Editor’s Note: Robert Francis Kennedy, a politician who might have transformed our nation had he lived, would have been 93 today. Those of us who remember him know how special he was. I am reposting this piece I wrote long ago in the hope that what he stood for and who he was might inspire us as we move towards another Presidential election.
Robert Kennedy, perhaps the most fascinating and complex man I have ever seen, died 14 years ago today.
Most of the time that seems very much longer ago; the world has greatly changed. But just occasionally, especially in springtime, it seems not so long. He was as man of the springtime, of new beginnings. This is a very personal essay, a remembrance of a man who could laugh at himself and the only politician whom I could ever imagine successfully quoting ancient Greek poetry to poor black Americans on the night of their greatest sorrow.
He may have been at his most eloquent on a cold, windy evening in Indianapolis in the spring of 1968.
Campaigning without a police escort (candidates did not have Secret Service protection then) the smallest of the Kennedy brothers climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck parked in the toughest section of that city’s black ghetto.
The hundreds who had waited to hear the presidential candidate had not heard the news. He spoke to them briefly, impromptu, without notes:
“I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.
“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred, I can only say that I feel in my heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my own family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these difficult times.”
He spoke some more, quoting Aeschylus, his favorite poet, to an audience, few of whom had ever heard of the 5th-century B.C. Greek poet. He asked those present to help “dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.”
The senator asked he grieving crowd to go home. They did. There were civil disturbances across the country that night – but not in Indianapolis.
**
That was 14 years ago. Fifteen days ago, the California parole board, after weeks of intensely publicized hearings, decided to cancel the scheduled parole date for his killer.
When that happened, there was a general and self-satisfied feeling of relief. Many felt that justice had been served; the murderer would remain behind bars. But I knew that the real meaning of Sirhan Sirhan’s latest round in the spotlight was much different. Evidently we will be spared the ultimate irony of Sirhan’s scheduled release on the traditional opening day of the 1984 presidential campaign.
If there was any doubt before, however, the parole controversy made it clear that Sirhan has now accomplished more than he had ever hoped for. While in prison awaiting trial, he reportedly said at one point that by his act “he had instantly become as famous as Lennon or a Kennedy.”
Well, he may now be more famous than the one he killed. The dozens of stories and editorials that have been written about Sirhan this year have all centered on him. They have barely mentioned the man he killed or why his crime mattered so much.
Probably most Americans younger than 30 have little idea who Robert Kennedy was, beyond being just another 1960s politician, the brother between the assassinated president and the current senator. Some older, maybe, never knew.
If so, that would be the ultimate tragedy – the total success of Sirhan’s act of nihilism. I do not greatly care whether Sirhan rots in prison or is let out (as, eventually, he is virtually certain to be) to emigrate, as he has hinted, to some Arab country, to denounce America from the safety of exile.
But I do care that Robert Kennedy is remembered.
What was so special about him?
He was a moody, brooding man who probably had the best sense of humor I remember of anyone in public life – except perhaps for his brother, the president.
Mostly, RFK’s was a kind of gently self-depreciating kind of humor , but it had its exuberant aspects. Can anyone even imagine another attorney general keeping a 150-pound Newfoundland dog in his office closet at the Department of Justice and telling visitors that the sounds coming from within were made by a gorilla?
**
He was someone with a strange sense of foreboding – “doom was woven in his nerves,” the poet Robert Lowell wrote – who yet inspired a strong sense of hope in the future, especially among those who had the least reason to hope.
Probably Jack Newfield put it best, quoting Pascal: “ A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both ends at once.”
At his funeral, radical Tom Hayden and Mayor Richard Daley wept in neighboring pews. Ten weeks later, the forces each represented would be fighting in the streets during the Democratic National Convention.
A writer named Paul Cowan said in the first weeks after RFK’s death that he was the “last liberal politician who could communicate with white, working-class America.”
That statement, as far as it went, was true. Surveys later showed that a significant number of his supporters turned, not to other ‘liberals,’ but to George Wallace, another candidate of the alienated, after he died.
But in a broader sense, he was of more than common statute because no simple label – “liberal” or “conservative” — adequately defined him.
**
Last June President Reagan presented a medal honoring Robert Kennedy to his widow, saying, “I remember very vividly the closeness that had developed in our views about the growing size and unresponsiveness of government.”
That wasn’t just rhetoric. In the last three years of his life, RFK became increasingly sensitive to the fears of Americans that their lives were being too much run, too much controlled from Washington.
