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

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“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

May 6, 2008: “Indiana Can Choose”, The Voice in My Ears, Through the Corridores of Time

“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.

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” (1)

“Indiana can choose the next President of the United States”, Bobby had intoned. Not since that campaign so long ago has the Indiana primary figured so large in the political calculus. Forty years ago it was important because it was the first real contest among the ‘heavyweights’; this year it is important because it comes toward the end of a long and drawn-out struggle; and could perhaps be not the contest which begins the race for the Presidency, but the contest which ends the race for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.
Clinton is looking for a quick combination in which she comes close in North Carolina, where Obama had at one time a 20 point lead, and finishes him with a huge right hand by crushing him in Indiana. The latest polls show her close in North Carolina, and a 6-8 point advantage in Indiana. Given that voters who have made their decisions in the closing days of the campaign have been breaking decidedly toward Clinton, the forces of the ‘dark side’ see Indiana as the battlefield that will change the fortunes of war.

“Indiana can choose the next President of the United States”. Forty years ago it turned out not to be so. Perhaps this year will be different. “Indiana can choose the next President of the United States”…I can still hear that voice echo through the corridors of time.

Footnotes:

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

April 29, 2008: Indiana Calls Me, Back to the Future, Those Were The Days My Friend

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.

Footnotes:

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

April 11, 2008: A Sunny Afternoon at Campau Square, "There aren't any Republicans Here, Are There?", Great Leaders Don't Grow On Trees

Robert F. Kennedy at Campau Square

On this day 40 years ago, Robert F. Kennedy spoke at Campau Square in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. 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.

{Above is a rather tattered copy of a handbill, no doubt one that I had distributed in the downtown business district in and around Campau Square.  I found this on the internet, said to be in the possession of the Grand Rapids museum}

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.

December 29, 2007: Reach Out In the Darkness, Sympathy For The Devil, Requiem For Benazir

“I think it’s so groovy now
That people are finally getting together
I think its wonderful now
That people are finally getting together
Reach out in the darkness
Reach out in the darkness
Reach out in the darkness
And you may find a friend” --Friend and Lover

I was standing in line at a gas station when that song so rarely played stabbed my consciousness like hot steel on a cold night. It seems so long ago now as we approach yet another presidential election cycle, the 10th such season of promises, since that song was popular, since that terrible time when the universe came unhinged. There was a certain inexorable logic behind that season of tragedy. The nation was deeply divided between rich and poor, black and white, young and old, war and peace. The Tet Offensive had demonstrated the total bankruptcy of our war policies and the nation, after several long summers of rioting and rage was bracing itself for another “long hot summer”. Yet we had emerged strong and promising, pregnant with possibilities, challenging the established order, dreaming things that never were and asking “why not”?

First Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota emerged to challenge Lyndon Johnson for his party’s nomination. In February, McCarthy nearly defeated Johnson in New Hampshire. By mid-March Robert Kennedy, after re-assessing his situation was drawn into the race, and by the end of March Johnson announced his retirement. It seemed as if the heavens had parted and a new dawn had come to America. But throughout the season dark clouds loomed on the horizon like the ugly protesters that ringed the outer fringes of the Kennedy rallies.

I remember watching on television Robert Kennedy announce his candidacy for the presidency on March 16 from the old Senate chamber. Kennedy had been drawn into the battle much sooner than he had wanted, preferring to defer a presidential bid until 1972 or 1976. But the conflicts both at home and abroad had caused many of his friends and political supporters to look elsewhere and Bobby knew that his national stature demanded that he step forward. I watched with a certain foreboding as he picked up the mantle of his brother and began the campaign hoping for the best but fearing the worst.

As April Fools day dawned Johnson had fled the field and it seemed as if victory would come without firing a shot. But within days the long national nightmare began. Martin gunned down in Memphis and the rioting that followed, the entrance of Vice President Humphrey into the race to carry the standard of the party regulars, and finally, after winning all the remaining primaries save Oregon (which went to the anti-war McCarthy); Bobby too was gunned down as he reached for his party’s nomination. Within 90 days it was over, all that remained was to vent our rage at the convention. It was like a Greek tragedy beginning with the hubris of youth, and ending by cursing the fates; beginning with so much promise and ending with the ultimate booby prize: Richard Nixon.

“Let me please introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I lay traps for troubadours
Who get killed before they reach Bombay”--- The Rolling Stones

In this frame of mind I returned home. Going into the living room, I turned on the television and up came the financial news network. I was watching the market numbers and noticed on the crawl space a news report that former Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated following a political rally. I turned to CNN and followed the initial reports that she had died following an explosion set off by a suicide bomber. Later this was revised to include shots fired at her motorcade at close range. It felt like de ja vu all over again.

The truly redeeming quality of politics is that by participating one can experience a certain mobility otherwise unattainable. Through political action one can transcend one’s station in life and meet not only interesting, though largely self-absorbed individuals, but on occasion rub shoulders with the powerful. In 1968 I was drawn into the Kennedy campaign, first working with his advance men organizing a political rally at Campau Square in downtown Grand Rapids, and then later in Indiana running a sound truck and doing door-to-door work in Michigan City and Marion. And so it was that four years later a son of a poor factory worker found himself in a Hotel room in Cambridge Massachusetts sitting on a bed talking politics with Benazir Bhutto.

