He was not a hero, only a hope; he was not a myth, only a man. But to have been a hope and a man in America during the 1960s was to be something special.—From Robert Kennedy: A Memoir by Jack Newfield

PROLOGUE

I went to bed the night of June 4, 1968 with the optimism that only the young possess. The early returns from the California primary were encouraging, and U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was on the verge of a hard-won victory that would clearly position him as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Or so I believed.

I brought a book to bed with me, the latest in a long series of biographies of Bobby Kennedy that I devoured from the White Plains, N.Y., Public Library during the spring of Kennedy’s last campaign. This one was titled Robert Kennedy at 40, by the veteran newsmen Nick Thimmesch and William Johnson. I remember my mom stopping by my room to say goodnight as I was reading, and expressing confidence that all would be well. I had no idea at the time that Kennedy would only live to age 42.

I awoke in the morning to the sound of my mother crying. She broke the news to me that Kennedy had indeed won the California primary, but moments later, after making his victory speech, he had been gunned down. He was clinging to life, but there didn’t seem much cause for hope.

Tears welled up in my eyes and I started crying. I couldn’t believe it was happening again. I had been in elementary school when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas, and was glued to the television set throughout the days of mourning that followed. I remember we had been at a museum in New York City on Sunday, Feb. 21, 1965, and hearing the news on the car radio that Malcolm X had been murdered. And just two months earlier, on April 4, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been gunned down in Memphis.

Now, it was Bobby Kennedy. I wore my RFK campaign button to Highlands Junior High School the next day, as I had every day since Kennedy announced his candidacy in March. Friends and acquaintances tried to offer condolences, but when I attempted to talk, I just started crying and neither of us knew what to say or do.

As he struggled for his life after he was shot, I tried to find hope in Bobby Kennedy’s well-known toughness. And he did indeed hold on to life for another day, before succumbing to his wounds on June 6, 1968.

I had been a student volunteer in Kennedy’s campaign. The Saturday before the California primary, I had distributed leaflets supporting Kennedy in downtown White Plains for the New York primary to be held later in the month, and helped out in the White Plains campaign office. The next year, my junior high English class had a writing assignment to describe a particularly happy day in our lives. That was the day I wrote about.

In all the years since, that uniquely American, bleak passion play has become an annual ritual for me as the calendar turns to June. It begins in joyous triumph, with Kennedy’s victory in the California primary for the Democratic presidential nomination. But the triumph is short-lived, as Kennedy is gunned down, lying in a pool of his own blood on the kitchen floor of the old Ambassador Hotel, his head cradled by a Mexican busboy named Juan Romero, offering comfort.

However, in this passion play, on the third day, there is no resurrection of the hope that RFK brought to so many poor and working-class Americans—Black, white and Hispanic. Only the finality of death, and the death of yet another dream.

During the internet age, I have searched online each year as June 4^th approaches to see what, if anything, is still being written about Bobby Kennedy, if he is remembered by any but the generation that lived through his final campaign—my generation. To see if there are people who understand how important a leader he was, how critical a crossroads the United States faced in 1968, and how that trail of assassins’ bullets that started with JFK and ended with RFK set us on a path marked by bigotry, hate and fear that continues to stain our politics today.

This year, however, when I Googled “Robert F. Kennedy,” Google, as it is wont to do, added an unrequested “jr.” to the name I typed. I know it’s just algorithms and SEO, reflecting the most popular search terms by sparing us the undue burden of actually typing them in ourselves. But I was stunned and angered that Junior (I will not contribute to the algorithms and search results) had usurped his father’s legacy in the digital realm. Much as he tried to usurp his uncle’s legacy with a tasteless Super Bowl ad that angered Kennedy family members for its tawdry mimicry of a John F. Kennedy ad from his successful1960 presidential campaign.

One hallmark of the Kennedy clan has always been fierce loyalty to family and friends. The fact that more than 30 of Junior’s own flesh and blood have publicly endorsed President Joe Biden’s reelection is telling about his ego trip masquerading as a campaign.

Junior has carved out his political brand as an anti-vaccine activist spreading misinformation about everything from measles to autism to COVID-19, embracing and spreading tin-foil hat conspiracy theories along the way. And then there is the bizarre tale contained in Junior’s own words in a 2012 deposition given during his divorce from his second wife concerning how a worm got into his brain, ate a portion of it, and was later discovered dead there by doctors.

I do not come to bury Junior, but to make an attempt to refocus attention on his father’s life and legacy, which I fear are in danger of receding into the digital swamp. I set out to write as clearly and passionately as I could about why Robert F. Kennedy still matters, what we as a nation lost that June night 56 years ago, and how his compassion and authenticity in advocating for and seeking to unite poor and working-class people across race, religion and whatever else is used to divide us can still shine a light on a better path forward to a newer world.

Then, I came across an editorial I wrote in 1993, for the Pottstown Mercury, on the 25^th anniversary of Kennedy’s death. As I re-read it for the first time in a long time, I realized that I’ve already written what I have to say, perhaps better than I could now. And what struck me hardest was that, aside from the passage of 31 years, very little has changed. If anything, the bigotry, hate and fear have continued to metastasize.

So here is that editorial, exactly as it appeared on Sunday, June 6, 1993. I wish with all my heart that it was more upbeat, more optimistic, more hopeful. Sadly, that only would have rendered it less honest.

