“
----Senator Robert F. Kennedy, March 16, 1968
With these words, Senator Robert Kennedy speaking in the very same Senate Caucus Room in which his brother had a short eight years earlier launched his own presidential campaign, began his own short-lived odyssey which, in a mere 82 days, would transform his political legacy as well as a broad spectrum of the country.
It has been a half-century now since that terrible time that transformed America. A year fraught with violence; a year marred by riots and demonstration; a year that began with such promise and ended with the ultimate booby prize: Richard Outhouse Nixon.
We are now as far removed from that time as they were from the Armistice ending the First World War. Many have chronicled those days, but few, if any, have captured the times, the energy, the drama, or the lightning in a bottle. There are, to be sure, records. There are films, videos, books, magazine and newspaper articles. Historians make constant reference to the year in which the foundations underlying the social contract cracked. But these, as any accounts, are secondary. They do not and cannot capture the smell, the moment, the life as it is lived. They are merely and can only be vicarious accounts such as they are.
But to wrap one's arms around the legacy of Robert Kennedy is no easy task. During his lifetime those who drew political cartoons rarely captured the man. He was, simply too complex to easily caricature. The best chroniclers of the time were Theodore White's “The Making of the President 1968”, one in a series of such books on the presidential elections from 1960-1972. Joe McGinness' work “The Selling of the President” about the Nixon campaign's use of media leap immediately to mind, as does Eugene McCarthy's “Year of the People”. None, however, reach the breadth and scope of three Englishmen, foreign correspondents at the time, Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page with their opus “An American Melodrama The Presidential Campaign of 1968. In addition, there have been countless biographies from Arthur Schlesinger to Victor Lasky of Robert Kennedy each, in their own way, attempting to plumb the depths of his complexities if not his soul.
Thurston Clarke, who has presented us with perhaps the best effort at capturing the soul of the '68 campaign and, perhaps by extension, the soul of the candidate himself, begins his account with what is clearly the best description of the funeral train carrying the body of Robert Kennedy from New York City to Washington D.C. Chris Matthews, himself recalling those scenes a full half-century later, would note the composition of those that gathered along the miles of railroad tracks: black and white, young and old, protestant and Catholic, rich and poor, inner city residents and rural farmers and farm hands, people from every walk of life standing along the tracks holding American flags, standing in salute, holding signs expressing the nation's grief in a demonstration of reverence that can only be compared to the funeral cortege that accompanied the deaths of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. And yet, this man was never elected president.
“What did he have”? Campaign chronicler Thurston Clarke asks repeatedly as he describes these scenes. To ask the question is to seek answers into the ties that bound the soul of the man to millions of his fellow Americans. Clarke takes us on a journey from the steel mills and farmlands of Indiana, to the cornfields of Nebraska, to the Indian Reservations in the Dakota's to the Valley of California in search of his soul. But perhaps the best description of the man that was Robert Kennedy came from the old chronicler himself, Teddy White
:
“The gash that Robert F. Kennedy tore into the story of 1968 aches still—aches in personal memory, but more in history itself. Of all the men who challenged for the Presidency, he alone, by the assassin's bullets was deprived of the final judgment of his party and people. Wistful and pugnacious, fearless and tender, gay and rueful, profound and antic, strong yet indecisive—all these descriptives of him were true. Yet none recaptures what stirred the passions that made him the most loved and most hated candidate of 1968, nor the quicksilver personality who, when pensive, looked like a little boy, or, when hot-in-action, like a prince-in-combat.
For he was more than himself, and he knew it To explain why this was so, and the blaze he lit in the mad spring months of 1968, one must start with the phrase, 'the Kennedy movement.' However difficult it is to define, the Kennedy movement is a romantic reality—and thus one of the hard political forces of America today as it was in the spring of 1968, it exploded at the call of its then-leader, Robert F. Kennedy.
Technically, of course, one can specifically date the transformation of the political resources of the Kennedy family into what is called a 'movement'. It began at the moment when John F. Kennedy's body was buried in Arlington and his memory rose to become legend. One could dissect the Kennedy movement almost as one dissected the anatomy of the grand Rooseveltian coalition: there were the common millions who had come, simply, to enjoy the presence and grace of the handsome young President on the home screen or in their midst; there was the very real gratitude of millions of Negroes, given hope; there was the respect of thousands of thinkers who could not forget a man who had so effectively used talent and ideas; there was the corps of eminent men—executives, writers, diplomats, politicians—who had known their first taste of greatness and responsibility, in the thousand days of the Kennedy administration and remained, a shadow corps of loyalists, yearning to govern again.
