An RFK for Today?

In early June 1968, I was working in Boston as a substitute schoolteacher in the city’s public school system and living in an apartment across the Charles River in Cambridge. I would walk down to the Central Square subway station to catch a train to work. Sometimes I would go into the greasy spoon Hayes-Bickford cafeteria next to the station for a cup of coffee or a full breakfast of bacon and eggs. On the morning of June 6, as I approached the restaurant, I saw through the plateglass window an elderly lady, unmistakably Irish, with a newspaper spread out in front of her, weeping silently, with tears running down her face.

I knew immediately what must have happened, and why she was crying. Two days before was the finale of the California primary in that year’s race for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, pitting Bobby Kennedy against Eugene McCarthy, and the news was trickling out that, after declaring victory, Bobby—like his brother Jack, like the civil rights leaders Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X—had been assassinated. In Bobby’s case, it had nothing to do with civil rights. The assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian Jordanian, was irate at Bobby for supporting Israel in the 1967 Six Day War with surrounding Arab states. Kennedy was shot point-blank as he was being led through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, after giving his victory speech for having won the California primary. But murder and mayhem were in the air in 1960s America, with the Vietnam War killing many thousands of U.S. troops, riots in the major cities every single summer, and the decade’s grand finale, the ghoulish Manson family murders of August 1969.

Years later, in preparation for a column I was writing for the fiftieth anniversary of Bobby’s death, I reread Jack Newfield’s masterful book RFK: A Memoir, and two things stood out for me after all those years. The first was Newfield’s fascination at Bobby’s memorial service in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York with the fact that both Richard Daley, the hard-nosed mayor of Chicago, and Tom Hayden, the young 1960s radical, were seated in the cathedral and weeping openly. Newfield comments: “No other public figure could have so touched, at the same time, a young radical and an old machine boss.” And then this comment at the very end of the book:

“We are the first generation that learned from experience, in our innocent twenties, that things were not really getting better, that we shall not overcome. We felt, by the time we reached thirty, that we had already glimpsed the most compassionate leaders our nation could produce, and they had all been assassinated. And from this time forward, things would get worse: our best political leaders were part of memory now, not hope…The stone was at the bottom of the hill and we were alone.”

Newfield also wrote, “The militant young blacks who wore ‘Free Huey Newton’ buttons as they cheered Kennedy in San Francisco the day before he was shot, and the low-income whites who signed George Wallace petitions in July, would have both voted for Kennedy in November. He was able to talk to the two polarities of powerlessness at the same time.” This many years later, what Newfield projected would be impossible. Polls indicate a white working class that not only has abandoned its longstanding allegiance to the Democratic Party but is strongly drawn to Donald Trump, not because Trump is actually offering them anything in the way of legislation that would benefit them economically (on the contrary, as during his previous term as president, he would cut taxes on the corporations and impose tariffs that would raise the cost of living for average Americans), but, it seems, for the sake of protest against a system in which they no longer have faith.

There is an old saw that a month, or a week, or even a day can be an eternity in politics, but the period of time between the election of Republican Richard Nixon as president in 1968 following Kennedy’s death and the election of the next Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, in 1976 is a chasm. Political scientist Robert D. Putnam, in his book The Upswing, has described these years as the period when my generation—the ’60s generation—abandoned the idealism of our youth and became (in essence) materialistic “yuppies,” while commentators such as journalist Michael Lind and political philosopher Michael Sandel have identified President Carter as the first in an extended line of presidents, both Democratic and Republican, who imposed the economic philosophy of neoliberalism on the American economy, a creed that calls for putting the dictates of the capitalist marketplace above the economic needs of the American people. Trump disdained the free-trade agreements that were part and parcel of the neoliberal worldview, which is one of the main factors that made him popular among American workers.

America, in 1968, was a fractured country, and Bobby Kennedy’s campaign that year has been characterized as a redemption tour. One of Kennedy’s greatest strengths, which Newfield pointed out, was that he was capable of uniting members of both the black and white working classes in the common cause of helping to redeem a nation seething with discord. Vice President Kamala Harris is also embarked on a redemption effort, but her challenge is greater than Kennedy’s was, since the current right wing, under the aegis of Trump, has set much of the white population on edge about our emerging multiracial society. Qualities Harris possesses to counter this phenomenon include a shining intelligence, an infectious optimism, a deep-seated integrity, and a manifest love of a country that allowed the child of two nonwhite immigrants to ascend as far as she has already. She could restore the nation to a condition of political health.