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25 Years after death of Robert Kennedy

In the majestic stillness of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the deep divisions that had violently torn the country apart in the spring of 1968 were temporarily bridged by grief.

Under the harsh glare of television lights, it became painfully clear one last time exactly what Robert Francis Kennedy meant to the nation.

In his brief run for the presidency, Kennedy had pulled together blacks, whites and Hispanics. Young and old. Farmers and factory workers. Radical leftists and old-guard politicians.

As his body lay in state in a simple mahogany casket, there was Richard Daley, the iron-fisted mayor of Chicago, crying uncontrollably. Later, sitting in a back pew with his green Havana cap sticking out of his pants pocket, there was revolutionary leader Tom Hayden, weeping.

In just two months, Hayden and Daley would be opposing generals in the bloody battle of Chicago at the Democratic National Convention.

In his excellent book, “Robert Kennedy: A Memoir,” the writer Jack Newfield recalled watching the long line of people patiently waiting to file past the casket, and how he thought of a quotation from Pascal that Camus invoked at the start of “Resistance, Rebellion and Death,” a book that Kennedy had read and reread several times.

“A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.”

That was Robert Kennedy’s unique gift, and in the 25 years since he was gunned down at age 42, the pain of his loss has only grown.

• • •

Rarely in history have triumph and tragedy been so intertwined as they were the night of June 4, 1968.

As Robert Kennedy walked into the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the crucial California primary, all things seemed possible.

It already had been an extraordinary political year, one that saw an incumbent president — Lyndon B. Johnson — face a rebellion within his own party ranks over the war in Vietnam.

A little-known senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, had challenged the president when others — including Kennedy — considered it folly. But then came the Tet offensive in January 1968, and suddenly the Viet Cong were in Saigon, firing on the American Embassy.

Kennedy decided to enter the race, but McCarthy staked his claim to the hearts of the young with a stunning showing in the New Hampshire primary.

By the end of March, Johnson shocked the nation by withdrawing from the race. The battle between McCarthy and Kennedy grew increasingly bitter, as then-Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey waited in the wings, hoping to steal the nomination without dirtying his hands in the primary fray.

Kennedy won Indiana and Nebraska, but suffered a setback in Oregon. It all came down to California.

In his acceptance speech the night of the California primary, Kennedy optimistically told his cheering supporters: “I think that we can end the divisions within the United States.”

Then, he sounded the theme that defined his campaign. “What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis, and that what has been going on within the United States over a period of the last three years — the division, the violence, the disenchantment with our society; the divisions, whether it’s between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups or on the war in Vietnam — is that we can start to work together.”

In the sweltering ballroom, the crowd chanted, “We want Bobby. We want Bobby.” The center of their adulation left the platform and, making a last-minute detour, headed out through the kitchen pantry.

• • •

We will never know what would have happened if Robert Kennedy had taken another exit route that night. The gunshots fired by Sirhan Sirhan unalterably changed history.

It is by no means certain that Kennedy would have claimed the Democratic nomination for president in Chicago. But if he had, and if he had gone on to defeat Richard Nixon in November, we would almost surely live in a different country today.

In the years since Kennedy’s death, the divisions, the disenchantment and the violence he sought to end have only grown deeper. With Kennedy as president, there might be 27,000 fewer names on the granite wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Watergate would merely be an office complex in Washington, D.C., and Kent State would just be a Midwestern university. The polarization between the races, and the rising tide of hate crimes, may have been averted.

We’ll never know. But there is something we do know, a sad and terrible truth that Newfield wrote of a quarter century ago.

“Now I realized what makes our generation unique, what defines us apart from those who came before the hopeful winter of 1961, and those who came after the murderous spring of 1968. We are the first generation that learned from experience, in our innocent twenties, that things were not really getting better, that we shall not overcome. We felt, by the time we reached thirty, that we had already glimpsed the most compassionate leaders our nation could produce, and they had all been assassinated. And from this time forward, things would get worse: our best political leaders were part of memory now, not hope.”

• • •

Just a month before his death, British television personality David Frost taped an interview with Kennedy. Toward the end, Frost asked him: “How would you like to be remembered? What would you like the first line of your obituary to say?”

Kennedy responded softly, “Something about the fact that I made a contribution to either my country or those who were less well off. I think again back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this? I’d like to feel that I’d done something to lessen that suffering.”

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EPILOGUE

At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in 1964, the pain and grief of his brother’s assassination still raw, Robert F. Kennedy closed his tribute to our nation’s slain leader with these words:

When I think of President Kennedy, I think of what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet: “When he shall die take him and cut him out into stars and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.”

In this election year, let us pay no worship to the garish son. Instead, let us re-dedicate ourselves to Robert F. Kennedy’s vision to relieve suffering and hunger; to combat poverty through jobs and a living wage; to champion the rights of all, including Native Americans and Mexican farmworkers; to work together to unite, not divide; and to keep our nation from waging unjust wards.

Maybe it’s too late. To understand the opportunity we lost in 1968, we need only reflect on the studies that showed that many blue-collar, white voters who cast their ballots for Kennedy in the Indiana primary voted for the racist former Alabama Gov. George Wallace in November.

But we have to at least try. Because, as Kennedy told David Frost in that long-ago interview, “If you do not do this, then who will do this?”

CODA