RFK and two years on the brink
More and more 2020 is resembling 1968, a year of war, riots, and political divisions so extreme it seemed at times that the country could not survive.
Like 1968, 2020 is drenched in blood and bewilderment.
Of course, the particulars are different.
March 1968 started with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and widespread urban unrest and ended with the surprise announcement by President Lyndon B. Johnson that he was bowing out of the contest for the White House.
Between these seminal events was a fourth upheaval: an event that changed the course of the Vietnam War: the North Vietnamese/Viet Cong Tet offensive swept through the villages and cities of South Vietnam and in its wake convinced millions of Americans, watching on television back home, that there was no “light at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam — that the blood spilt by American soldiers to stem the tide of communism there and throughout Southeast Asia was a precious waste; an exercise, by policymakers, of hubris and self-delusion.
In August 1968, there were riots in the streets of Chicago, as the Democrats were nominating a presidential candidate. Chicago police clubbed and scattered and tear gassed protesters, mostly radicalized white college kids. On the convention floor, animosity flared. From the podium, a U.S. senator decried “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.” The Irish-American mayor of Chicago screamed back, as the cameras rolled, “You Jew s.o.b.”
Two months earlier, Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of the president assassinated five years earlier, himself died at the hands of an assassin. To many Americans, Robert Kennedy represented a last, best hope.
In the spring and early summer of 1968, Bob Kennedy was widely misunderstood. His character and background touched so many different strands of the American experience that he refused easy framing. He was – really was – both tough and compassionate. Good Bobby. Bad Bobby. If his brother Jack was the personification of cool, then Bobby was red hot. If his brother eschewed the extremes, Bobby seemed to thrive there.
But it was the times. Robert Kennedy was a reconciliator, or at least he might have been. In 1968, with white backlash emerging and Black Power surging, he talked and made sense to both whites and Blacks. He was cheered by Kansas farm kids. By union guys. By African-Americans. By the poor of West Virginia.
About the only people he couldn’t reach were the self-satisfied, the out and out bigots, and those who hated America.
The writer David Halberstam in his book “The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy” gives us a vivid portrait of the candidate as he campaigned in California in 1968. The place: a rally at the University of San Francisco.
“The auditorium … was dominated by [anti-war] Peace and Freedom kids. They were well-organized, angry, bitter, and they hated … Kennedy…. Victory for the Vietcong, a kid yelled.”
No, I don’t agree with that, Kennedy said.
“Victory for the Vietcong, the kid repeated.
“Later Kennedy told a reporter: those people, the ones who yell Victory for the Vietcong, I can’t help people like that, someone who hates this country. Someone who comes up to me and says, look, this and this and this are wrong, we’ve got to change it — I can help them. I can understand that, and I can understand some of the bitterness. I can understand the alienation and the 18-year old black kid who comes to me and says this country means nothing to me, I’m outside it; prove it to me, prove that it’s worth it. I can understand that. What has this country offered to a kid like that? Someone like that can be helped. But not the ones who hate it and want to destroy it. How can you help them?”
“Another kid asked a belligerent question, a question filled with hate…. Kennedy, a little tired, answered, ‘What we need in this country is to cut down on the belligerence. If we let this hatred and emotion control our lives, we’re lost.'”
Today, so many Americans hate America. Those who profess to love the country the most maybe hate it the most. There’s hate on the left and on the right. There’s hate in low places and in high — in fact, the very highest place. You cannot love America and hate democracy — hate the diversity of the country — hate and distrust free speech and free elections and free assembly — hate our flawed, glorious, embattled instruments of government; hate the long-nurtured touchstones of cultural and political life; hate equality and fairness and the rule of law.
The next several months will be dangerous ones. How the country could use a man like Robert Kennedy right now. But maybe our lucky streak is over. Maybe it’s been over. 1968 was such a long time ago.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. His latest book “JFK Rising” is available on Amazon. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.