I still remember the day that Bobby Kennedy died. He was the senator from my home state of New York, and I had met him when he stopped in my hometown during his senatorial campaign. It was a quick handshake to a giddy high school student, but I remember it to this day. The hour he got shot in Los Angeles was the middle of the night New York time, so I heard the news when I woke up for school the next day. At that point he was still alive, but his condition was grave. He died later in the day. It had been less than 5 years since his older brother John had been assassinated, and it was a mere 2 months following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. Those around me felt that the fabric of the nation was being torn apart....our last, best hope was now gone.
The subsequent Democratic Party Convention later that summer in Chicago just proved to be the finale. A strange darkness had set over the nation. Later in the year, Richard Nixon was elected President, on a promise to end the war in Vietnam. We much later learned of excursions into Cambodia and Laos, prolonging the war into Nixon's second term.
Something about Bobby spoke to me, spoke to the best in many. He wasn't perfect; in truth he was a recent convert to the side of the "righteous". He had spent many an hour earlier in his career being a lackey to the Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn cabal and their Communist witch hunt in the 50's, spurred on by his father Joseph Kennedy. He could be ruthless, as when he went after Jimmy Hoffa and organized crime. He came of age in the Justice Department of his brother's administration as Attorney General, but really came into his own following the death of John.
Under Lyndon Johnson, while still serving as Attorney General, he worked to see that the Civil Rights Act that his brother had proposed was brought to fruition, and sought to protect the marchers and protesters in the south, often in vain, and often against the wishes of then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. He finally broke with Johnson over the Vietnam War, when he became a vocal critic of the American policies in Southeast Asia.
In the last years of his life, Kennedy became the advocate for the poor and the minorities of the United States. Following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr, Kennedy he addressed a crowd in Indianapolis, spoke of the losses in his family and of the death of his brother. While riots broke out in many American cities, Indianapolis was calm.
Kennedy decided to run for the presidency in 1968 on an anti-war platform that also stressed urban poverty. Although he was a late entry into the race, he had begun to build momentum.
On the night of June 5th, he was at the Ambassador Hotel in
Los Angeles, giving a victory speech following the results in the
California primary. Leaving the ballroom through the kitchen,
he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan.
Forty years on, many comparisons are being made between Robert Kennedy and Barack Obama. There are those who have compared their oratory, their causes, their ability to attract younger voters, and the messages of hope they chose to convey. In many ways, we're at a similar crossroad today: a war that's in seeming gridlock, a country that is divided by "red" and "blue" states, conservative and liberal, flag pins and fuming preachers. Many voters are seeking not only "change", but an end to the internal war; the us vs. them politics that has become familiarly known as "Rovian"; the thought of a 50 +1 form of governance. The ghosts of Katrina are still around, and we ignore them at our peril. Whether the comparisons are valid or not are irrelevant: we don't know what President Robert Kennedy would have gone on to do, just as at this juncture Barack Obama is very much an unknown quantity. What they do share is an intangible, something that, for better or worse, few politicians ever match. Hillary Clinton is shrewd, able, fierce, intelligent, and would have made an awesome candidate, but she doesn't share what both Bobby Kennedy and Barack Obama did: an ability to call us to, as Lincoln said, "the better angels of our nature".
I'll end this with a quote of Bobby Kennedy's concerning the law. It seems fitting during these times when we have an administration seemingly hell-bent on trampling every law it doesn't like in order to impose new ones that suit its purpose:
We know that it is law which enables men to live together, that creates order out of chaos. We know that law is the glue that holds civilization together. And we know that if one man's rights are denied, the rights of all others are endangered.
Robert F. Kennedy
May 5, 1961