June 6, 2018: Melting in the Dark, Lonely Eyes, The Voice Remains.

“MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark
all the sweet, green icing flowing down
someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'cause it took so long to bake it
and I'll never have that recipe again
Oh no!”
----Jimmy Webb “MacArthur's Park” 1968

“Spring was never waiting for us, girl”...the song, sung by British actor Richard Harris began, “It ran one step ahead/ as we followed in the dance.” So began “MacArthur's Park” which made it's debut unto the country's A.M. Pop music radio stations late in March, 1968, following closely on the heels of Robert Kennedy's announcement that he would run for president. Soon it joined Simon and Garfunkel's “Mrs. Robinson”, Blue Cheer's remake of “Summertime Blues”, Bobby Goldsboro's “Honey”, Friend and Lover's “Reach Out in the Darkness” and the Beatles' “Lady Madonna” atop the American music charts.

The song in its tribute to lost love, was played—despite it's length (it being twice as long as the then required three minute allotted to an artist on A.M. radio), throughout the political primary season serving as a haunting backdrop to the drama that was unfolding and was, it turned out, yet to unfold. “ MacArthur's Park”, one of several hit songs written by Jim Webb for the likes of, among others, Glenn Campbell rose quickly in the charts with the assassination of Martin Luther King and was fading  by late May when it achieved a second life with the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in early June. Events, it transpired, had given the song unintended meaning; spring, we discovered all-to-late, was always one step ahead, indeed was never waiting for us. For those of us who lived through those awful events, the song hauntingly remains one of the signature pieces of cultural art perhaps best encapsulating the time.

It has been half a century now and we still haven't found that recipe. “Its a strange, strange world we live in Master Jack”, sang Four Jacks and a Jill. Rivers of blood, years of darkness mark those times from these. We have been wandering in the wilderness ever since.

“Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio

Our Nation turns its lonely eyes to you”
----Paul Simon, “Mrs. Robinson”.

Chris Matthews, who was five years old at the time, has written a biography commemorating the half-century mark since Bobby left us. What would have been; what should have been; what might have been remains forever unanswered for the tribune of the underclass, the one political figure able to unite the country remains silent. Matthews', quite rightly, points to the crowds and knots of people that lined the route of the funeral train as it slowly made its way from New York to Washington. Poor blacks and whites, midde class and working class blacks and whites, Latino's, Native Americans, men in uniform, VFW and war veterans, police and firemen, mothers with children.  High school bands, and crowds singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", school children out of class to pay their respects.  Catholic priests and nuns, and Protestant congregations.   A complete cross section of the country poured from their homes and precincts to stand in salute, to stand with hand over heart, to stand together to honor this man. Nothing in our national experience except the train taking FDR from Warm Springs, Georgia back to Washington, or Lincoln's funeral train from Washington back to Springfield, Illinois, had been witnessed by this country. Certainly no national outpouring of grief and respect had greeted a man who had never been elected President of the United States.

Bobby spoke to the country. Bobby appealed to what Lincoln called our “Better Angels”. Bobby told us that we were better than this; that we had a responsibility to each other. Bobby taught us that we are a community that is more than the sum total of individual interests.

Hunter S. Thompson mused in “Fear and Loathing: the Presidential Campaign of 1972” that the shit train began on November 22, 1963. Indeed it had. Bobby's campaign was, in some measure, a reach for national redemption, a restoration, of making things right again. But it became much more than that as Kennedy spoke directly to the divisions within the country, reminding all of us that each of us bears some responsibility not only for the existence of these divisions but for their resolutions. He challenged us to become better citizens.

“You!, You! And You! He shouted out at a medical school in Indiana, telling the assembled that they would be paying for social justice; that they were privileged to be able to attend such a school; and that their futures were assured, reminding them that they had a responsibility to the society that made such privilege possible. He did not pander. He did not cajole. Instead, he raised the level of political discourse by refusing to flatter his audience.

What might have been? Would we have continued riding the shit-train down the rabbit-hole of modern conservatism? Would the nation have suffered another 5 long years of war and the deepening divisions and erosion of confidence in governance that it produced? Would have we had the acid-bath that was Nixon and Watergate further eroding confidence in governance?

Kennedy's bust is the most ubiquitous one in Washington. It populates more congressional offices than any other. Men like Civil Rights leader and now Congressman John Lewis ask themselves “What would Bobby have done?”. The 'Radical Priest', as Alice Roosevelt Longworth once called him, the national scold, the voice that demanded the best from us was silenced in that kitchen pantry as Kennedy was holding up network reporters and newscasts as he paused to greet the hotel's kitchen staff. The tribune of the underclass, the tribune of the people.

