Robert F. Kennedy: What if He Had Lived? -- A Golden Age That Never Was

40 years ago today Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the world turned into a darker, meaner place in the decades that followed.

As a young student at Columbia University off for the summer, I was to join the RFK campaign staff the following week.

The spring of 1968 had been exhilarating and tumultuous.

Gene McCarthy was running an energetic anti-war campaign against the carnage in Vietnam. Martin Luther King had been assassinated in April. Students were protesting all over the country and the world. (See previous post)

In March, Bobby Kennedy, with great anguish, decided to contest the nomination of a powerful sitting president, Lyndon B. Johnson. Facing angry crowds wherever he went, and on the verge of losing the Wisconsin Primary, Johnson declared that he would not seek re-election. Shortly thereafter, Vice President Hubert Humphrey announced his candidacy, but declined to enter the primaries, relying on party bosses to deliver the needed delegates.

In the last week of May, McCarthy, and his army of idealistic young people, students, and intellectuals, astonishingly beat Kennedy in the Oregon Primary. The results of the June California primary would decide whether Kennedy's quest for the nomination was at all viable. Robert Kennedy was relying on the more traditional voting blocs of the excluded -- Latinos, Blacks, and working class and poor whites.

On the night of the California primary, I stayed up until 3 AM waiting on the final results. After Kennedy's victory speech, I dozed off in a contented sleep. Minutes later, a commotion on television woke me up. Kennedy had been shot in the head. Nobody knew anything, but everybody knew everything. The nightmares began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't stay awake. I kept waking up thinking it was all a dream..... but the television was still on.... He was shot in the head.....He was shot in the head..... over and over again...until he finally died 26 hours later.

The images of Kennedy lying in a pool of his own blood in the Ambassador Hotel kitchen are forever seared into my brain.

Is it possible that the act of one mad man could so drastically alter the course of history?

With the hindsight of 40 years, I can clearly see how different the world would have been had Bobby Kennedy lived. His assassination was even more significant, and ruinous, than the deaths of his brother, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King Jr.

Kennedy's untimely death came at a time when the world was on the cusp of transformative change -- between Cold War enemies and post Cold War non-violence, between authoritarian societies and social and political justice -- and much of that change was stalled in the US for decades to come.

In the five years after his brother was shot, RFK had witnessed a society in turmoil.

The success of the Civil Rights movement -- and the hope that it had begotten -- inspired and empowered students all over the world. Evil -- in the form of racism, sexism, cold war colonialism -- could be challenged and defeated. and it was our duty, as the children of a prosperous society, to question everything.

A Global uprising of exhilarating hope -- that change was possible -- spread to students round the world -- amplified by television images and electronic media reports as never before. The protests leapt from country to country like wildfires feeding on each other.

It was the time of the Prague Spring and, later that summer, there were massive protests against Soviet oppression in Czechoslovakia. There were student demonstrations in Poland (against Soviet domination), Italy, Germany, and Mexico (against a feudal ruling class), to name a few.

In France, 40 million students and workers went on strike for the entire month of May, protesting the Algerian war and worker injustices.

And Robert Kennedy, a compassionate Catholic already appalled by injustices towards the disenfranchised, was inspired by the possibilities.

He picked up the torch and rhetoric of the times: "Let us not have tired answers."

"Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream of things that never were and say why not."

Kennedy was the perfect messenger, the royal heir, who could bridge the divide between the old world and the newly emerging one. He had strong ties to the traditional Democratic Party machine that had elected his brother and yet, was able to harness the energy, anger and hope that the post-WW II generation -- the largest ever -- was producing.

RFK was a rare mix of radical compassionate ideas, somewhat conservative personal values, self sacrifice, self discipline, stoicism and patriotism, rooted in moral conviction, but he was also perfectly in tune with his times.

He had a perpetual sense of outrage at the racial, political, and social injustices that were crippling our country.

For most political observers there is no question that Bobby would have won the nomination. After winning the California primary, RFK was a scant 108 delegates behind Humphrey. He was picking up momentum, sucking the air from the McCarthy crusade. McCarthy supporters would have united with the Kennedy delegates. Kennedy had a unifying idealism, that would have brought the party together and probably even won the support of the machine politicians like Mayor Daley.

And Kennedy would have also beaten a flawed and awkward Richard Nixon.

As it happened, the chaos and violence of that summer's Chicago Democratic convention triggered a backlash that insured Nixon's narrow victory over Humphrey. Nixon's trump card was a "Secret" plan to end the war.

