Why Bobby Rocks A New Generation

There's something poetic, unnerving, or both about the fact that Barack Obama has secured the Democratic presidential nomination in the same week as we're remembering Robert F. Kennedy.

Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's assassination. Hillary Clinton took an absurd amount of flak for mentioning him and the month of June in one breath, but I'm doing so because I believe Bobby still rocks -- maybe more than ever.

I was born after he died, so maybe I'm not supposed to care about him. Truth is, though, my generation has something timely, even urgent, to learn from his advice to the world's youth.

On June 6, 1966 -- exactly two years before his murder -- Kennedy visited the University of Capetown. Without losing sight of South African apartheid or American segregation, he adopted a different focus.

Kennedy extolled the "common qualities of conscience and indignation" in students. Hinting at honorary membership in their ranks, the 40-year-old New York senator anointed youth "the only true international community."

But his message that day was not merely about the virtue of sticking together for social justice. Almost presciently, he challenged the tribal politics of race, gender and sexual orientation so fashionable on college campuses today.

Out of Kennedy's soaring rhetoric about solidarity came this dare: Risk backlash from your own for the sake of a greater good.

It's a 21st-century dare because our multicultural era often reduces the individual to an unsolicited mascot of this or that group. The result is conformity on various fronts.

Either you're a liberal or you're a conservative. Either you're a consumer or you're a loser. Either you swallow the dogma of your ethnic, religious and professional clan, or you've sold out. While many of us hunger to defy orthodoxy, only a handful of us give ourselves the permission.

Bobby Kennedy didn't sanitize the reality of human compliance. In his University of Capetown speech, he acknowledged that "few men brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society." Those who dare are agents of "moral courage."

We're not talking run-of-the-mill gutsiness. "Moral courage," Kennedy observed, "is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence."

After all, speaking truth to power requires standing up to your own. This is always more intimidating than pointing fingers at the faceless, unfamiliar enemies on the outside. Indicting outsiders comes with the affirmation that you belong to a circle of insiders. But when you expose injustice within, the security blanket of instant belonging disappears. Then what?

Kennedy's appeal for moral courage illuminates one of the most vexing leadership questions of our time: How do we transform our culture of polarization into one of genuine pluralism? In other words, how can individuals develop their unique voices and expand diversity, rather than cave to groupthink and feed fundamentalism?

For clues, Robert F. Kennedy could have invoked his contemporary, Martin Luther King Jr. As an agent of moral courage, King confronted the peddlers of insularity and insecurity within his tribe of religious progressives.

Eight liberal clerics in Alabama alluded to Reverend King as an "outsider" whose street marches fomented extremism. Because he took the fight for equality beyond the courts, they accused him of undermining a "constructive and realistic approach to racial problems." The title of their statement: "A Call to Unity."

King cleverly distinguished between unity and uniformity. In his now-famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, addressed to "Fellow Clergymen," the civil rights icon wrote: "I must confess I am not afraid of the word 'tension.' I have earnestly opposed violent tension but there is a type of constructive, non-violent tension which is necessary for growth."

He was referring not to personal growth, of course, but to that of wider society. If this greater good emerged at the expense of solidarity within the movement, so be it. Like Kennedy, King believed that Americans could do better and be better than many of their religious mentors gave them credit for. So, breaking ranks became an act of faith in community, not a repudiation of it.

Therein lies a tough but relevant lesson for my generation. As we struggle to transcend the us-versus-them politics that force us into tidy and artificial camps, let's remember Bobby Kennedy's concept of moral courage. It teaches us that when we exercise our authentic voices, we're liberating possibilities that would otherwise be lost to self-censorship.

You better believe that's a recipe for heresy. Whether in the corporation, at the church, or on the campus, progress demands nothing less.

Comments

[abarafi]

Bobby Kennedy, as someone commented, was a complex individual. He did grow and change over time. The son of Joseph P. Kennedy - an ambitious, morally challenged, Boston millionaire - he was subject to his father's philosophies, and, yes, he was an early adherent to McCarthy's tactics. He loved and admired his brother, John, and was his loyal confidant. When John was murdered, Bobby was devastated. But in the years following John's death, he grew and changed immeasurably. He traveled the rural roads of the deep south and saw the poverty and injustice of race-based discrimination. He saw the divisiveness that the Viet Nam war was causing between America's generations. Bobby would have been a great president. He would have been an inspiration to America's disaffected youth. Instead, we ended up with Nixon and a legacy of cynicism, polarization, and dishonor. That political Big Bang's echos still rumble through America's psyche.

[kgb999]

Hillary did not receive "absurd amount of flak for mentioning him[RFK] and the month of June in one breath".

She received legitimate criticism for mentioning what happened to RFK in the month of June as one of her reasons for staying in a race that had become mathematically impossible.

[YankeeCanuck]

Many thanks for an insightful post, Ms. Manji. It's always refreshing to hear your voice.