History has a way of eliminating all other alternatives. No one can tell what might have been, but the voice remains. I can still hear that voice in my ears, echoing down the corridors of time. It's been a half-century now and the wound still hasn't healed. Our nation still turns its lonely eyes to you.

May 7, 2018: The Voice in My Ears, Indiana Can Choose, American Melodrama,

“This is Senator Robert Kennedy. Today is an important day in Indiana. Today is Election Day. I urge all registered citizens to go to the polls and vote. Vote for the candidate of your choice, but vote. Indiana can choose the next President of the United States. This is Senator Robert Kennedy”. After all these years, I still hear that voice in my ears.

Tuesday, May 7, 1968 was election day in Indiana.  It was the first presidential primary in which Robert Kennedy was on the ballot.  It marks another milestone marking the 50th anniversary of what British chroniclers Chester, Page and Hobson called "An American Melodrama, The Presidential Campaign of 1968".  It was more than that, transcending as it did the presidential campaign to include the Tet offensive, the withdrawal of, perhaps, the most powerful and influential president in our lifetime, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the riots in the streets and at convention, and the infection of the body politic that is the cancer of the American conservative movement.  On this day there was reason to celebrate as the heirs of FDR, JFK and LBJ, were in the ascendant with anti-war progressives dominating the Democratic field.  But, alas, it proved an illusion for luring in the murk was the mendacity of Richard Outhouse Nixon and everything he represented.  But all that was in the future. 

And so, without further ado, I am reposting my entry of ten years ago marking what was then 40 years wandering in the wilderness:

On or about the 3rd or 4th of May, 1968, I got my final call from the campaign to go South once again, this time in an effort to get out the vote. Kennedy was by now in a tight race with Eugene McCarthy who had established himself, after New Hampshire and Wisconsin, as a strong anti-war voice. The political landscape was further complicated by the ‘favorite-son’ candidacy of Governor Roger Brannigan. The Governor was then serving as a stalking-horse for the newly re-minted Hubert Humphrey who had entered the foray too late to file for the primaries. The campaign, sensing a possible setback, sent out a last call for us to return, this time to work until the time the polls would close. So once again I arranged some time from work, skipped a few classes, gathered up a friend of my younger brother and, with Max McPherson in tow, drove my car through the long dark night, and once again headed to the land of the Hoosier.

This time I reported to Michigan City, an industrial town situated in the Northwest corner of the state on the shores of Lake Michigan. Michigan City and neighboring La Porte, Indiana were working-class towns, surrounded by a growing rural prosperity with upper middle-class and upper class residences located in the dunes overlooking the lake. It was familiar ground to me, much like the cities in which I was raised. We arrived early Monday, finding the campaign headquarters situated downtown on Main Street near a theatre which was then playing “The Graduate”. The music of Simon and Garfunkle’s “Mrs. Robinson” filled the airwaves as we listened to the radio while making our way about town. I can remember crossing a set of railroad tracks, listening to the local news, as—in a foreshadowing of what would become common practice in later times-- a spokesman for Lyndon Johnson made references to ‘another McCarthy era’ in an attempt to smear the critic of the war. I remember shaking my head and remarking, “he didn’t say that, did he?” Not anticipating the politics of Lee Atwater or Karl Rove, I had no idea then that such tactics would become standard operating procedure, the political currency with which power would be purchased by the emerging Generation of Swine. But that was far off into the future; we had more important tasks immediately at hand.

We arrived at the headquarters and were assigned our various tasks. I went out into the neighborhoods canvassing door-to-door as I had a few weeks earlier in Marion. We returned, as before, late in the day to headquarters where Max and I were invited by a young campaign worker, who was then taking time from his studies at nearby Taylor University, to stay with his family then living in a splendid home up in the dunes overlooking Lake Michigan. There I spent a pleasant evening talking with the family about what we had done, why we had joined the cause, what brought us so far. After a morning breakfast I drove back downtown to the campaign headquarters.

It was now the first Tuesday of May, 1968. It seems strange, by today’s presidential campaign schedule, that this was the first primary election in which Robert Kennedy would make an appearance. Announcing his candidacy too late to enter the earlier contests, he had missed the important New Hampshire and Wisconsin primaries; Indiana was the first Presidential ballot upon which the name of Robert F. Kennedy would appear. Unlike the contest forty years later, the Indiana primary came near the beginning rather than the end of the process and represented the initial test of Robert Kennedy’s political reach. For this reason it was seen as an early bell weather of his support and would determine the seriousness of his candidacy.

