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Bobby Kennedy: In Memory Yet Green
Thirty-nine years ago today, I came of age. I was seventeen, about to graduate from high school and I had spent that exhilarating spring volunteering for Senator Bobby Kennedy's campaign. I wasn't old enough to vote but I could make myself useful so I stuffed envelopes. Working on the campaign gave me the opportunity to meet him.
Then as now, the reporters focused on the superficial aspects of the candidates. They made jokes about the size of his family—12 children and one on the way. "Ask not if Bobby Kennedy is big enough for the White House," went one, "ask if the White House is big enough for Bobby Kennedy!"
The media were obsessed with Senator Kennedy's hair; he had a lot of it and it was always tousled and needed to be cut. I remember one night when he came to a local TV station in San Francisco. He came in exhausted, pale and particularly hirsute but he was very intense; charisma emanated from him.
At seventeen, I was not politically sophisticated. His competitor, Senator Eugene McCarthy's icy idealism did not attract me, but Senator Kennedy's warmth and compassion drew me in before I really understood anything about politics. In particular, I was drawn to him after passing a billboard on my daily bus ride to school through the Fillmore, a black district in San Francisco. It showed him holding a little black boy in his arms with the caption, "Some see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not." He was white but he saw African Americans and Latinos; he really saw us. For all his faults, even today I am struck by the depth of his empathy for the poor and disenfranchised.
The first time I saw Senator Kennedy in person was in Delano where one of my teachers volunteered with the nascent Farm Workers Union. I still have the photograph of him with the UFW flag in the background. Seeing him standing shoulder to shoulder with Cesar Chavez, we could dare to imagine that the terrible inequalities that racial and ethnic minorities suffered could be obliterated if this man became president. He gave us hope.
On June 5, 1968, just after he won the California primary, he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian nationalist who shouted "I'm doing it for my country!" Twenty-six hours later, he died of his wounds and the hope of a generation died with him. The image of Senator Kennedy lying in a pool of his blood on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel haunts my dreams; I wish I could forget it.
On June 8, when his body was carried by a funeral train from the funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York to Arlington National Cemetery, the full impact of his death hit me. Dreams don't always come true; good people can be cut down by the evil ones; true equality for people of color will never come. That is what coming of age is: The loss of one's innocence once and forever.
I was thirteen when we lost President John F. Kennedy to an assassin; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered less than two months before Senator Kennedy. And finally, when Senator Kennedy died, the full horror sank in— would anyone as brave, as wise, ever come forward to lead us?
At his funeral, Teddy Kennedy, the last remaining Kennedy brother, said,
"My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.
"Those of us, who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world.
"As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: 'Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.'"
Today I see his faults and recognize the many ideological conflicts I would have had with him. In my starry-eyed idealism, I could not see them at seventeen. Still, I wonder what our lives would have been like if Senator Kennedy had lived to serve as president of the United States. Would we have gone deeper into Vietnam? What if the 58,000 dead had lived normal lives, given birth to children and would now be coming upon retirement? What if there were no homeless veterans on our streets and downtown doorways?
Will we ever find another president who dreams of a better world and asks why not?
Oh sad, sad day.
Rosa Maria Pegueros (pegueros@uri.edu) is an associate professor of Latin American History and Women's Studies at the University of Rhode Island.
8 Comments so far
Show AllI'm about halfway through Sy Hersh' _Dark Side of Camelot_
Ms Pegueros should read this!
Although I am no Oprah fan, one afternoon I caught her interviewing the "Kennedy clan" and she asked about their dedication to public service. They explained it by virtue of the St. Thomas admonition, "To the one much is given, much is expected." That family HAS dedicated much of its time and life-force to righting wrongs, and I think Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. the environmentalist lawyer is another rising star. Contrast this family's often altruistic acts (I know Granddaddy had a mixed reputation) with those of the Bush family. How many recall the Mother Jones cover story that had a hand cluthing dollar bills and a Bush figure on each finger, with the adage, "Bush family values."
The days when presidents--and presidential candidates--were concerned about the wellbeing of the people, instead of the corporatist pigs who now are in such complete control of our benighted nation, are gone forever--at least under this "constitutional" regime.
