As all who care are aware, the first week in June marked the 55th anniversary of the assassination of U.S. NY Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Obviously, Mr. Kennedy is best known as the right hand of his brother, President John F. Kennedy; he managed his brother’s successful 1960 campaign for the presidency and thereafter served as U.S. Attorney General in the Kennedy Administration. His memory is closer to mind at present due to the recent declaration of his son, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
I was about two months into my first after-school job when Mr. Kennedy was assassinated, and a political junkie even then; thus, I actually have a somewhat clear personal memory of him – much clearer than I have of his brother, who had died five years before. I would submit that he is one of the most arresting Americans of the second half of the last century, evolving: from working for the Committee of the Communist scaremonger, U.S. WI Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s; through his years as campaign ramrod for his brother; through his years in the Executive branch, during which he was the president’s closest advisor; to his years after his brother’s assassination, when he reconsidered the American Vietnam policy he had helped fashion and became the most politically potent opponent of the war. It was because he was a Kennedy, and viewed as a tough guy, that his opposition to the war had particular credibility; no one considered him “soft.” President Lyndon Johnson only announced that he would not seek another term after Mr. Kennedy declared for the Democratic Party’s 1968 presidential nomination (the two men despised each other).
During his years as Attorney General and thereafter, Mr. Kennedy had become increasingly aware of and then outraged by the mistreatment of blacks he saw in America, and became African Americans’ most politically powerful advocate. (Dr. Martin Luther King was obviously their most notable advocate, but Mr. Kennedy had greater influence with America as a whole.) No white politician since 1900, with the possible exception of President Franklin Roosevelt, has been as intensely loved in African American community as Mr. Kennedy.
By all accounts, Mr. Kennedy wore his emotions on his sleeve – in contrast to his brother, who (similar to comments I’ve read about President Barack Obama) projected warmth on camera but reportedly was coolly analytical in private.
All that said: I would submit that any commentators you now hear intoning that we would have had a different world had Mr. Kennedy lived may well be missing the mark. Despite winning a string of 1968 Democratic party primaries after he declared his candidacy, it was a different era; he would have needed significant support of Democratic Party bosses across the country to win the nomination. The Kennedys, who derived their power from their charisma and their money, were never the favorites of the Democratic machines, who were much more comfortable with organization-dependent candidates such as Vice President Hubert Humphrey. At the same time, by entering the Democratic presidential primary contest after U.S. MN Sen. Eugene McCarthy had just scored heavily on an anti-war platform against Mr. Johnson in the New Hampshire primary – when liberals had turned to Mr. McCarthy only after Mr. Kennedy had rebuffed their earlier pleas to run against Mr. Johnson — he outraged Mr. McCarthy’s supporters [then considered the (Adlai) Stevenson wing of the party; they are today’s progressives]. In The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy, David Halberstam wrote: “In the spring of this crucial year [1968, Mr. Kennedy] had managed, because of his delayed entrance, to be at once too ruthless and too gutless for the liberals and the students, too radical for the middle class, too much the party man for some of the intellectuals, and too little the party man for most of the machines.”
Under the candidate selection process in place at the time, after Mr. Johnson’s withdrawal it was Mr. Humphrey who had the inside track to the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, not Mr. Kennedy.
Even if Mr. Kennedy had won the Democratic nomination, I would suggest that it was by no means assured that he would have defeated then-former Vice President Richard Nixon in the fall. While the nation’s grief about and warm feelings for his brother would have helped him, his opposition to the war would have cost him support among the then-core Democratic working class voters who have since morphed into Trump supporters, and he would have lost support among the liberal elites angered at what they perceived as his usurpation of Mr. McCarthy’s rightful place (a close parallel is the dynamic between the camps of U.S. NY Sen. Hillary Clinton and U.S. VT Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016). In their respective times, Mr. Kennedy and Ms. Clinton shared an unfortunate and crucial attribute: a high Antipathy Quotient. Most politicians need to get known. In their cases, everyone in America already knew them; their problem was that a notable segment of Americans actively didn’t like them. That said, perhaps — perhaps – the Kennedy nostalgia and charisma would have been enough to hold enough of the white working class and the African Americans and the Democratic Party machines and the liberal intellectuals (the latter two both detested Mr. Nixon) to win the White House; but it would have been close.
Of one thing I am as sure as I can be about the inclinations of someone I never met: Mr. Kennedy would be distressed beyond all bounds by his son’s declaration for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. It is patently obvious that any criticisms that Mr. Kennedy, Jr. makes of President Joe Biden in the coming months have the potential to ultimately redound to the benefit of the candidate of a Republican party that is now dominated by MAGA concepts of division and exclusion – diametrically contrasted with the positions his father was espousing the day he was shot.
If you have an opportunity, pick up The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy, Mr. Halberstam’s account of his time traveling with Mr. Kennedy’s last campaign. It is a short, easy read, published in early 1969. Mr. Halberstam is as smooth a writer of public affairs as I have ever read. A New York Times reporter who covered the Vietnam War – and whose reporting of the war incurred the wrath of the Kennedy Administration, including that of Robert Kennedy – he later authored The Best and the Brightest, a study of the tragic progression of America’s Vietnam policy. (Mr. Halberstam noted years later that he found it ironic that “the best and the brightest” had found its way into the public lexicon as a high compliment, when he had intended the title as a wry reflection on the fact that the intelligent elites had led America so far astray.) Mr. Halberstam also indicated before his own untimely demise in a car accident that despite some seemingly very positive descriptions of John Kennedy in The Best and the Brightest, he had never had any particular sympathy for the president; but at the same time he conceded that he had developed a deep affinity for Robert Kennedy by the time of Mr. Kennedy’s death.
McCoy's Noise 