We arrived at the headquarters and one of the campaign managers asked if he could fit my car with speakers, transforming it into a sound truck. It was a 1962 Ford Galaxy, as I remember it, a four-door brown sedan that was not-too-much the worse for wear and presentable. Someone emerged with the equipment in hand, made the necessary installations, and soon my auto was converted into another piece of campaign equipment. With the young man from Taylor University riding ‘shotgun’ we then proceeded out to tour Michigan City. We turned on the sound system and there was that voice, a message the Senator had recorded which would be played in an endless loop as we traveled through the streets of the city and through its neighborhoods. Over a span of now four decades I can still see the reactions of people as we moved among them. Children would stop playing, turn and run toward us, adults would turn and listen, fingers would be pointed, and small crowds would, on occasion, rush to gather around us as we moved among them. We smiled and waved, handed out some literature, urged those who looked old enough to vote. We were amazed, there were times when we thought we might be mobbed as people would gather around us and make moving the car forward difficult. Simply the power of his voice, by now growing familiar to America, was enough to elicit that kind of response.

This is how we spent Election Day in Indiana forty years ago. At the end of the day, as the polls were closing we debated whether we would make the journey South to Indianapolis and join the campaign’s victory party. Someone in the group knew where it was going to be held, we toyed with the idea for a while, but decided that it would make for a very long drive home. The group, which by now included not only my brother’s friend Max but also two students from Aquinas College, a catholic institution in Grand Rapids, decided that perhaps discretion would be the better part of valor and that the prudent thing would be to head home. Besides, there would be the general election, another campaign, and more victory celebrations. We waited for the election returns, did some celebrating with our friends at the Michigan City headquarters and then, taking our leave, began the long drive into the night. We arrived in Grand Rapids shortly after one in the morning; I dropped off our friends at their dorms and then headed west toward the lakeshore. I drove Max home, then made my way back into the city, down to Sixth Street, and got back into bed a few hours before the sun would rise.

“Those were the days, my friend

We thought they’d never end

We’d sing and dance, forever and a day.

We’d live a life we choose

We’d fight and never lose,

For we were young and sure to have our way”

---Mary Hopkin-- “Those Were The Days” (2)

“Indiana can choose the next President of the United States”. Fifty years ago it turned out not to be so. For half a century now we have wandered in the wilderness.  “Indiana can choose the next President of the United States”…I can still hear that voice in my ears. 

_________

1. Chester, Lewis. Hodgson, Godfrey. Page, Bruce. "An American Melodrama The Presidential Campaign of 1968." Times Newspapers and Viking Press, Inc. New York, New York 1969.  814 pages. Note:  The authors, citing the shorter Oxford English Dictionary, as Brits will do, define "Melodrama" as "a dramatic piece characterized by sensational incident and violent appeals to the emotions, but with a happy ending".   1968, it should by now be painfully apparent, did not end happily.  

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Were_The_Days_(song)

April 27, 2018: Those Were The Days, The Whirlwind, Would Forever Define

“This is a time that you will always remember; a time that will forever define who you are.”

­                 ----a local union leader, Marion, Indiana

Today, I stop and observe yet another benchmark. On this date, a Saturday a now half-century ago, I found myself in Indiana. The presidential primary election, held on Tuesday, May 7, was at hand, and I found myself in Marion canvassing for Senator Robert Kennedy. What follows is a column I wrote ten years ago in which I described where I had found myself in the whirlwind that was 1968:

As I watched Robert Kennedy give his speech at Campau Square that bright April afternoon I remember him asking if we would join his campaign and go to Indiana. I thought, at the time, that it was a rhetorical question and didn’t think any more of it. We simply nodded yes. A few days later I got a call from the campaign to do just that. The Kennedy campaign had chartered a North Star bus out of Big Rapids and gave us instructions to gather in front of the Michigan Consolidated Gas building in downtown Grand Rapids and head south to join the campaign.

It was not, given the times, a difficult decision to make. The war was raging, the nation was tearing apart at the seams, and Bobby appeared to not only have a grasp of the situation, but was the one candidate who appeared most likely to prevail in the struggle against the “establishment”—that is, the established order. My problems in joining the campaign, however, were manifold.

