Robert Francis Kennedy November 20, 1925 – June 6, 1968

 

 

It was 40 years ago today. Robert F. Kennedy, “Bobby” to friend and foe alike, scored a major victory when he won the California primary.  While far from being guaranteed the nomination, it was a major boost to his candidacy and his staff and supporters were buoyant as he stepped into the ballroom  at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California to to claim victory. The year was 1968, a tumultuous year in the history of the United States. A country divided by race, class, and generation gap. An unpopular war raging in Vietnam, civil rights still being battled in the streets, and millions of Americans feeling like they had no voice. While great victories were being achieved in the space race, here on Earth things could not be more unsettling. The summer of love it was not. On January 31st, Viet Cong opened the Tet Offensive by attacking major cities of South Vietnam, a move that triggered President Lyndon B. Johnson’s call for peace negotiations. March 31st, L.B.J. surprised the nation by choosing not to run for reelection. On April 4th, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, leading to riots in Washington, D.C. and other cities. At Mexico City’s Summer Olympic Games, African American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos won gold and bronze medals, then bowed their heads and raised clenched fists during the playing of the U.S. national anthem in protest of U.S. racism. In August, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was marred by clashes between Vietnam War protesters and Mayor Daley’s police force. A Viet Cong officer is executed by Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese National Police Chief. The event is photographed by Eddie Adams. The photo makes headlines around the world, eventually winning the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, and sways U.S. public opinion against the war. “May of 68” is a symbol of the resistance of that generation. Agitations and strikes in Paris lead many youth to believe that a revolution is starting. Student and worker strikes, sometimes referred to as the French May, nearly bring down the Frenchgovernment. The world was restless, the country was ill and the war was devastating the lives of those who fought in it and those who fought against it. In many ways, 1968 was the Second American Civil War. Yet, in the midst of all that despair, there was a light, a candle in the darkness, a beacon of hope that the disaffected, the disenfranchised and the fed up looked to for leadership and healing. They called him “Bobby” too.  He was known as the ruthless Attorney General during his brother’s presidential administration. He was a tireless advocate for the poor. During his tenure as Attorney General he undertook the most energetic and persistent desegregation of the administration that Capitol Hill had ever experienced. He demanded that every area of government begin recruiting realistic levels of black and other ethnic workers, going so far as to criticize Vice President Johnston for his failure to desegregate his own office staff.

After the assassination of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy undertook a 1966 tour of South Africa in which he championed the cause of the anti-Apartheid movement. The tour was greeted with international praise at a time when few politicians dared to entangle themselves in the politics of South Africa. Kennedy spoke out against the oppression of the native population and was welcomed by the black population as though a visiting head of state.

Nine months after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Robert Kennedy left the Cabinet to run for a seat in the United States Senate, representing New York. It is the seat that is currently held by Hillary Rodham Clinton

President Johnson and Robert Kennedy were often at severe odds with each other, both politically and personally, yet Johnson gave considerable support to RFK’s campaign. Kennedy emerged victorious in the November election, helped in part by Johnson’s huge victory margin in New York.

During his years as a senator, Kennedy also helped to start a successful redevelopment project in poverty-stricken Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn in New York City, visited the Mississippi Delta as a member of the Senate committee reviewing the effectiveness of ‘War on Poverty’ programs and, reversing his prior stance, called for a halt in further escalation of the Vietnam War.Seeing no end to war in sight, he announced his candidacy for President of the United States Kennedy declared his candidacy on March 16, 1968, stating, “I do not run for the Presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I’m obliged to do all I can.”

Kennedy stood on a ticket of racial and economic justice, non-aggression in foreign policy, decentralization of power and social improvement. A crucial element to his campaign was an engagement with the young, whom he identified as being the future of a reinvigorated American society based on partnership and equality. On the night of April 4, Kennedy was in Indianapolis, Indiana for a campaign rally when he learned of the assassination of Martin Luther King. He gave an impromptu and impassioned speech calling for reconciliation among the races in this country. This video is worth watching.

 

Bobby Kennedy addressed his supporters in the early morning hours of June 5, 1968 in a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He left the ballroom through a service area to greet supporters working in the hotel’s kitchen. In a crowded kitchen passageway, Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian, opened fire with a .22 caliber revolver and shot Kennedy in the head at close range. Following the shooting, Kennedy was rushed to The Good Samaritan Hospital where he died the next day. In his remarks at his funeral at New York’s Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Senator Edward Kennedy said this about his brother: 

“My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life. He should be remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times in many parts of this nation to those he touched and who sought to touch him: “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say, why not.”

 

Today we are faced with a war that is not winning the hearts and minds of the world. Many of the things Bobby Kennedy wished for this nation and this world have yet to come to pass. But the cause endures, the work continues, the passion remains, and the dreams will never die. I was three years old when Bobby was assassinated. Yet as I grew and studied, I saw a man that I wanted to be like. “Him, that’s my guy, if I want to be like anyone, that’s the one”. I had and still have a passion for politics. But more importantly, a passion to seek justice for the disenfranchised and the disabled, to give voice to the voiceless, to end the divisions of race and creed and gender, within my own heart and without. As an American, I wish to reconcile with the rest of the world, to show them that we are a good nation filled with good people who desire peace. I am still a possibility junkie, to borrow a phrase from a musician friend of mine. I have not given up hope that the dreams we share as a nation, as a globe, can come to pass in our time. It will take courage and sacrifice and honesty, both personally and collectively. Someday I may decide to run for office. I am a flawed person. I have done things in the past that I regret. I have lied. I have betrayed people I loved. I have been greedy and grandiose. I  have cared more for my own selfish interests rather than that of my neighbor. I am human. These things give me pause as I consider what my next move will be. I accept them and try to do my best to avoid behaving like this now.  But I try every day to bring the spirit of a quote of one on Bobby’s favorite poets Aeschylus, who said it is the goal of all  “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” Some day, I may, with humility and honesty, stand for office and continue Bobby’s work. I believe Barack Obama is now carrying that torch. As we remember Bobby Kennedy and his call to our nation to heal, let us go forth into the day and start the process one person at a time. A person at work, a colleague, a chance to be of service. Let us become a community of Americans again. We are at a most exciting time in the history of our country, and the choices we make about the war, about the environment, about better education for our children, about equality based on gender, race, and sexual orientation, about affordable and accesible healthcare, about healing the wounds that divide us be they in our personal lives, our national stage or our global standing. Years from now, long after the noise has died down, let them say of our generation – when their action was needed, they answered the call, and this was their finest hour.  The best is yet to come Let’s never forget what Bobby stood for, and how relevant his words and actions are now, 40 years after his death.