"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 40th 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.