Grand Valley State was, in those days, a small teachers college with a growing campus located due west of Grand Rapids on the plains overlooking the Grand River at Allendale. It was founded in 1963, and graduated its first class just prior to my arrival in 1967. One of the peculiarities of the institution was that for some reason, never made clear, registration for classes occurred on a single day in which the entire student body, then numbering about 1200, would converge just off the cafeteria and sign up for classes. Over the course of time it transpired that a great number of upper classmen had not been able to register for their foundation courses by this method and, therefore, were facing a situation where they could not graduate until they had satisfied the basic course requirements. This produced a melee in which upper classmen, juniors and seniors, converged on the proceedings with slips in hand from department heads and deans, reserving positions in the 100 and 200 level classes normally taken by freshmen like myself. By the time we got to the counter there were only junior and senior level courses left to be taken. So it was that I found myself with a course load that included one basic course in economics, but an upper level class in 19th century American History, and a course in International Law.

We were on quarters then, classes lasted for a mere 10 weeks, and some History classes would have as many as 5 textbooks and require a major paper, sometimes two. At the time the institution had not yet received certification, and the demands of the classes were daunting. Needless to say this was a formidable challenge made all the more compelling by the fact that my History professor was none other that John Tevebaugh. To understand what that meant one needs to watch a few episodes of “Paper Chase”, in which John Houseman plays a law professor who is a demanding old curmudgeon. I think this role must have been inspired by John Tevebaugh. Tevebaugh was the chairman of the History department and such a task-master that seniors were known to schedule writing their thesis around John’s sabbaticals. In any case I was quickly up to my eyebrows in books as I found myself, along with Steve Peckich and Dick Merrick charged with researching and writing two 50 page papers covering the political history of 19th century America. The experience proved to be, in spite of the ordeal, one of the most rewarding classes I would take, for I was introduced to the colorful and ribald political world of New York’s Tammany Hall, the machine politics of Philadelphia and other cities, the study of such splinter groups as the ‘Barnburners’ and the ‘Mugwumps’; and began my understanding of Jacksonian Democracy as well as the later Greenback and Progressive movements.

Additionally I was up to my eyebrows in the study of International Law, researching a major paper for Dr. Junn which included the readings of jurist Hugo Grotius among many others. This was a great period, one of those seminal times in one’s life in which one is confronted with great challenge, in which one works hard not to let the grade point average suffer too greatly, but nevertheless produces quantum leaps in ability and confidence. After this experience I knew that I could handle whatever the college could throw at me, and I was off to the races.

In addition I was working two jobs, on weekends and some evenings at the old W.T. Grant department store in Grand Haven unloading trucks and stocking shelves, and on weekends at the old Starlight Drive-In Theatre between Holland and Saugatuck, as a projectionist. It was a full load to be sure. Then I got a call from the Kennedy campaign asking if I would make the journey south to Indiana and join the cause. Of course I would. I made arrangements to take some time from work, skipped some classes, and made my way to the ‘big city’ to meet the bus.

We gathered very early on Friday morning at about this time of the month and made the long bus trip down to Kokomo, Indiana where we were split up into two groups. I went along with the group that was sent on to Marion and arrived at the campaign headquarters located across from the courthouse on the town square in a scene that looked very much like the town in the film “Back to the Future”. We found our way down to the campaign headquarters; an old store-front rented for the occasion, and were introduced to the campaign organizers. We were given a list of registered voters and addresses, some brief instruction, and sent out to canvass the neighborhoods door-to-door. Indiana, in those days, presented a bit of culture shock to those of us who were still, figuratively speaking, babes-in-arms. I remember Mark Henges, a friend of mine who had likewise joined the campaign, relating the story of a lynching that had occurred a few decades earlier in the square across the street from the campaign’s headquarters. Nothing like that had ever occurred from where we came from and such tales seemed exotic and somewhat frightening. Years later I would tune in to PBS and see an account of it and recognize immediately the incident being retold. Further we were up against the political forces of the Governor, Roger Brannigan, who was originally a stand-in for Lyndon Johnson but now a stalking-horse for Hubert Humphrey. The governor had the full power of patronage on his side with state workers taking time to openly campaign for him in the primary, leaving the streets to be patrolled by packs of dogs that freely roamed the city. The campaign was worried that Brannigan, a popular Democratic governor, would win the votes of the party regulars leaving Kennedy and McCarthy to split the ‘peace’ vote. Victory was not seen then as anything like a foregone conclusion.

