Bobby, we hardly knew ye, either

June 7, 2008

Guest Post by Morbo

I’ve seen a lot of old television footage of Robert F. Kennedy over the past few days. He was assassinated 40 years ago. RFK was shot on June 5, 1968, and died the next day.

I was a kid when this happened. Since I barely remember Bobby, I decided a few months ago to read a biography of him. Unfortunately, I forgot a cardinal rule about the Kennedys: Some people have an irrational hatred of them. The first bio I picked up (at a used book store) turned out to be a hatchet job. I was 50 pages into it and already feeling uncomfortable when the author quoted a source who compared Bobby to Caligula. I threw the book down in disgust.

A little research led me to the book I should have picked up all along: “Robert Kennedy: His Life” by Evan Thomas.

Neither hagiography nor a hit job, Thomas’ book is a fair and balanced look at a gifted, yet flawed man. RFK emerges as a complex, intriguing figure. Above all, Thomas paints a portrait of a man of incredible political gifts with an amazing ability to inspire people. On the campaign trail, Bobby was frequently mobbed by crowds who would pull at his clothes, desperate to get close to him. (A woman once made off with one of his shoes.)

Yet he could be tentative. Bobby did not hesitate to dream big, but sometimes seemed afraid to translate that into public policy. His anger over social injustice was real, but it sometimes seemed as if he lacked focus.

The book is full of interesting details. One of my favorite stories concerned a speech Kennedy gave before a group of medical students. He was outlining an ambitious plan for social programs when a smug attendee challenged him by asking, “Who’s going to pay for all of this?”

Bobby looked the man right in the eye and said, “You are.” Can you imagine a politician with the guts to say that today?

RFK should not be deified. I was surprised to read, for example, that he was homophobic. But I also think that, given the Kennedys’ passion for social justice, Bobby would have kept an open mind, learned and overcome this prejudice, had he lived. Perhaps his brother Ted, a great champion of gay rights, would have led Bobby to a better place.

I finished the book with a lump in my throat. I felt sadness for the loss of Bobby and regret for what might have been.

My mom took me to see him at a rally in Rochester when he ran for senate (I was 11.) I got the merest glimpse of him across a vast crowd and it looked like people were either trying to hold him up or pull him down. Clearly, though, he was theirs. An amazing sight.

  • Bobby Kennedy was the last presidential candidate about whom I felt real optimism and excitement. Until this year.

    Morbo, please choose another expression to replace “fair and balanced.” For me, that phrase evokes only cynicism.

  • As an idealistic 18 year old Eugene McCarthy supporter, I resented Kennedy for inserting himself into the campaign after McCarthy bravely proved there was enough anti-war sentiment to run against Johnson and thus stealing McCarthy thunder and riding on his brave coattails.

    McCarthy, however, never would have been able to get nominated let alone elected, but Kennedy would have.

    Kennedy had a charisma and magnificence that no one at that time possessed. He had the ability to inspire and electrify people from all backgrounds much like Obama today.

    It was a sad and tragic day indeed when he was assassinated. Those times were certainly dynamic and exciting only to have much of it’s promise and potential stolen from humanity by the same kind of powers that be that are still pulling the strings and manipulating people and events to their advantage.

    “The only thing new is the history I don’t know” – Harry Truman

  • I was surprised to read, for example, that he was homophobic.

    That was a different era. Instead of Will and Grace gays, there were priests, Rock Hudsons and Liberacis. If I looked like RFK, I would have been homophobic, too.

  • RFK should not be deified.

    Good rule of thumb. Any time the legend becomes larger than life, we do the individual, society and ourselves a great injustice. The founders, so often held up as some paragons of wisdom,virtue and strength were often conflicted, often wrong and sometimes took the easy way out. So too, our modern “heroes,” be they Reagan, Clinton, JFK, RFK, Obama, McCain, Nixon, North (yeah, some pukey names in there, but nonetheless heroes to some).

    I’d love to see a shift away from our hero fascination, where we’d take off the blinders and see complex, imperfect individuals not unlike ourselves, with strengths and weaknesses. I won’t hold my breath, but I am getting tired of women stealing my shoes.

