In
honor of RFK’s 90th birthday, Jeff Greenfield, who worked as one of his
speechwriters, explains why his legacy still looms so large.
He
has been dead five years longer than he was alive. More than two-thirds
of Americans were not yet born when he was killed, and if you were old
enough to have voted for him the year he sought the Presidency, you’ve
been on Medicare for at least three years. To remember that he was born
ninety years ago is to understand just how long ago he died—and perhaps
to remember as well that he was the third brother to die violently
before his 50th birthday. When Press Secretary Frank Mankiewicz
announced his death, standing atop an automobile outside a Los Angeles
Hospital, he ended with a sentence that encompassed despair and rage:
“He was 42 years old.
So why does Robert Kennedy
remain so powerful a loss for so many who remember him—and, remarkably,
for so many who know him only in the images they see in retrospective
histories. For his detractors—and they are legion—it is little more than
the rose-colored distortions of sentimentalists or naive liberals. For
his acolytes, it is the loss of what would have been a Restoration, a
return to the earlier years of the 1960s, before the War, before the
racial and cultural divides that cleaved a country. (As one sign had it
during a Kennedy rally in Indiana in 1968: “Camelot Again.)
It
was the very first election in which I could vote. As a kid, I had
campaigned for JFK. It was a school assignment, but I would have done
it anyway. My sister and I had a box full of pins and stickers that we
could not give away in our Republican town. If my mother hadn't pitched
them when we moved, they might, later, have helped finance my way
through grad school. But as joyous as I was that my candidate won that
election, and as destroyed as I was by his assassination, my support for
Bobby Kennedy was never predicated upon a return to Camelot. So I
disagree with Mr. Greenfield on that point. I also disagree with his
header because Bobby Kennedy did not die. He did not just fall and
expire on the floor of the hotel kitchen. He was felled by an assassin.
Murdered. Other than those two points, I agree with Mr. Greenfield
and appreciate his reminder that we would be wishing Bobby a Happy 90th
under more fortunate circumstances.
I was an anti-war person and
had spent months following and helping Eugene McCarthy's campaign. He
was not all that likable, sort of dry, and I really was not paying a lot
of attention to his platform except that most of it consisted of ending
the war. That was why I backed him... until St. Patrick's Day 1968,
the day Robert Francis Kennedy threw his hat in the ring also on an
anti-war agenda. I flipped like a Solo cup.
On the campaign trail,
Bobby was a powerful and effective speaker and could get very riled
over injustice. He took up the cause of migrant farm workers, and we saw
him on the back of pick-up trucks parked in the fields. Cesar Chavez
would be beside him, and he would be wearing that jacket that was always
too loose. It was Jack's and too big for him. He always looked a
little sad, no matter how jubilant and funny he might be, and there was
that jacket on him that broke my heart.
Bobby was livelier,
wittier, and much better prepared, as Greenfield points out, from his
days in the White House, than Gene McCarthy could ever have hoped to
be. It was easy to be enthusiastic about him. His agenda was broader
than McCarthy's with social justice planks. He appealed to our better
selves. When we lost him, we lost all of those things Mr. Greenfield
mentions. I lost all hope for the 1968 election. My first vote was a
robotic one for Hubert Humphrey who lost. I thought we had already lost
back in June.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan won Bobby's senate seat. A
brilliant college senior wrote a thesis in which she analyzed some of
Moynihan's senate initiatives along with the effects of certain
government programs on his constituency. LBJ waged a war on poverty,
and there was a lot of controversy around government programs at the
time. On page 76, she compared "decentralization" in Ocean
Hill-Brownsville (Moynihan's constituency) with "unconstitutionalism" in
Little Rock. She had no idea when she wrote that sentence that she one day would be First Lady of Arkansas and later occupy the seat
Moynihan had inherited from Bobby thus representing Ocean
Hill-Brownsville herself.
In Arkansas and in her campaign for and
service as New York Senator, Hillary Clinton's similarities to Bobby
emerged loud and strong. Her interest in improving the schools, her
attention to "the little people" - the ones who cannot finance anything
for a politician - were Bobby's interests. She had a value added. She
saw the degree to which the role and rights of women impacted families
and the economy and always put families, parents, and children at the
core of her efforts. She listened to people. She visited farms and
small, post-industrial towns. Like Bobby, she was called a
carpetbagger, but she won that seat - twice - and served the people of
New York and the United States with vigor and honor. In 2008, 40 years
after Bobby, she was my candidate. Truly the first to have won my
heart in the way Bobby had - to the extent Bobby had - no, even more,
she was and is Bobby plus. I have always said that about her.
Jeff
Greenfield is right. We lost a great deal - in our history - when we
lost Bobby. We cannot know what he might have done. We cannot know what
kind of party we might have today had he survived. It was a loss, a
huge one. It is most unusual to be given a second chance. We had that
with Hillary in 2008, and it did not go our way. A few weeks after
suspending her 2008 campaign, she was, as she had promised to be, on the
campaign trail for the presumed nominee. (Many supporters peeled off
for that, but that's why we love her. She keeps her word.) When I say
"trail," I mean she was in muddy fields in California with migrant farm
workers. Just like Bobby.
Now we have yet another opportunity.
Hillary is the candidate. She is the one who will do things Bobby would
have and more. I am not saying she is exactly like him, she is not, but
they were/are kindred spirits. He would have loved her. I cannot help
thinking that. We have one more chance to elect someone who fights for
ordinary hard-working Americans - for us. Like Bobby, she has been in
the White House and knows the ropes.
In the same way Bobby was not
running to finish his dead brother's term, Hillary is not running for
her husband's third term. She is running for her first term.
Supporting Hillary is the best tribute we can pay to Bobby's memory in
my book. She is that voice of which Mr. Greenfield speaks.
Democratic
U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton delivers remarks to gun
violence prevention advocates at the Brady Center's annual Brady Bear
Awards Gala in the Manhattan borough in New York, November 19, 2015.
Hillary Clinton is the recipient of the inaugural Mario M. Cuomo
Leadership Award. REUTERS/Stephanie Keith