We went out into the neighborhoods and worked until dark, long hours going door-to-door, engaging the bewildered Hoosiers who were surprised to find people coming from so far away to elicit their support. We asked questions, we engaged in conversations, we wrote down their responses. At the end of a long day, as the sun was setting, we headed back to headquarters where we met with campaign organizers and relayed the information we had gathered. My friend Henges and his friend Larry Baker —who would transfer from Grand Rapids Junior College to Grand Valley later in the year— and Baker’s friend Keith Wakefield, suggested we get a motel room and do some serious drinking. I asked if we had any booze, and Baker, with a grin, simply gave a silent nod. We asked one of the campaign organizers, a local union official, if he knew of a good motel. Sensing that we were up to no good, and that he was looking in the face of a possible major campaign scandal—since we were all underage—if we were left unattended, he seized upon the idea and told us that he knew just the place. He then promptly drove us to a local motel on the outskirts of town. When we got there we were surprised to learn that we would be staying with the family that owned the establishment and would remain with them in their living quarters. With the much desired beer warming in Brother Baker’s suitcase, the outlook appeared grim indeed.

The four of us sat about a small table playing a game of penny-ante poker as their young teenage son sat on a small couch engaging us in conversation. With the evening winding down and the beer getting warmer, Baker suddenly turned to the lad and asked, “Would your parents mind if we all had some beer”? “I don’t think they’d mind if you had a beer”, replied the lad, adding “why, you don’t have any do you?” At that Brother Baker got up and walked over to his suitcase, opened it up and proceeded to produce several cans. He had several such containers packed full. The boys eyes lit up and he went down the hall and, explaining to his parents that we would be undressing and getting ready to retire, arranged to have the area of the house closed off.

The party began in earnest at that point. To keep our cover we continued the poker game as each of us would temporarily leave the table, guzzle down a can, and then return. Over the next few hours hands were played, and coins changed hands with an ever diminishing understanding of whose hand one was playing and whose coins one was risking. What I remember mostly was the difficulty of getting the soap from my body as I showered before finally retiring in a drunken stupor. I slept like a rock, and woke up fully refreshed and ready to go.

“Those were the days my friend

We thought they’d never end

We’d sing and dance, forever and a day

We’d live a life we choose

We’d fight and never lose

Those were the days

Ah, yes those were the days” ----Mary Hopkin “Those were the Days” (1)

Those were the days, my friend, drink like a fish and no hang-over. We awoke, our gracious hosts none the wiser served us a splendid breakfast. We were then off to campaign headquarters for a repeat of the previous day’s labor and, at the end of another long day, we boarded the bus and headed back home. Sometime early Sunday morning we returned to Grand Rapids, found our cars and made the long drive back arriving safely home as the sun was rising.

As I reflect on that time now so long ago a few more memories play upon my mind. One is the image of my friend Mark standing in the middle of an intersection surrounded by a pack of dogs, the other is the remarks of a local Marion union leader who told us that we would always remember these days; that this was a time that we would always carry with us; a time that would forever define who we are. So it was.

_______________

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Were_The_Days_(song)

April 11, 2018: R.F.K. At Campau Square, Don't Grow On Trees, Unspoken Connection

"Great leaders don't grow on trees"
                                -----Mother

It has been half a century now since Robert F. Kennedy spoke at Campau Square in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was 50 years ago today, on a day much like today, that Kennedy brought his campaign to Grand Rapids. The following is a posting on this date 10 years ago, commemorating the 40^th anniversary of his appearance:

I had received a call from a classmate several days earlier asking if I wanted to help organize a rally for the Senator. I went to Grand Rapids and was introduced to two of his advance men, Madison Avenue types dressed in expensive suits, who were holed up at the old Pantlind Hotel adjacent to the square. I spent several days working with them, arriving early each morning, passing as I did long lines of emptied bottles of scotch and bourbon, joining them for breakfast before hitting the streets. I put in several such days in the warm spring sun. This Thursday proved no exception and the event was held in what became a bright and sunny afternoon for so early in the year. The press reported the crowd to be around ten thousand, as I remember it, numbers not seen again until John Kerry made an appearance in the city 36 years later.