But the legend was stronger than this analysis suggests; the legend rested on more primitive elements. The strongest force in the movement came from an atavistic craving—the simple craving of people for heroes. In the remorseless strangulation of American politics by new technologies and infinitely complicated problems, the vent of a personalized loyalty gave millions of Americans who responded to the name Kennedy the same emotional satisfaction felt by those English yeomen who had fought for York or for Lancaster. An indefinable but nonetheless substantial power came to the movement from the equally simple hunger of people for style and elegance. And there was a time element also: when Dwight D. Eisenhower was succeeded by John F. Kennedy, it was as if a generation of fathers had been put aside and a new postwar generation of Americans had taken over....
There could have been no Kennedy movement without John F. Kennedy; but there could also have been no Kennedy movement had not Robert Francis Kennedy been large enough a man to keep it alive. Without the younger Kennedy, the older brother would have been remembered as Tiberius Gracchus might have been by the Romans if Tiberius' assassination had been an isolated episode—as a single glorious moment in the expansion of freedom and opportunity in that republic. It was the life—and violent death—of Gaius Gracchus, his younger brother, that made them remembered as 'the Gracchi,' and identified them with a cause that outlived their time in the forum.” (2)
It wasn't as if Robert Kennedy didn't have his distractors. Nearly every campaign stop was met with those in the crowd who registered their opposition. Placards reading: JACK WAS NIMBLE, JACK WAS QUICK, BUT BOBBY SIMPLY MAKES ME SICK was remembered by White as a particular piece of anti-Kennedy doggerel that stuck in his memory.
The first quality that surfaced when Bobby Kennedy was discussed was his 'ruthlessness.'
The tag had been applied to him as he first came to public notice in his brother's Presidential campaign and administration [actually, prior to that when RFK was chief counsel of the Senate Rackets committee interrogating the likes of James Riddle Hoffa and mob figures like Sam Giancanna]. There was no doubt that he had been for his brother the enforcer, the 'rod,' the crack-down man, whether it was against Russian diplomats who lied to the administration, or to politicians who ran out on a deal. If one had to choose an enemy, Robert F. Kennedy was not a man anyone would like to have as an enemy. He fought hard, bare-knuckled, savagely. To break one's word to Robert Kennedy was to put oneself in peril—for a welsher he had little forgiveness. Whether it was a hack politician, book-writer, steel magnate—once a man broke his word to Robert Kennedy, Kennedy's retaliation was certain. He could also be intemperate and impulsive. Robert Kennedy made up his mind on the right-or-wrong of any given issue quite slowly, but once he did he could be the image of wrath—his forefinger pointing, his fist pounding in his palm, his eyes ablaze. His insistence on immediate action, a quality of youth, angered a broad spectrum of Americans. It angered businessmen who never forgave the Attorney General who, they believed, had authorized the FBI to rouse sleeping newsmen [and steel company executives] from their homes during the steel crisis; it angered liberals who felt that no sin of Jimmy Hoffa justified the wire-tapping and relentless pursuit of that corrupt union leader to jail; it angered intellectuals and writers who could not understand Kennedy's quarrel with William Manchester, who have been authorized to write an approved story of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and who Bobby believed had broken his word
The rigidity of his convictions was so stubborn that to the outside world he appeared dictatorial. Within the inner circle of the Kennedy administration, however, this rigidity was often an amusement. I [Theodore White] remember a late-afternoon visit to the White House during the Kennedy administration when, sitting in the Oval Office, I tried not to eavesdrop but was unable to resist tilting my ear to a series of important telephone calls that interrupted the President. A Federal judgeship in the Southern states, at the frontier of civil rights, was obviously at issue. President Kennedy was balancing calls between the hold buttons on his desk telephone until he reached the Attorney General, Bobby must have been crisp, tart and emphatically negative. The President flicked his hold buttons and told the Southern Senator hanging on the decision that he would have to get back to him later. Then he noticed I had been listening. 'You know,' he said, 'you know what the trouble with this administration is?' 'No, sir,' I said. 'The trouble with this administration,' continued the President, 'is that the Attorney General has so much higher standards for judges than the President.' it was not quite that, of course, but whatever the Attorney General felt he would express with a vehemence which, in echo, always made him sound like Savonarola.