“Bigness, loss of community, organizations and society grown far beyond the human scale – these are the besetting sins of the 20th century,” he said in 1968.
He certainly was no “knee-jerk” liberal, Indeed, he started out as a rather narrow reactionary – his father’s child, deeply suspicious of labor unions and the Soviet Union.
Throughout his brief 1968 campaign, the former attorney general insisted, over and over again, that the fear of crime and the desire for “law and order” were not just “code words for racism,” as some other liberals termed them. He thought, Arthur Schleslinger Jr. has written, that government had forgotten the blue-collar whites, too.
**
But more than anything else, I think RFK was defined by an almost puritanical desire for justice.
He was only 35 when President Kennedy made him attorney general, and his experience with minorities’ problems had been, to put it mildly, limited. “We didn’t exactly lose any sleep over the rights of Negroes” prior to 1961, he wryly told a friend years later.
But this changed – fast. Indeed, Robert Kennedy’s continued capacity to change and grow, especially after his brother’s assassination, were perhaps his most remarkable feature.
The early civil rights struggles, and the discovery that fundamental injustice did exist in America, radically changed him. He became more and more an advocate for the ppor, the blacks, the farm workers, the Indians.
He dared to propose a sweeping subsidized medical care program to medical school students. When a skeptical doctor-to-be asked where the money for it would come from, RFK shot back, “from you.”
Part of him was pure radical. When a friend, half in jest, remarked that he really should be a guerrilla warrior, RFK replied, “I know it.”
He frightened some people, especially the comfortable. One woman told one of his aides that she opposed him because “he talks about a ‘new America’ and I like the one we’ve got.”
A friend, columnist Anthony Lewis, wrote long afterwards that “he listened. More than most people he took advice, reflected on it. And learned, Most people acquire certainties as they grow older. He lost his.”
**
RFK was certainly not a saint. He was a politician by trade and hence, an opportunist. He made mistakes. The early Robert Kennedy was not, outside his innermost circle, very likeable at all.
He started his career as counsel to Joe McCarthy’s infamous Senate subcommittee on investigations. He was abrasive, dogmatic, hard-nosed.
Then he took on the Teamsters as an aide to another Senate committee, going after Jimmy Hoffa with the tenacity of a terrier going after a rat.
Later, he was the necessary SOB in his older brother’s campaigns, the guy who kicked behinds, fired people, kept the pressure on the workers.
The “ruthless” label acquired in that period stuck to him, although to the end his hands shook when he spoke in public, even in his last speech, minutes before the fatal shot.
**
Though he deepened with age, he remained quite capable of lapses. Indecision and waffling over whether to enter his final race cost him support, and split the anti-Johnson forces.
Those who most admired him groaned when RFK descended to demagoguery in a televised debate in California just days before he died, accusing Eugene McCarthy of wanting to “take 10,000 black people and move them into Orange County.”
More often, however, he took the high road. RFK won that primary election, as he won all the others he entered except one.
And then he was shot. Had the bullet gone an inch or two to either side, he might not have been even seriously hurt. It was a small bullet from a small gun, but it shattered his soft mastoid bone and scattered pieces of metal and bone shrapnel throughout his skull. He had a stout heart. It beat for six or seven hours after his brain stopped functioning.
He was only 42 years old. He would be 56 now – in the traditional prime of life for presidential candidates.
It is unclear at best whether RFK would have been nominated for president in 1968 if he had lived. It would have been an uphill battle, a kind that he relished.
Even had he not been nominated, he surely would have campaigned hard against the election of Richard Nixon – which might have been enough to change the outcome of a race narrowly lost by Hubert Humphrey, the Democrats’ eventual nominee in that bitter year.
One wonders, indeed, whether he would have been able to prevent the 1970s from becoming the vacuous years that they were – Garry Trudeau’s decade of “disco and Watergate books” and of trivial people preoccupied only with themselves.
I don’t know. But I do know that when the administration of the man who was elected instead ended in a wave of bathos in 1974, Richard Nixon summoned Henry Kissinger to hear his last ravings and to hear Nixon pray.
As Nixon made his Secretary of State kneel with him on a White House rug, Kissinger – himself a friend and admirer of Robert Kennedy long before his association with Nixon – suddenly remembered RFK and the words of Aeschylus that he had quoted years earlier to those Indianapolis blacks on the day Martin Luther King died:
**
In our sleep
Pain that cannot forget
Falls drop by drop
Upon the heart
Until, in our own despair
Against our will
Comes wisdom through the awful
Grace of God
**
I hope that Aeschylus was right.