I fully understand the excitement of the Obama campaign. Reports of those that have attended Obama’s recent campaign rallies talk about the electricity that he generates. I know, forty years ago, I was there too. The crowd had been gathering for well over an hour first in small knots, then over time forming itself into a large mass in front of the podium. As the bus arrived there was a roar as the crowd, almost as one, surged forward. What struck me, as the Senator took the platform, was how old and frail he looked. He was thin and wan, as if he could easily have been blown away by a strong breeze. He looked much older than he appeared in pictures, much older than his 42 years. Worry lines were deeply etched into his tanned face; his hair was speckled in grey. After being introduced, Kennedy immediately established a rapport with the crowd. Knowing this was Jerry Ford’s district he asked rather impishly “I've been told this is Republican country, is that right?” to which the crowd shouted a resounding "NO!" “I didn’t think so,” replied the Senator with a toothy grin. “There aren't any Republicans here, are there?”, he asked again, and the crowd thundered “NO!” Of course everyone knew better and we all had a great laugh. Then the Senator began talking in earnest about the problems facing the country. He talked of his concern that the President had just called up more troops to be sent into the maw of war. The crowd stood in rapt attention and as he spoke a small group of protesters made a bit of noise on the periphery. He spoke for about twenty minutes about the urgent need to find a just solution to the conflict in Vietnam and the necessity to create a more equitable society. Then he stopped and leaned down to touch the crowd. Outstretched hands reached for him, relieving him of his cufflinks, a practice that was then fast becoming a ritual at each campaign stop. All too soon he stepped off the platform and disappeared into his bus and was gone. I was struck by the rapport he established with the crowd, as well as his unease at the podium. He was not a natural speaker, and was not comfortable before crowds. His voice carried an undercurrent of unease and nervousness, trembling a bit yet expressing a depth of commitment and sincerity that was palpable. His hands shook as he spoke. Here standing before us, the heir of Camelot, was a man who reached out to embrace what appeared to be at times polar opposites, and implicit contradictions. Here was a man who understood the use and misuse of power; a man with a reputation for ruthlessness, but also the tribune of the dispossessed; a man who possessed uncommon courage and was known to take great risk, but conveyed through body language a deep personal vulnerability.

I remember looking around at the crowd before and during the speech. The event was held at the center of the old town. Flanked by the Pantlind Hotel, the old Woolworth’s Building, and several high-rise office buildings that dwarfed the proceedings, his high reedy voice reverberated down the brick and concrete canyon as it passed over the crowd. Standing at the heart of town, amidst the bustle and smell of the city, Bobby conveyed nothing if not a sense of vulnerability and it was

this vulnerability that, I believe, was at the heart of the deeply unspoken connections that he made with those in the crowd.

If you were black you understood vulnerability. It was said at the time that if you were black you were the last to be hired and the first to be fired if the economy went sour; you knew the scourge of injustice and daily experienced both the visible and invisible hands of cruel fate. If you were white, especially a recent refugee who had moved from southern fields into the northern factories, you also understood vulnerability. Stints at the factory interrupted by occasional layoffs, in which one had to hustle up whatever work one could find, and feed your family on government surplus rations. Periods of precarious good times interrupted by the near terror of unemployment in which palpable fear was felt at the kitchen table as parents openly worried about where they would find the next meal. There were millions in America who knew such anxiety and vulnerability. In Bobby, despite his origins, they sensed after Dallas a kindred soul, one which the Fates had also treated cruelly. They saw in Bobby a vulnerability with different causes to be sure, but a vulnerability they immediately recognized as one with their own. This, it appeared to me, was the glue that bound together blacks and poor whites—groups living precariously and normally seen as bitter rivals for the crumbs that have dropped from the tables of the established order—behind the candidacy of Robert Kennedy. Bobby was able to convey not simply in speech but, much more importantly it seemed to me as I watched him that afternoon, through body language a sense of loss and struggle to those who found both a daily companion. To stand before us and give testimony to great loss and yet raise hope is what made him such an anomaly in American politics. This is what lent such gravitas to his call to ‘seek a newer world’ by creating a more just society. As Roosevelt’s battle with polio had humanized him, the tragedy at Dallas had transformed this son of privilege into a tribune of the people. Mother used to remind me when I was, in her estimation, too stridently critical of Lyndon Johnson that great political leaders don’t grow on trees. What she meant, of course, is that they don’t come along every day.

Indeed, they don't. It has been a half century now since we have had a leader who would take this country to the Indian reservations, the hills of Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Harlaam, Watts, the steel mills of Gary, the farmlands on the prairie. It has been a half century since we have had a leader that could span the chasms between the rich and the poor, black and white; between the young and the old, between those with education and those without: between those who were succeeding and those who were left behind. We have had, rather, in his stead a conservative movement that has had it's bony fingers about the throat of this republic for now a half a century strangling the American Dream.

“An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh.

Impeach and Imprison.

April 1, 2018: Hey Joe!, Future on Loan, April Fool

“It is as if we hold the future on loan; knowing not when it will come due.”