There will be no change, and no salvation for us, until things get so bad that people are shocked out of The Matrix they are living in, and dump CNN, CBS, ABC, FOX, and all of the corporatist-fascist media and the theocrats who suborn their various crimes. But that's a Catch-22: The people who are immersed in Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears and the latest horrific crime by some escaped mental patient and whatnot are not CAPABLE of breaking free, and won't be until they are weaned from their Mainstream-Media fantasy.
God help us--and She probably doesn't exist...
Thank you DaveE: Anyone interested in the real Kennedys, as opposed to the myth, should read The Dark Side of Camelot. Hersh is rightly famous for his scrupulous research. We all know about the shady past of their father, but RFK's association with Senator Joe McCarthy's crazy anti-Communist crusade is not widely known. And even if one takes RFK's civil rights and anti-war epiphany--which happened after JFK's assassination--at face value, the fact is that these guys were not the righteous choirboys so idealized by the media and the masses. JFK, in particular, would probably have been impeached if he had not been assassinated, if only for buying the election in my home state of West Virginia (but there was so much more). And still, the myth lives on....
The writer speaks of his idealism and it is idealism more than specific individuals that I believe we mourn. Both JFK and RFK were men, flawed and wonderful, and we mourn them because both were able to inspire hope and the idealism to imagine we could build a better world.
Those seeking Leadership today, seem more intent on the power of control, than leading us to a better world. They make the leaders of yesterday seem heroic in comparison... but for all of that, it takes more than a figurehead to make a viable democracy - it takes a nation of people involved and committed to the ideals of Freedom and equality..
Good points Mainstay. Bildad, even with their blemishes, that family GAVE to America, and the Bush's just take, steal, plunder and raise bombastic thunder! (This sentence best heard in Jessie Jackson cadence.)
Sorry, bildad, but you either weren't around in '68 or you have some memory loss going on. RFK wasn't portrayed as a "righteous choirboy" at the time. The one word that was consistently used to describe him in the media was "ruthless". Everybody knew about his role as JFk's hatchet man/ enforcer and his past with McCarthy (Joe) was hardly a secret. But I think Mainstay has nailed it that it's Bobby's idealism that we miss and that seems so unattainable today.
I was actually a Gene McCarthy fan and one of those who resented RFK as an "opportunist" for jumping into the race after Johnson threw in the towel. But when Bobby was killed, my reaction was the sick feeling that anyone who had the courage to stand up, tell the truth, and speak out for freedom was never going to be allowed to make a difference. And since then anytime anyone with that kind of promise appears, I dread picking up a paper or turning on the TV news to hear that they too have been taken from us.
You don't have to believe in conspiracy theories to know that the media continually set us up for disappointment by building up politicians so they can then tear them apart by showing us their faults. We need people to realize that any human being has faults and inconsitencis - Jefferson's slaves, FDR's internment of Japanese-Americans, JFK's sex life - but that is not what's important. What IS important is whether they appeal to OUR better impulses instead of playing on our fears and insecurities which is the absolute hallmark of the current occupant of the White House.
I like Obama mainly because he touches me in the same way Bobby did so long ago. He has admitted plenty of past behavior that will surely be used against him by the right and the media sheep. Let's hope that he can stand firm against that slime and help us to recapture some of that lost idealism.
Ms Pegueros youthful impression was real. So were the Kennedy's and their ideals. Four decades of relentless disinformation and lies about JFK and RFK has made us lose sight of the truth about these martyred leaders, who unlike the current occupants of the white house were democratically and legitimately elected. The only way they could be stopped was with a bullet. Forget Sy Hersh and his Dark Obsession about Camelot. He got it wrong. It was never about that.
If you want to really understand the Kennedys, the Sixties and where we are today read "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years" by David Talbot. This brilliantly written, thoroughly researched and documented work reveals the truth about those years as no author before ever has. Based on hundreds of interviews with both Kennedy insiders and opponents, this radical history pulls no punches about the Kennedy Brothers, their politics and the Cold War culture they set out to confront. Their murders were a direct result of this confrontation.
This is the first book to fully explain the events of those years and the consequences the Kennedy assassinations have had on our democracy and our history. You cannot fully understand where we are as a nation and what we have yet to confront about our history and our political system until we come to grips with the truth about those years. This book is a good place to start.