She was 19 at the time, a freshman at Radcliff, daughter of the Prime Minister of Pakistan, young, intelligent and articulate. I was 23, a senior at Grand Valley State. We were drawn together as participants in the Harvard Invitational Model United Nations held at Cambridge Massachusetts. She was representing, of course, Pakistan. I was representing, not so obviously, the United States. I was deep in my senior thesis on the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 when I received a call from Dr. Junn, the head of the political science department asking if I wanted to participate in a model U.N. sponsored by Harvard. I asked which country we would be representing and he told me the United States. It seemed a set up: why with all the colleges and universities to choose from would Harvard ask a small teachers college in western Michigan to represent the United States? The answer: Vietnam. Here was a golden opportunity for the debate teams of Harvard and Yale, not to mention several others to beat up on United States foreign policy. We would be the perfect “straw man”.

We called a meeting of the several members of our delegation and I was chosen chairman, principally because I had written several papers on Vietnam and was something of the resident expert on the subject. This made me in effect the United States Ambassador to the United Nations playing the role of then UN Ambassador George H.W. Bush. I preferred to see myself as a young Adlai Stevenson but was forced to consult the record, largely one of abstaining from votes on Security Council resolutions that characterized the Nixon White House. Fortunately I knew the history of Vietnam and American involvement in it as well as all the arguments in favor of our prosecution of the war. In addition I was an outspoken early critic of the war and knew the arguments of dissent. So it happened that I became the unanimous choice to sit at the Security Council and face the debate teams of America’s most prestigious universities.

The first day was a rough go. Villanova, representing Germany stood with us, but the school representing France bolted to our adversaries and followed the Chinese by launching an all out attack on American “imperialist” foreign policy. Represented by the University of Utah, who had spent two weeks with the Chinese delegation at the UN in New York, the debate teams of Harvard and Yale representing countries like Cuba lined up with several others to oppose our intervention in Indochina. At the end of the first of the three day session our delegation met at our hotel suite to map out strategy given that many of the participants were not faithful to the policies of the governments they were purporting to represent but were instead using the forum to express personal opinions. We determined that drastic action was needed. I asked how much money we had brought with us. Dr. Junn gave me a figure and asked why. I responded that we must now do what diplomats the world over have always done—order large quantities of alcohol and play the gracious host. In a word: PARTY!

We sent someone out for the requisite liquor and let it be known that our suite, which in due course became the entire floor, would be scene for an “international” social event. It was during a bit of banter with my friend from Utah, a slightly older man who had fought with the Montignard tribesman in Vietnam and who would later, playing the Chinese role magnificently, refer to “running dog American Imperialism” that I was elbowed by a young lady who introduced herself as the representative of Pakistan and asked if I could speak with her. We went to a room and she impressed upon me the urgency of the United States introducing a Security Council resolution concerning India and, if memory serves, had something to do with Kashmir. I told her I would do the best I could and we talked for some time about Pakistan and its relations with her neighboring countries, Kashmir, and the United States.

The next day I met with her again, but unfortunately things were tight at the Security Council as I struggled to stave off a full fledged assault on the United States. Benazir stopped by and importuned me once again but I tried to explain that I had greater problems to deal with at the moment. She left disappointed. Finally, midway through the second session, the Council voted by a majority of one to strike Vietnam from the agenda. We had dodged a bullet but there were still issues in South Africa, Rhodesia, and elsewhere that consumed the time. Mostly it was theatre. I had stopped while walking through the “yard” and bought a socialist rag being hawked by a vendor which I read whilst the Chinese “Ambassador” from Utah railed on about “American Capitalist Imperialist Aggressors”. The Chairman of the Security Council, who was in real life a legal counsel to the United Nations, asked me in a terse Eaton accent if the United States had any response. I remember saying’ as I peered up from my worker’s party rag, “It is the position of the government of the United States that the ranting of the honorable ambassador from the People’s Republic is unworthy of comment and that if he is interested in serious boilerplate I have a copy of an excellent publication he might find informative”. In any case events dictated that Pakistan would not emerge as a major player as long as the Cold War lasted. I had tried to teach an important lesson in international politics: that the United States has no friends, it has only interests and that United States support could be uncertain.

But it was not Benazir’s nature to remain undeterred. Critics, and there were many in Pakistan, saw her re-emerge as a political figure too closely allied with the United States. She had promised to allow the Americans to use Pakistani territory to establish bases of operations against the growing lawlessness in the tribal provinces along the Afghan border where Bin Laden is believed to have taken refuge. But most importantly she represented, as her father before her, an attempt to transform Pakistan from tribal Feudalism into a modern secular liberal democratic state.

I sensed all those years ago that Benazir was in large measure enamored with all things American, attending an American university, adopting western dress, and with her father attempting to impose a western style republic on a tribal culture. I felt then it was risky business. Many transformational political figures have paid the last full measure for their effort. The Gracci brothers in ancient Rome, Julius Caesar for creating pax Romana, Lincoln, the Kennedy’s; and in her own part of the world Mahatma Gandhi, Neru, Indira and Rajib Gandhi, her own father. I watched with a certain foreboding as she went home to once again pick up the mantle of her father, hoping for the best but fearing the worst; and as I watched her bloody return from exile I told my wife that Benazir was going home to die. It had the inevitability of 1968 about it, as certain as the setting sun.

Go gently into that good night Benazir Bhutto; we are left now to reach out in the darkness.