----from “The Quotations of Chairman Joe”

I remember waking, a half century ago, to a clear sunny morning and the songs of birds at my window. I had gone to bed the night before after watching President Johnson’s speech on Vietnam which ended in his startling announcement that he would not seek another term as President. I was elated. I hated to see Johnson leave the national scene because he had done so much for civil rights and for the poor in of this country. We have not seen his like since. But the specter of Vietnam hung over the upcoming election like the grim reaper. I had long since joined the ranks of the dissenters and had been voicing opposition to the war since late in 1965 so the candidacies of first Eugene McCarthy and then Robert Kennedy held out great hope that we would begin to change our tragic course in Southeast Asia. On this day it looked as if all things were to come to pass. It felt as if there was a new dawn in America. I remember grabbing a quick breakfast and then heading out the door unto Sixth Street toward my car heading off for classes in Allendale. I got about half way across the street when I encountered my old friend John Hierholzer. “Hey Joe!” he shouted, “What do you make of Johnson’s speech last night”? I stopped in the middle of the street as he drove his car up to me, “It looks like Bobby’s got it now!” I shouted back in glee. “There’s no one but Humphrey standing between him and the nomination, he should be able to beat Hubert”, I said. “Remember what day it is”, John admonished. “What day is it?” I asked. “April Fool’s Day” was his response. So it was.

I had first met John at St. John's Lutheran when I was in second grade. I still remember it. I was assigned my seat and behind me was seated the new kid in school who was full of questions about what to do and where to go. He kind of latched on to me and we became fast friends. I lived in the country then so we saw each other only during school, but later that year we moved into the city down by the river near the old factories and he brought me home with him a few times and introduced me to his parents. In due course we moved into the same block, our house being just around the corner. John and I went through the rest of grade school, junior high school and high school together. Upon graduation we applied to the same college so again we were classmates. On this morning we ran into each other as each of us was about to drive the thirty miles to the Allendale campus. His welcome and familiar voice always carried a note of caution, a trait he picked up from his stern German father. John was the kind of friend every mom wanted their son to be around, whenever we had the urge to do something rash or stupid one could always depend on John to point out the folly of it and make us stop and think. So when he told me it was April Fool’s Day a chill shot through me; a certain indescribable foreboding. I quickly shrugged it off marking it down as one of my friends odd remarks, for which he was so well known, hoping there could not possibly be any significance. I was wrong.

It has been fifty years now since that terrible time, that time so full of promise, that time when all our life lay before us. It was also a time in which none of us spoke about the future. At school no one asked what one's father did for a living. No one asked “What are you going to do when you graduate?”, for everything was held in abeyance, the future itself suspended in disbelief as we all awaited uncertain fate. It was as if we held the future on loan knowing not when it would come due.

For half a century now we have wandered in darkness as the Generation of Swine have squandered the national treasure. Now, this April First, we await the fool's gold mouthpiece, the hollow horn, as the quintessential Boomer, our very own Caesar Disgustus, makes a pig's breakfast of what is left of this republic.

“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”.

Impeach and Imprison.

_____________________

Note: This essay is a re-write of one posted on this day ten years ago in 2008, marking another milestone in remembrance of the year that marked the zenith of American power and prestige, but also marked, with the coming of the modern conservative movement, the destruction of the social contract as well as the beginning of the end of the American empire.

March 31, 2018: Landmark Observance, Rock and a Hard Place, Yes! Yes! Yes!

“Great Leaders don't grow on trees”

                           ----Mother

Today is yet another landmark observance of that time half-century ago when anything and everything seemed within our reach. On this date in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson addressed the nation in a speech to the nation about the war in Vietnam. The speech had become necessary in the wake of the January Tet Offensive during which South Vietnam had been temporarily overrun by insurgent forces. Images of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon under assault, and raging battles lasting weeks in the old provincial capital of Hue where street fighting was literally block, by block, house by house, door to door.

Johnson had accepted at face value, as had most of the nation, the assurances of General William Westmoreland, then commander in the field. Recent biographies have thrown doubt upon the veracity of Westmoreland as well as his role in creating illusions of victory; for he had purposely manipulated the facts on the ground in order to tell the president what he thought the president wanted to hear. Now the president would tell a nation, grown impatient and weary of war, what it so desperately wanted to hear. This, tragically, had led the president to tell the nation that there was, in his unfortunate metaphor, 'a light at the end of the tunnel'. Now, it appears, that light was nothing more than a speeding locomotive.