  • Actually, when it comes to homophobia, a good Catholic like RFK wasn’t that far out of the mainsream, and I can think of any number of “progressives,” myself included, who in 1968 didn’t think squat of bad attitudes toward gays – I am certain that would have been an overhwelming 80%+ of “progressive” people.. I remember disliking my discovery that “those people” seemed a bit too common in the West Hollywood neighborhood I lived in.

    Let’s recall that “Stonewall”hadn’t happened and wouldn’t for another year, and that it was years after that evernt before a majority of gays managed to find a way to releate to that event. My oldest friend in the world, who finally “came out” at age 58, has told me how much he hated himself back then. Anotehr friend who was a radical socialist back then was terrified to let people know he was gay, and when I ran into him in 1969 on Castro Street in San Francisco (back when that neighborhood was just defining itself) he was adamant hewas just there to visit a cousin.

    Not said to excuse, but people too young to know what they’re talking about need to have an understanding of history. It shows us how far we’ve come when you do understand it.

  • I was 17 and was totally in the bag for Bobby. No “Clean for Gene” for me.

    I was devastated when he was shot.

    I get really nervous when I hear Obama being compared to either JFK or RFK or MLK. In fact, I wish his acceptance speech in August was NOT on the 45th anniversary of MLK’s Dream speech.

  • In the early 60’s Bobby Kennedy came to Seneca falls N.Y. to campaign for the presidency. He came because as some of you may know it is considered to be the birth place of the Woman’s Rights movement. My brother shook his hand after he tried to approach him and was shoved-aside by a security agent and Kennedy intervened and called my brother over (who was 13 at that time) and shook his hand and mussed-up his Beatles haircut. I saw this and was amazed at his charisma. Obama has the same type of people power. Thank God he’s running.

  • As others have noted, I think that if RFK were operating in today’s political environment, he’d come in for a great deal of criticism from… well, people like me. For his work with McCarthy in the ’50s, the bare-knuckle politics he practiced on his brother’s behalf, his initial ambivalence about the civil rights movement while serving as attorney general, his initial enthusiasm for Vietnam, maybe above all for equivocating through 1967 and early ’68 about the moral imperative of running against Johnson and the war and for finally jumping in, at the most craven/opportunistic moment imaginable, in March 1968.

    Yet he’s a hero of mine and has been ever since I learned about him as a teenager. I can intellectualize this by pointing to his obvious capacity for growth and improvement and the way his appeal resonated amongst otherwise diametrically opposed groups–“hard-working whites” and African-Americans and Hispanics–and for the political courage he ultimately showed. But I wonder what this says about our politics then and now as well as my own tendency to take a moralistic view (a reason I so strongly preferred Obama to the Clintons) that, by its nature, can’t be entirely informed.

  • ej pretty much tells my story, so i’ll simply add that i’m among those who think that rfk would have wrested the nomination from humphrey in ’68, with who knows what impact on the future of american politics.

    and i also want to praise dajafi for candor: let’s hope some of your peers learn the same lesson, dajafi.

  • I was in 5th grade in 1968. My Mom was for McCarthy and sorely resented RFK jumping in and splitting the antiwar vote. My Dad was for RFK all the way. I kind of liked Humphrey just to be different, but I also thought he was a good man.

    It’s hard to express to anyone who was not alive at the time what a devastating loss it was.

    I remember the broadcast of the funeral. I thought it showed some bias by the media that MLK’s funeral was not covered the same way; I remember thinking at the time, why didn’t they consider it just as important.

  • Does anyone think that there’s something off about CNN deciding to do a special comparing Bobby’s primary to the current one? Always mentioning in the promos that of course Bobby was assassinated…. I don’t know — were there really a lot of similarities to justify some kind of comparison? You’ve just said that he did show some of the same kind of ability to inspire with his words, but was it a close two-way race when he was killed? Or is this just CNN’s way of trying to encourage some nutjob to assassinate Obama?

  • A few years ago, I was listening to a story about RFK on All Things Considered. They found a guy who had met Kennedy in West Virginia. He was campaigning up the mountains and hollows and that was where the two met, in a tumbledown shack. The guy said that a few days after the campaign visit, a roofer showed up and put a new roof on every house in the area. He said Kennedy paid for it.

    A crass politician would have made sure the press heard about this, but the press didn’t learn until 30 years later. He did it because it was a good thing to do, not because he saw an angle to be exploited.

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