Thus, 'ruthlessness' (3)
The story goes that when Theodore Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother on the same day, he was so stricken that he placed his young daughter Alice in the care of a relative and went off into the badlands of the plains to find himself. For penance, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, would be able to say things to the President that no one else dared. After one open tart retort a bemused Teddy turned to a friend and quipped “I can be either President of the United States or Alice's father; I cannot possibly be both”. Such was the caustic nature of Alice Roosevelt Longworth who lived out her life as a wife of an alcoholic congressman, becoming an American version of Gertrude Stein holding salons in which she would regale the assembled with her caustic wit an commentary. She once said of Robert Kennedy that “Bobby could have been a revolutionary priest”. (4)
Thus, 'ruthlessness'.
Indeed, the “roughest confrontation between Kennedy and Students came when he spoke at the University of Indiana Medical School to the kind of privileged youths who had [earlier in the campaign] angered him at Columbia.”(5) Here gathered were a group of “Boomers” that one would think would have been his natural constituency but were, in fact, the political larvae that would soon emerge to spawn the “Generation of Swine”. Kennedy spoke for about twenty minutes before a group The New York Times reported as 'generally hostile'. (6) Quoting Aristotle he spoke of health care as being more than a luxury available only to the affluent. He told the audience about what he had seen in the slums of the inner cities, the shacks of Appalachia, the squalor of the Mississippi Delta,
“A student called the neighborhood clinics that Kennedy was proposing needless and costly. Another asked why he wanted to increase social security payments to the elderly. Another questioned why it mattered that ghetto health centers were second-rate since most Negroes did not bother to use them anyway Another raised the issue of funding again saying 'All these programs sound very find and nice and all that, but where's the money gonna come from?'
As at Columbia, Kennedy had finally had enough. 'From you!' he barked, pointing a finger at the student who had asked the question. He pointed at the youth with the Reagan balloon and said 'from you.' then went around the hall, jabbing his finger and shouting 'From you!..You!...You..You!'
Kennedy left, shaking his head saying “They were comfortable, so comfortable”. (7)
Thus, 'ruthlessness'.
But there were other sides to the man. Schlesinger in his two-volume biography takes us with Bobby to South Africa and Latin America, to the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia, to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Watts and Harlem, and countless other places that politicians fear to tread. Kennedy not only went there but took the press corps in tow, taking the nation with him. Thurston Clarke captured best the essence in a chapter called “Brave Heart and Christopher Pretty Boy”. Kennedy, press in tow, had veered off the campaign trail and headed to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation at Chandron, Nebraska. There he spent a day on the campaign trail meeting with the tribe and touring the reservation investing precious time at a place with few votes and where he had already huge support. The title of the chapter is about the chance meeting of Kennedy, dubbed “Brave Heart” by the tribe dating back to his days as Attorney General when the cause of the tribes were at the forefront of Bobby's expanding horizons, and Christopher Pretty Boy, a young boy whom Kennedy met among the junk cars. Clarke published among others a photograph of Kennedy sitting on a bed with Christopher Pretty Boy looking like there was no other place in the whole-wide-world he would rather be. Kennedy asked the boy to come and visit him at his home (Bobby was known to do this) but within a year both would be dead. (8)
Again, let us consult historian Theodore White:
“...Missing in this appreciation of Robert Kennedy were several other qualities of personality that had surfaced first in the administration and then, later, in Robert Kennedy's years of displacement from power. They were his sheer, stunning executive ability; his intuitive sense of the use and nature of American power; and his sense of personal identification, unique among American politician, with the victims and casualties of American society.
His executive talent had been noticed only by a small handful of men in the years of his brother's administration, when he was overshadowed in action by the larger transactions of the President. But one should linger over this talent, for his stewardship of the Department of Justice as Attorney General was, without doubt, the ablest of modern times....
