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| Robert F. Kennedy on the campaign trail in 1968 |
RFK had just won the June 4 California Democratic presidential primary when the fatal shots were fired. He was running for president as an anti-Vietnam War candidate. By the year 1968, then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson, also a Democrat, had been escalating the Vietnam War since 1964, a year after he'd taken office in 1963.
LBJ had been our sitting vice president when RFK's brother, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. LBJ had won the presidency in his own right in 1964, in a landslide over Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, then had begun ramping up the War in Vietnam ... and then, a few months earlier in 1968, had surprised the world by declining to run again. LBJ had said, in announcing that he would not seek reelection, that the antiwar sentiment that was starting to boil over in our country demanded that he focus laser-like on finding a way to end the Vietnam conflict honorably and victoriously.
In the California primary on June 4, RFK was pitted against another Democratic senator, Eugene McCarthy, who had announced his antiwar candidacy on November 30, 1967, well before Kennedy had done so on March 16, 1968. LBJ's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was not on the California ballot, but Humphrey was actively running in several states as an opponent to both Kennedy and McCarthy. Humphrey was not a declared antiwar candidate. He was supporting President Johnson's Vietnam War policy at that point.
In the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary that had been held on March 12, 1968, McCarthy had nearly defeated President Johnson, who, as the incumbent chief executive, had been considered a shoo-in.
Four days later, Robert Kennedy announced he too was running for president as an antiwar Democrat.
*****
I met Senator Robert F. Kennedy in the fall of 1967 at Hickory Hill, his family residence in McLean, Virginia.
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| Hickory Hill |
I was a student at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. I was living off campus, at my parents' house in Bethesda, Maryland. My college friend Bob Moore had been hired to tutor Robert and Ethel Kennedy's oldest boy, Joe, in French. When Ethel asked Bob to tutor the next-older Kennedy boy, Bobby Jr., in geometry, Bob referred Mrs. Kennedy to me. Ethel gave me the job.
I could drive from Bethesda to Hickory Hill in about 20 minutes. But the first evening on which I was due at the Kennedy house at 6 pm, somebody ran a stop sign and hit my car. No one was hurt, but it made me late for my first encounter with the Kennedy clan.
No matter. I just knocked sheepishly on the front door, upon finally arriving, and was admitted by the oldest of the Kennedy children, Kathleen. Ethel, when I met with her, comprehended my excuse for being late and never mentioned it again. She was truly one of the nicest, most gracious, and least pretentious ladies I have ever met.
I began tutoring Bobby Jr. right away. There were two evening tutoring sessions each week, plus one Saturday afternoon session. In the middle of each of the evening sessions, I would sit at the Kennedys' dining room table and have dinner along with all of the older children. Ethel would sit at the head of the table, as the Senator was usually not home from Capitol Hill by that time.
One evening, I found Bobby Jr. too distracted to focus on geometry. He told me his father had given each of his older children the task of memorizing one verse of the Tennyson poem "Charge of the Light Brigade." Each child was to recite his or her verse at the dinner table that evening, with the Senator present and looking on. Bobby was nervous about it.
It was that evening that I first met the Senator. No glad-handing politician, he was gracious and yet reserved toward me. I liked him. I thought he looked different that he did in the mostly black-and-white photos and TV coverage I was accustomed to seeing — somewhat fairer of hair and ruddier of complexion.
After dinner, the Senator and his older kids included me in a vigorous game of touch football on the grass of Hickory Hill. Senator Kennedy played the game hard, but at the same time — owing to the sizes of his children — not too roughly.
(Was it that evening, or a different one, on which daughter Courtney's rabbit got loose on the grounds, and everyone had to pour out of the house in order to find and retrieve it? Possibly. Yes, the rabbit was soon retrieved.)
It was on that evening when at 9 p.m. — or was it 8 p.m.? — Bobby Jr. interrupted our tutoring session to join with the other older kids in their parents' bedroom for prayers. Bobby told me that whenever the Senator was home in time, the entire family unfailingly said prayers together at that moment in the day.
*****
In the fall of '67, it was impossible to guess that Senator Robert F. Kennedy would run for president and would have any chance at garnering the Democratic nomination the following year ... much less as an antiwar candidate. It was impossible to imagine that he might even want to run.
Saying that his grief was profound when his older brother, President John F. Kennedy, was gunned down in Dallas in November 1963 doesn't do RFK's reaction justice. RFK had been JFK's attorney general and closest confidant. None of JFK's advisors had been more important during the Cuban missile crisis in helping the president in finding — and then implementing — a solution that would avoid nuclear war and yet not hand the Soviet Union a diplomatic victory.
Few of the president's advisors had played as significant a role in the Kennedy administration as Robert Kennedy did with respect to civil rights. In September 1962, Attorney General Kennedy sent U.S. marshals to Oxford, Mississippi, to enforce a federal court order allowing the admittance of the first African-American student, James Meredith, to the University of Mississippi. The situation was a nail-biter. After bloody riots and a tense standoff, Meredith was finally admitted.
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| RFK with James Meredith |
But the political fallout from that incident was scary for Democrats. The party historically depended on support in the white-dominated Deep South. By becoming ever more staunch on civil rights, JFK risked losing his re-election bid in 1964. RFK, who had been JFK's campaign manager in 1960, knew this full well.
*****
Following JFK's assassination, the remainder of the 1960s ramped up to become a truly tumultuous time. LBJ's electoral landslide in 1964 convinced him that he'd be able to do great things as president. And indeed he did, becoming responsible for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. His Great Society and War on Poverty initiatives augured huge changes in an unashamedly progressive direction that would rival what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, LBJ's role model, had done in the 1930s.
Yet the wheels quickly came off LBJ's cart. His committing large numbers of U.S. forces to fighting on the ground in South Vietnam, along with his bombing of North Vietnam, failed to bring the communists to the peace table as LBJ had hoped. By 1968, American public opinion was turning conspicuously against the war, following what our citizens perceived as the communists' victory during their surprise Tet offensive beginning in January.
This was the political climate which brought Senator Robert F. Kennedy into the 1968 presidential race. Opposition of numerous young Americans to the war had grown noticeably even before Tet, which is why Senator McCarthy's candidacy in November 1967 was able to gain such traction with them.
Before the shooting of RFK on June 5, 1968, came the assassination of America's greatest civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., on April 4. King's assassination traumatized not just African Americans, but all of us in general. On the campaign trail in Indianapolis, Indiana, Kennedy had this to say on the night of King's slaying:
RFK's speech was given extemporaneously, without notes. That the city of Indianapolis turned out to be unlike the many American cities with large African American populations that erupted in riots on the next day may have been due to RFK's solicitude, so movingly expressed.
It is for reasons like this that I believe Robert F. Kennedy could well have become the Democratic nominee, had he not been slain, could well have been elected president over Richard Nixon, could well have united the country in a way no other politician would have been able to do. Given his ability to think flexibly and pragmatically, I think he could well have found an honorable way for us to exit the Vietnam War long before Saigon actually fell on April 29-30, 1975. American history would have been, oh, so different if RFK had not been slain.
(Those of you who want to learn more about RFK can read Larry Tye's excellent biography, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon.)
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