But despite Nixon's "Secret Plan," the Vietnam War continued on for another seven years, at a cost of 38,000 more young American lives.

The nasty Nixon era was followed by a dreary progression of conservative, uninspiring leaders -- Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Bush.

The grand dreams and hopes of 1968 were gone.

Almost immediately after the spring assassinations, the movements that had sprouted in the sixties began to splinter, and parts turned violent. The civil rights movement spawned the Black Liberation Front and thuggish elements of the Black Panthers. Some SDS fringe groups evolved into the occasionally violent Weathermen.

But if Robert F. Kennedy had lived...

It is an irresistible, tantalizing, and admittedly unanswerable question.

But I can dream Nixon would have faded away. George McGovern would not have been nominated in 1972; the Democratic Party would not have splintered. Jimmy Carter would not have been elected president in 1976.

Kennedy would have brought us to a golden age of justice, judicious legislation, a compassionate Supreme Court. Nixon and Ford nominated and confirmed five conservative Supreme Court Justices.

Kennedy would have been more supportive of the environmental movement, (The Kyoto treaty would have been signed), the women's movement, and the gay rights movement.

Kennedy's aide and speechwriter, Peter Edelman, has said that there is no question that RFK would have negotiated an early end to the Vietnam War by 1969 and worked hard toward racial reconciliation and the narrowing of the income gap at home.

Kennedy would have adopted a wiser, more restrained foreign policy, (more like the advanced Europeans countries of today) and would not have felt the need to aggressively bully the rest of the world

With a calming of the international waters -- and abandonment of the belief that our great military might and wealth could impose an American solution to every international problem -- foreign relations would have been far less tumultuous. The American Embassy in Iran might not have been seized; the oil crisis and the recessions of the seventies and eighties would have been milder, without the additional seven years of crippling Vietnam War debt.

We would have developed a different, easier relationship with the rest of the world. Gentler, not so overbearing.

RFK has a continuing, extraordinary hold on our imagination, not because he was a martyr, but because he, (and his brother) represented a hope.

The Golden years that might have been continue to haunt us.

If Kennedy had lived, I don't believe that we would be in Iraq today, nor do I believe that 9/11 would have happened. I believe that we would have a better, more admired, safer country, a more humane country, a more generous society.

We were cheated out of the chance to see how his ideas and dreams would have played out.
RFK was not a perfect man, none of us is, but he was the right man at the right time and would have moved us gracefully into a new era.

Bobby never failed us. He never grew old. He never sold out.

Instead, he opened up the vision for the future. Of course he was denied the opportunity to lead us there, but he showed us the way.

His legacy lives on, albeit slowly.

"....The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die." --- Edward M. Kennedy.

write:[e-mail]

Comments

[DragonMama]

I'm 31 and I've heard my elders talk about the devastation of the Kennedy assassinations throughout myl life without ever being able to understand how so many people took it so hard that a president (and then a candidate) were killed. I certainly wouldn't have been devastated if Regan, Bush I, or even Bill Clinton had been assassinated. I would have been sad and a bit scared if Bill had been killed but I don't think it would have shaken me to the core the way I have sensed the Kennedy assassinations did to so many.

Then Barack Obama caught my attention. Now I understand, completely. If something bad were to happen to Barack, it would be like it had happened to a member of my own family. Barack makes me feel a kinship not just with him, but with everyone who supports him in this movement. We are an American family, and that's a big step toward turning us into a global human family and making real change. The idea of that being ripped from us, especially now that I'm a mother myself, is too horrible to contemplate.

[StephenKMack]

HuffPost's Pick

Gene McCarthy had the political courage to challenge Johnson on the war. He was the first. Mr. Kennedy vacillated because he was uncomfortable with the role of political dissident: his constant state of political timidity, and indecision, reflected that discomfort. Always one step forward, two steps back, in his critique of Johnson"s war.
Your précis of Mr. Kennedy"s political career, from your viewpoint, followed by quick historical snapshots, blended with political speculation, brings to me a sadness: that to face Mr. Kennedy, as he was, is beyond your ken. Your very moving testimony, to your hopes and aspirations, as projected retrospectively across our history, is more an expression of your undaunted idealism, and beautiful for that, an almost Proustian idyll. But hagiography is untenable now, if ever.

[Blake Fleetwood - Huffpost Blogger]

Thanks

You may be right

Blake

[Trueheart]

Good post. Do you sail out of RI?

[lostnacfgop]

Hmmm, some grudges are never set down, are they? Yes, McCarthy was first; what kind of excitement did he generate? What hope did he engender? What coalition did he build - in a matter of a few frenzied weeks?