Within months of his swearing-in in 1961, black 'freedom riders' were loose on their challenge to ancient racism in the South; and no law, nor any legitimacy, gave the Federal government the right to protect them. One remembers Washington slowly becoming aware of his executive talents during these weeks of peril. What code gave the Federal government the right to act? If the Attorney General did choose to act how would he find the manpower? How—out of the few hundred middle-aged men who bear the title of Marshals of the United States scattered across the country—could he assemble an effective force? Could he legally recruit Treasury Agents, prison guards of Federal prisons, immigration border guards, to pacify the turbulent South? The simple administration and coordination of such bodies was a puzzle; yet it was all accomplished in a matter of weeks. And at the moment of crisis, when white mobs in Montgomery, Alabama, threatened to burn down a Negro church in May, 1961, the Attorney General was ready and presided over every detail of the counterstroke—the assembly of men, the provision of planes, the installation of communications. He was to demonstrate his flair for action over and over again as Attorney General—at the University of Mississippi in 1962, at the University of Alabama in 1963.
This executive ability of Robert Kennedy flowed from the best principles of leadership. He had impeccable taste in men, chose extraordinary lieutenants. He listened; no man seemed more indecisive over longer periods of time than Robert Kennedy as he consulted, consulted again, aired his thoughts with friends and deputies, probed, questioned and re-questioned, trying to find the jugular of his problem. But then, when he acted—decision was his alone. (9)
Contrast this, if you will, with not only what now sits in the presidential seat, but those about him in the agencies and the Congress. A politician with empathy; a politician with experience; a politician with judgment; a politician with questions; a politician in search of new beginnings; a politician who understands the uses of power in the name of the republic. And, let us not forget, a politician who could and did admit mistakes. Kennedy understood power as few others; always the tactician, Kennedy had learned by experience how power enables and how it humbles those who wield it.
It has been half a century now and the wound still bleeds. MSNBC host Chris Matthews has written a book about Kennedy on this the half-century of his passing. He wrote it to commemorate the milestone and in that vein, I purchased a copy this Christmas for my daughter inscribing:
“To My Greatest Creation,
A reminder of what once was and what could yet be.”
Impeach and Imprison.
“I am today announcing my candidacy for the presidency of the United States. 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 that I can...
At stake is not simply the leadership of our party or even our country. It is our right to moral leadership of this planet.”
----Senator Robert F. Kennedy, March 16, 1968
It has been a half-century now since that terrible time that transformed America. A year fraught with violence; a year marred by riots and demonstration; a year that began with such promise and ended with the ultimate booby prize: Richard Outhouse Nixon.
We are now as far removed from that time as they were from the Armistice ending the First World War. Many have chronicled those days, but few, if any, have captured the times, the energy, the drama, or the lightning in a bottle. There are, to be sure, records. There are films, videos, books, magazine and newspaper articles. Historians make constant reference to the year in which the foundations underlying the social contract cracked. But these, as any accounts, are secondary. They do not and cannot capture the smell, the moment, the life as it is lived. They are merely and can only be vicarious accounts such as they are.
But to wrap one's arms around the legacy of Robert Kennedy is no easy task. During his lifetime those who drew political cartoons rarely captured the man. He was, simply too complex to easily caricature. The best chroniclers of the time were Theodore White's “The Making of the President 1968”, one in a series of such books on the presidential elections from 1960-1972. Joe McGinness' work “The Selling of the President” about the Nixon campaign's use of media leap immediately to mind, as does Eugene McCarthy's “Year of the People”. None, however, reach the breadth and scope of three Englishmen, foreign correspondents at the time, Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page with their opus “An American Melodrama The Presidential Campaign of 1968. In addition, there have been countless biographies from Arthur Schlesinger to Victor Lasky of Robert Kennedy each, in their own way, attempting to plumb the depths of his complexities if not his soul.
Thurston Clarke, who has presented us with perhaps the best effort at capturing the soul of the '68 campaign and, perhaps by extension, the soul of the candidate himself, begins his account with what is clearly the best description of the funeral train carrying the body of Robert Kennedy from New York City to Washington D.C. Chris Matthews, himself recalling those scenes a full half-century later, would note the composition of those that gathered along the miles of railroad tracks: black and white, young and old, protestant and Catholic, rich and poor, inner city residents and rural farmers and farm hands, people from every walk of life standing along the tracks holding American flags, standing in salute, holding signs expressing the nation's grief in a demonstration of reverence that can only be compared to the funeral cortege that accompanied the deaths of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. And yet, this man was never elected president.
