed outrage at hunger in the Mississippi Delta, mistreatment of Native Americans on reservations, and unfair conditions faced by migrant workers in California. In February 1966, the hardline anti-Communist came out against the Vietnam War.<\/p>\n

As he \u201cbecame convinced that poverty was his brother\u2019s last unfinished agenda,\u201d Matthews tells, this \u201cnew\u201d Bobby drew upon an old reservoir of Catholic teachings, illuminated by Dorothy Day and Michael Harrington. This is a departure from the commonly taken view that \u201cthe younger brother\u2019s true soul showed itself only after Jack.\u201d Matthews sees instead \u201cearly evidence\u201d of that \u201ccompassion which was later to reveal itself so vividly.\u201d Conversely, the toughness was also there in the later years\u2014as, for example, when RFK continually reminded voters during the rioting of 1968 that he had been \u201cthe chief law enforcement officer of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fifty years after Robert Kennedy\u2019s death, African Americans remain staunch Democrats, while working class whites have come to support, in the most recent election, a reactionary and racist populist. In 1968, polls found that Robert Kennedy drew support from many former George Wallace voters; in 2016, the reverse transpired, as enough former Barack Obama voters swung the election by supporting Donald Trump. \u201cIt\u2019s now the accepted wisdom,\u201d Matthews notes \u201cthat the interests of the discarded factory worker and the ignored inner-city youth cannot be met together, so why try?\u201d<\/p>\n

The biography details how RFK built this coalition not by choice, but necessity. By the time he joined the presidential race, anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy had already locked up many of the upper-middle class white liberals and students who might have supported Kennedy. This left RFK in a tricky position: \u201cHe was looking to maximize his popularity among minorities, exciting them enough to turn out at the polls in large numbers. Yet it would be a balancing act. He\u2019d need to accomplish that feat while at the same time not scaring off the white working class voters.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matthews does not discuss it, but there is some scholarly debate over exactly how successful RFK was in getting the white working class vote. The first-hand observers who wrote about the campaign\u2014Jack Newfield, David Halberstam, Jules Witcover, Roland Evans and Robert Novak\u2014were all impressed by the coalition, but respected historian Ronald Steel has questioned Kennedy\u2019s appeal. My reading of the evidence from precinct returns and polls\u2014which I will outline in a forthcoming Century Foundation report\u2014suggests the biracial appeal was strong.<\/p>\n