Much has been made in the hand-wringing in the aftermath about the lessons of Tet. Pro-war advocates still contend that the battles were a huge defeat for the Vietminh, and that the nation should have pursued its objectives in the wake of the 'victory'. But this analysis misses the point entirely. Yes, as Johnson was about to address the nation, now 50 years ago this evening, he could report the heavy casualties inflicted upon the enemy and that it would take years for Hanoi to recover. Indeed, it would be another 4 years, almost to the day, before our adversaries could mount another major offensive. But missing in this argument is that there would, inevitably, always be another and then, seven years later, finally, another.

Johnson had finally absorbed what he had always suspected. In historian Michael Benchloss' book “Taking Power”, Benchloss publishes for the first time recorded telephone conversations from the oval office in the days immediately following the assassination of President Kennedy. Here one encounters Lyndon Johnson in frank conversation with his Senate mentor Richard Russell of Georgia wondering aloud, in the fall of 1963, whether anyone—even the United States—could ultimately prevail in Vietnam. These people are a warlike people, the President told his former Senate colleague, citing Vietnamese history. President Kennedy, confronted with a crisis in neighboring Laos in 1962, had wisely demurred from military intervention. Now the drumbeat for war in Vietnam was growing and the calls that the dogs of war be loosed were becoming ever more insistent. On these recordings one can hear a deeply troubled president cite the fact that the Vietnamese had fought the Chinese for over 300 years before they finally were able to free themselves. Johnson knew, as Ho Chi Minh would later declare in 1966, that our children and grandchildren will still be fighting this war. It was always a real possibility, if not a dead --certainty. Now, Tet had confirmed his worst fears.

Johnson found himself caught between a rock and a hard place. To ask the nation for ever greater sacrifice in the defense of such a corrupt regime; a sacrifice seemingly without end was, simply, not tenable. To sue for peace was, in the wake of all the jingoistic Sabre-rattling, unthinkable.

Many historians, from LBJ biographer Robert Caro to MSNBC's Chris Matthews, have duly noted that since his days in Congress, LBJ was always writing his resignation speech. Indeed, Lawrence O'Donnell in his “Playing with Fire” a book commemorating the 50^th anniversary of that terrible year 1968, points out that several anti-war activists—Allard Lowenstein among them—were pointing out to Robert Kennedy, Gene McCarthy and anyone else who would listen that LBJ would, if push came to shove, quit.

And so it was that as a reluctant RFK pondered the times, Lowenstein and others coaxed a quixotic Minnesota Senator to enter the race, challenging LBJ in a limited number of primaries. What followed was a stunning performance in New Hampshire in which McCarthy polling at around ten percent finished with an astounding 42 percent of the vote, Lowenstein had found his peace candidate. Then, on March 16, Robert Kennedy entered the race. Now the President faced with war on one side and a surging peace movement on the other, felt the ground shift beneath him.

From the White House, Johnson addressed the nation. He had two endings to his speech. As he approached the end of the speech he signaled Lady Bird Johnson what he would say. She was the only other person who knew of the alternate ending and they had agreed upon a prearranged signal. Accordingly, as he ended his address to the nation he told the country that, in effect, Walter Cronkite was right. That there had to be a negotiated settlement. That the effort would require his undivided attention and that to do this he had to remain above the partisan struggle now unfolding in the process to choose a new president. Then he said it “ accordingly, I will not seek, nor will I accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”.

I remember watching the speech alone. My mother was in the kitchen, my step-father was working second shift. In any case, I was the family's only dissenter and in our house the “generation gap”, as it came to be known, was real and palpable. They supported the President and this was anticipated to be yet another speech on what was becoming an all-too-familiar drum-beat. I quite expected the same and when the President announced that he was sending more troops into the maw of war, my heart sank. Then, he pulled a rabbit out of his hat, inviting our adversaries to join us at the peace table. When he withdrew from the race by god I leaped from the sofa, exclaiming “Yes!Yes! Yes!” My mother asked me why I was so animated. When I told her, she looked puzzled, perplexed, crestfallen. Then she said “you know, great leaders don't grow on trees”.

An observation that was soon enough brought home.

“An' Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”

Impeach and Imprison.

March 16, 2018: Higher Standards, You! You! You! Revolutionary Priest

“

“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

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.

______________________

1. Clarke, Thurston. “The Last Campaign, Robert Kennedy and
   the 82 days that Inspired America” Henry Holt and Company
   New 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

6. Clarke Page 187
7. Clarke Page 187-88
8. Clark Page 153-165

(9) White. Pages 153-154