“What did he have”? Campaign chronicler Thurston Clarke asks repeatedly as he describes these scenes. To ask the question is to seek answers into the ties that bound the soul of the man to millions of his fellow Americans. Clarke takes us on a journey from the steel mills and farmlands of Indiana, to the cornfields of Nebraska, to the Indian Reservations in the Dakota's to the Valley of California in search of his soul. But perhaps the best description of the man that was Robert Kennedy came from the old chronicler himself, Teddy White
:
“The gash that Robert F. Kennedy tore into the story of 1968 aches still—aches in personal memory, but more in history itself. Of all the men who challenged for the Presidency, he alone, by the assassin's bullets was deprived of the final judgment of his party and people. Wistful and pugnacious, fearless and tender, gay and rueful, profound and antic, strong yet indecisive—all these descriptives of him were true. Yet none recaptures what stirred the passions that made him the most loved and most hated candidate of 1968, nor the quicksilver personality who, when pensive, looked like a little boy, or, when hot-in-action, like a prince-in-combat.
For he was more than himself, and he knew it To explain why this was so, and the blaze he lit in the mad spring months of 1968, one must start with the phrase, 'the Kennedy movement.' However difficult it is to define, the Kennedy movement is a romantic reality—and thus one of the hard political forces of America today as it was in the spring of 1968, it exploded at the call of its then-leader, Robert F. Kennedy.
Technically, of course, one can specifically date the transformation of the political resources of the Kennedy family into what is called a 'movement'. It began at the moment when John F. Kennedy's body was buried in Arlington and his memory rose to become legend. One could dissect the Kennedy movement almost as one dissected the anatomy of the grand Rooseveltian coalition: there were the common millions who had come, simply, to enjoy the presence and grace of the handsome young President on the home screen or in their midst; there was the very real gratitude of millions of Negroes, given hope; there was the respect of thousands of thinkers who could not forget a man who had so effectively used talent and ideas; there was the corps of eminent men—executives, writers, diplomats, politicians—who had known their first taste of greatness and responsibility, in the thousand days of the Kennedy administration and remained, a shadow corps of loyalists, yearning to govern again.
But the legend was stronger than this analysis suggests; the legend rested on more primitive elements. The strongest force in the movement came from an atavistic craving—the simple craving of people for heroes. In the remorseless strangulation of American politics by new technologies and infinitely complicated problems, the vent of a personalized loyalty gave millions of Americans who responded to the name Kennedy the same emotional satisfaction felt by those English yeomen who had fought for York or for Lancaster. An indefinable but nonetheless substantial power came to the movement from the equally simple hunger of people for style and elegance. And there was a time element also: when Dwight D. Eisenhower was succeeded by John F. Kennedy, it was as if a generation of fathers had been put aside and a new postwar generation of Americans had taken over....
There could have been no Kennedy movement without John F. Kennedy; but there could also have been no Kennedy movement had not Robert Francis Kennedy been large enough a man to keep it alive. Without the younger Kennedy, the older brother would have been remembered as Tiberius Gracchus might have been by the Romans if Tiberius' assassination had been an isolated episode—as a single glorious moment in the expansion of freedom and opportunity in that republic. It was the life—and violent death—of Gaius Gracchus, his younger brother, that made them remembered as 'the Gracchi,' and identified them with a cause that outlived their time in the forum.” (2)
It wasn't as if Robert Kennedy didn't have his distractors. Nearly every campaign stop was met with those in the crowd who registered their opposition. Placards reading: JACK WAS NIMBLE, JACK WAS QUICK, BUT BOBBY SIMPLY MAKES ME SICK was remembered by White as a particular piece of anti-Kennedy doggerel that stuck in his memory.
The first quality that surfaced when Bobby Kennedy was discussed was his 'ruthlessness.'