Mr. Fleetwood's flights of historical fancy are what they are, and cannot ever be proven. Even FDR's transformational New Deal programs did little at last, to alter the basic construct of the socioeconomic period. But RFK's murder - as the last and most horrific in a half decade of such violent crimes against men seeking positive societal change, cemented for the generation a poisoned well of cynicism, which positively gushered following the election of Tricky Dick and his secret plan and ultimately Watergate. Avoiding those experiences - as I clearly think our nation would have, had RFK lived, would have rendered a country vastly different from what we are now, whether it met all or any of the lofty alternative aspirations set forth in Mr. Fleetwood's piece.

[StephenKMack]

Gene did generate some excitement, and he had the courage to make the issue of the war, at the risk of his political career. He never wavered. Bobby was all over the political map about the war.Mort Sahl had a routine, at the time, about mapping Bobby's political changeability, that was very funny, and very pointed. Bobby was ,of course, a Kennedy and had charisma to spare, and was very likable,and he had the sympathy and love of America.That is indisputable! As I recall it, Gene went all the way to the convention and his supporters were clubbed in the streets of Chicago.
Grudges are not the issue here! The issue is hagiography (lives of the saints) and rememberance,historical rememberance and its relation to historical actuality and the biography of a politician, not a saint! Who was Bobby?How many of your speculations are flights of historical fancy?But worthy of respect for their humainess.

[Terriac]

Beautiful post. I was 14 years old when RFK was shot. It was the first time in my then young life that I had ever gotten inspired by a presidential candidate. I was asleep when he was shot, and still remember vividly getting up in the morning for school, turning on the radio, and hearing of his assassination. Young as I was, I did realize that something beyond special had died with him. I have not felt that way about a candidate again, until now. I really believe this is our nation's best chance since Bobby Kennedy. I fervently hope Obama is allowed the opportunity to do what Kennedy never got the chance to do. This time, hopefully, we'll get a real chance for better things for this country. I loved your post.

[Trueheart]

Like Blake Elwood, I had dozed off listening to radio coverage of the primary, and was jolted into waking by sounds of screaming and crying: RFK had been shot. I roused my family out of bed and we stood together, sobbing and listening to the awful news. An idealistic teenager, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a hotbed of anti-war activity, I supported McCarthy, and thought RFK was a scheming opportunist, too tied in to the system to accomplish the kind of changes that Washington needed. But he joined the awful list of assassinated heros: JFK, MLK, Malcolm X. It was terrible and frightening and felt as though forces of evil were taking down anybody who inspired the American people to challenge the status quo. It left me with a deep cynicism about who really controls this country.

Unlike Blake Fleetwood, I have not spent time fantasizing about what changes RFK could have or would have made to change history. In my later life, I did a bit of work in the field of politics, got to see up close and personal how the Democratic Party and Kennedy machines worked, and became even more disillusioned with a system which pretends to serve the people, but is driven by self-serving agenda and corrupted motivation. I've come to believe that there is no rescue for a doomed social order except that the center gives way, it falls apart, and out of the chaos and suffering, something new and positive rises up.

[Trueheart]

DOH!
Of course I meant Blake Fleetwood,not Elwood. Blues Brothers on the brain? At least I didn't call him Fleetwood Mac.

[sandpiper]

God bless you!

I spent the last week of the California campaign as a young reporter traveling through the heart of the state with RFK and his entourage -- and as the journey drew to a close, I had secretly lost all of my precious journalistic objectivity with regard to the man. Had he asked, I would have followed him to the gates of Hell and beyond.

The shock of that final night at the Ambassador Hotel lingers still.

As with many of us,. some part of me died that night as well. Perhaps the dream, as brother Teddy said, would never die -- but it certainly was put abruptly on hold that night as RFK lay dying on that ugly kitchen floor.

I had been dead to the world of politics myself ever since -- until this year, when something in me began to come back to life. Just when I had thought it was all over ...

Here we are, 40 years later, and I have not felt so motivated, so stirred by anyone on our national stage, in all that time. But I feel it now.

The dream lives. His name is Barack Obama.

The young Kennedys saw it. Old Ted saw it. And now, so does this old retired reporter/editor, who never thought it possible that the magic could happen again.

I suspect that Barack and Bobby (and yes, I realize he hated that name!) would have liked each other. A lot.

[GOP4MoreTears]

We know about it, Hillary Clinton just brought it up not too long ago.