So often we associate morality with religious belief, but we humans do have a moral compass. Another interesting Canadian thinker, Charles Taylor would call this our "horizons of significance." Perhaps to remove the religious connotation that can sometimes be a sticking point or a point of polarisation between people of different faiths.

Here is where we begin. Again. Those of us who were very young at the time of RFK and MLK are now the elders. We never imagined having the possibility of another transformative leader in the span of one lifetime. This is why it's important to hear voices that question. We are humbled by thinkers like Ms. Manji and we are ready to play a supportive role to this generation.

[HBeachbum]

You know not of what you speak. You are anamored by the legends of JFK & RFK. The reality is that JFK was a horrible president and RFK was the poster boy for nepotism (becoming Attoney General under his brother). JFK sent the first US troops into Vietnam and nearly started WWIII with the Cuban Missile Crisis and bothched the Bay of Pigs Invasion. They both passed around Marilyn Monroe as a sexual plaything. They both had strong ties to the Mafia. Sorry to burst your bubble.

[RedDogBear]

As I said in my first post I agree somewhat with HBeachbum that RFK was not the saint he is often made out to be. However, he also was not the spoiled playboy preppie some people on the left and right make him out to be. Yes of course he became AG under his brother but he did an outstanding job, being the first AG to recognize organized crime as a force that had to be dealt with in this country. This is a good example of the many contradictions in the man. Not only was he taking on Hoover by trying to deal with the Mafia he was also treading on his own father's corrupt past . Some of these issues such as Vietnam are too complex to deal with here. But the Marilyn Monroe and RFK stuff is an urban legend popularized by people on the right who want to attack the Kennedys anyway possible and by people who want to sell books. JFK quite probably had an affair with her, but RFK never. Bobby was a highly, almost fanatically moral person. Of course it was his own kind of morality that included doing just about anything to help the family. But there is no evidence he ever cheated on his wife and certainly not with Marilyn.

[YankeeCanuck]

Red, you're right about the MM thing. For a fictional take on it, read Billie Livingston's "Cease to Blush" --RFK is a supporting character. You'll have to get it online. It was published in Canada, not here yet.
Remenber,it's fiction. Well researched and plausible fiction.

[YankeeCanuck]

It is the ideas, not the legend that Ms. Manji is discussing. And would you also dismiss MLK?

Look, the Kennedys were flawed human beings. Not to make a direct comparison, but think of the recently disgraced Elliot Spitzer. Smartest guy in the room (usually). Did a lot of good politically. Perhaps narcissistically flawed.
That is not to say that the ideas were unsound. The person is flawed. Even our founding fathers have skeletons rattling around in the closet. Nothing is absolute.

[cheforacle]

You belong to the group of people who believe (a) if a leader does anything wrong then all of the good things they also did are invalidated and (b) that no person has any potential for self-growth. The RFK of 1966-8 was much different than the earlier RFK.

Also Manji was not even discussing JFK's presidency in this post.

[mmeo]

Well, cheforacle,
HBeachbum has a lot of criminal, abusive, and destructive things Bobby Kennedy did by which to judge him, and not a lot of constructive, positive acts of moral courage.

For example, it is known that, when Martin Luther King was in jail in South Carolina during the 1960 campaign and JFK proposed calling him on the telephone, Bobby was against it.

The entire campaign to violate U.S., international, and natural laws and assassinate Fidel Castro, the campaign that contributed more than anything else to JFK's assassination, was Bobby's baby. He proposed, planned, and ran it.

Bobby was point man in making use of Mafia hitmen to kill Castro. Some high-minded enemy of the Mafia there.

HBeachbum, unlike Irshad Manji, does not evaluate people on their superficial press clippings, but on their deeds. I agree with that more reliable method, not least because the Kennedy family engaged in wholesale bribing of the members of the press throughout their political ascendacy.

[RedDogBear]

I take a lot of flak from my radical left friends for it but I admire Bobby Kennedy quite a bit. However, I think its a mistake to just remember him as some kind of martyred saint. He was a very complex man who grew immensely in his years in the Senate, as Attorney General, and running for president. Remember he started out his career as one of the biggest red baiters around, he even tried to work for McCarthy in the position that went to the self hating homosexual Roy Cohn. He was pretty much universally recognized as the toughest of all the Kennedy brothers, not someone you wanted to cross. He admired King and fought for his rights while AG but he also encouraged King to go slower as he and his brother tried to keep the democratic south from splitting away.He talked with a lot of moral authority but he also oversaw some immoral terrorist attacks on Cuba while in the white house and like his brother had a fascination with covert ops and special forces. He also stood up to organized crime as few others had and made some dangerous enemies in the process. To me all these different aspects of his personality are what make him so interesting and what makes his conversion (which I believe was honest and not based on political expediency) to being against the Vietnam war all that much more impressive.