The tag had been applied to him as he first came to public notice in his brother's Presidential campaign and administration [actually, prior to that when RFK was chief counsel of the Senate Rackets committee interrogating the likes of James Riddle Hoffa and mob figures like Sam Giancanna]. There was no doubt that he had been for his brother the enforcer, the 'rod,' the crack-down man, whether it was against Russian diplomats who lied to the administration, or to politicians who ran out on a deal. If one had to choose an enemy, Robert F. Kennedy was not a man anyone would like to have as an enemy. He fought hard, bare-knuckled, savagely. To break one's word to Robert Kennedy was to put oneself in peril—for a welsher he had little forgiveness. Whether it was a hack politician, book-writer, steel magnate—once a man broke his word to Robert Kennedy, Kennedy's retaliation was certain. He could also be intemperate and impulsive. Robert Kennedy made up his mind on the right-or-wrong of any given issue quite slowly, but once he did he could be the image of wrath—his forefinger pointing, his fist pounding in his palm, his eyes ablaze. His insistence on immediate action, a quality of youth, angered a broad spectrum of Americans. It angered businessmen who never forgave the Attorney General who, they believed, had authorized the FBI to rouse sleeping newsmen [and steel company executives] from their homes during the steel crisis; it angered liberals who felt that no sin of Jimmy Hoffa justified the wire-tapping and relentless pursuit of that corrupt union leader to jail; it angered intellectuals and writers who could not understand Kennedy's quarrel with William Manchester, who have been authorized to write an approved story of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and who Bobby believed had broken his word
The rigidity of his convictions was so stubborn that to the outside world he appeared dictatorial. Within the inner circle of the Kennedy administration, however, this rigidity was often an amusement. I [Theodore White] remember a late-afternoon visit to the White House during the Kennedy administration when, sitting in the Oval Office, I tried not to eavesdrop but was unable to resist tilting my ear to a series of important telephone calls that interrupted the President. A Federal judgeship in the Southern states, at the frontier of civil rights, was obviously at issue. President Kennedy was balancing calls between the hold buttons on his desk telephone until he reached the Attorney General, Bobby must have been crisp, tart and emphatically negative. The President flicked his hold buttons and told the Southern Senator hanging on the decision that he would have to get back to him later. Then he noticed I had been listening. 'You know,' he said, 'you know what the trouble with this administration is?' 'No, sir,' I said. 'The trouble with this administration,' continued the President, 'is that the Attorney General has so much higher standards for judges than the President.' it was not quite that, of course, but whatever the Attorney General felt he would express with a vehemence which, in echo, always made him sound like Savonarola.
Thus, 'ruthlessness' (3)
The story goes that when Theodore Roosevelt lost both his wife and his mother on the same day, he was so stricken that he placed his young daughter Alice in the care of a relative and went off into the badlands of the plains to find himself. For penance, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, would be able to say things to the President that no one else dared. After one open tart retort a bemused Teddy turned to a friend and quipped “I can be either President of the United States or Alice's father; I cannot possibly be both”. Such was the caustic nature of Alice Roosevelt Longworth who lived out her life as a wife of an alcoholic congressman, becoming an American version of Gertrude Stein holding salons in which she would regale the assembled with her caustic wit an commentary. She once said of Robert Kennedy that “Bobby could have been a revolutionary priest”. (4)
Thus, 'ruthlessness'.
Indeed, the “roughest confrontation between Kennedy and Students came when he spoke at the University of Indiana Medical School to the kind of privileged youths who had [earlier in the campaign] angered him at Columbia.”(5) Here gathered were a group of “Boomers” that one would think would have been his natural constituency but were, in fact, the political larvae that would soon emerge to spawn the “Generation of Swine”. Kennedy spoke for about twenty minutes before a group The New York Times reported as 'generally hostile'. (6) Quoting Aristotle he spoke of health care as being more than a luxury available only to the affluent. He told the audience about what he had seen in the slums of the inner cities, the shacks of Appalachia, the squalor of the Mississippi Delta,
“A student called the neighborhood clinics that Kennedy was proposing needless and costly. Another asked why he wanted to increase social security payments to the elderly. Another questioned why it mattered that ghetto health centers were second-rate since most Negroes did not bother to use them anyway Another raised the issue of funding again saying 'All these programs sound very find and nice and all that, but where's the money gonna come from?'
As at Columbia, Kennedy had finally had enough. 'From you!' he barked, pointing a finger at the student who had asked the question. He pointed at the youth with the Reagan balloon and said 'from you.' then went around the hall, jabbing his finger and shouting 'From you!..You!...You..You!'
Kennedy left, shaking his head saying “They were comfortable, so comfortable”. (7)
Thus, 'ruthlessness'.
But there were other sides to the man. Schlesinger in his two-volume biography takes us with Bobby to South Africa and Latin America, to the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia, to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Watts and Harlem, and countless other places that politicians fear to tread. Kennedy not only went there but took the press corps in tow, taking the nation with him. Thurston Clarke captured best the essence in a chapter called “Brave Heart and Christopher Pretty Boy”. Kennedy, press in tow, had veered off the campaign trail and headed to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation at Chandron, Nebraska. There he spent a day on the campaign trail meeting with the tribe and touring the reservation investing precious time at a place with few votes and where he had already huge support. The title of the chapter is about the chance meeting of Kennedy, dubbed “Brave Heart” by the tribe dating back to his days as Attorney General when the cause of the tribes were at the forefront of Bobby's expanding horizons, and Christopher Pretty Boy, a young boy whom Kennedy met among the junk cars. Clarke published among others a photograph of Kennedy sitting on a bed with Christopher Pretty Boy looking like there was no other place in the whole-wide-world he would rather be. Kennedy asked the boy to come and visit him at his home (Bobby was known to do this) but within a year both would be dead. (8)
Again, let us consult historian Theodore White:
“...Missing in this appreciation of Robert Kennedy were several other qualities of personality that had surfaced first in the administration and then, later, in Robert Kennedy's years of displacement from power. They were his sheer, stunning executive ability; his intuitive sense of the use and nature of American power; and his sense of personal identification, unique among American politician, with the victims and casualties of American society.
His executive talent had been noticed only by a small handful of men in the years of his brother's administration, when he was overshadowed in action by the larger transactions of the President. But one should linger over this talent, for his stewardship of the Department of Justice as Attorney General was, without doubt, the ablest of modern times....
Within months of his swearing-in in 1961, black 'freedom riders' were loose on their challenge to ancient racism in the South; and no law, nor any legitimacy, gave the Federal government the right to protect them. One remembers Washington slowly becoming aware of his executive talents during these weeks of peril. What code gave the Federal government the right to act? If the Attorney General did choose to act how would he find the manpower? How—out of the few hundred middle-aged men who bear the title of Marshals of the United States scattered across the country—could he assemble an effective force? Could he legally recruit Treasury Agents, prison guards of Federal prisons, immigration border guards, to pacify the turbulent South? The simple administration and coordination of such bodies was a puzzle; yet it was all accomplished in a matter of weeks. And at the moment of crisis, when white mobs in Montgomery, Alabama, threatened to burn down a Negro church in May, 1961, the Attorney General was ready and presided over every detail of the counterstroke—the assembly of men, the provision of planes, the installation of communications. He was to demonstrate his flair for action over and over again as Attorney General—at the University of Mississippi in 1962, at the University of Alabama in 1963.
This executive ability of Robert Kennedy flowed from the best principles of leadership. He had impeccable taste in men, chose extraordinary lieutenants. He listened; no man seemed more indecisive over longer periods of time than Robert Kennedy as he consulted, consulted again, aired his thoughts with friends and deputies, probed, questioned and re-questioned, trying to find the jugular of his problem. But then, when he acted—decision was his alone. (9)
Contrast this, if you will, with not only what now sits in the presidential seat, but those about him in the agencies and the Congress. A politician with empathy; a politician with experience; a politician with judgment; a politician with questions; a politician in search of new beginnings; a politician who understands the uses of power in the name of the republic. And, let us not forget, a politician who could and did admit mistakes. Kennedy understood power as few others; always the tactician, Kennedy had learned by experience how power enables and how it humbles those who wield it.
It has been half a century now and the wound still bleeds. MSNBC host Chris Matthews has written a book about Kennedy on this the half-century of his passing. He wrote it to commemorate the milestone and in that vein, I purchased a copy this Christmas for my daughter inscribing:
“To My Greatest Creation,
A reminder of what once was and what could yet be.”
Impeach and Imprison.
______________________
- Clarke, Thurston. “The Last Campaign, Robert Kennedy andthe 82 days that Inspired America” Henry Holt and CompanyNew York, New York 1968. 321 pages;`(2) White Theodore H. “The Making of the President 1968” Atheneum Publishers New York, New York. 1969. pages 150-151
(3) Ibid.151-152
(4). Op. Cit. Page 109
(5). Clarke page 186
- Clarke Page 187
- Clarke Page 187-88
- Clark Page 153-165
(9) White. Pages 153-154
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