Charles Pierce begins his fine essay on Robert Kennedy in Esquire Magazine a bit obliquely, praising Bobby’s daughter-in-law, Sheila Rauch Kennedy, for taking on the Catholic Church and Kennedy's son, and ultimately changing Church Doctrine on the practice of annulling marriages, which was the fate Joe II intended for theirs. It’s an interesting side journey, on a road I have not traveled, and a nod to not only recent skirmishes in the war between the sexes, but also a reminder that our heroes...depending on what gossip you give credence (but, barring gossip, at least their family members) often tread on feet of clay.
Having done that bit of housekeeping Pierce spirits us back to 1968, that year that, in Abbie Hoffman’s estimation, WAS!
Pierce confesses that he does not know what would have happened if Bobby had not died on that cold tile kitchen floor; he feels Bobby would have won the nomination but Chicago would have still been a mess as many of the more strident Anti-war protesters would likely have not been mollified by any nominee of the party of their nemesis and, speaking of whom - what would LBJ’s reaction have been to his hated rival’s elevation?
Could Bobby have battled back the Boll Weevil revolt embodied by George Wallace?
Could he have convinced the two wings of the Party to flap together in unison into the White House?
All unknowable.
But Pierce cannot help but wonder what might have been.
“Whatever it was that drew people to Robert Kennedy is lost to time, although there was some evidence of its abiding force in the two campaigns that Jesse Jackson ran, and even more in the 2008 election of Barack Obama. But the ferocity that drove the Kennedy campaign in 1968, the outrage burning beneath all the healing rhetoric, has been lost ever since. Politicians, and Democratic politicians in particular, became frightened by passion, by the personal, visceral force that drove RFK into the Indianapolis ghetto and announce to the crowd the news of the murder that night of Dr. King, quoting Aeschylus along the way….
That is still the most astonishing performance I have ever seen from a politician, because it was not a politician speaking that night. It was a bleeding country talking through a man who’d already seen tragedies descend upon himself like dark and predatory birds. It was a human being who’d already lost a sister and two brothers, the last of whom was killed from ambush while he was President of the United States.
One of the most remarkable passages from that Indianapolis appearance, a moment unlike any in American politics before or since, came when RFK talked about the murder of his brother.
””For those of you who are black—considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible—you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in greater polarization—black people amongst blacks, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand, and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion, and love. For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with—be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.””Ultimately, the great unknowable is whether the country would have taken the turns it took in the 1970s and 1980s, the dangerous detours that have brought us to our present moment, if there had been no guns in the kitchen that night. The reactionary forces against the gains of the Civil Rights Movement already were gathering force, and it’s not unreasonable to conclude that the Republicans would have formed their dark alliance with the remnants of American apartheid even more swiftly had Nixon been defeated by yet another Kennedy.
I would like to think that Robert Kennedy would have been able to stand against the foul gales that were then rising. I prefer to think that he would have, because I prefer to think of this country as perpetually redeemable. So many of our wounds are self-inflicted, and, by and large, through our history, we’ve at least made some good faith effort to heal them and to atone to ourselves for having inflicted them in the first place. That, ultimately, is what Robert Kennedy stood for and, alas, what he died for as well. Wisdom, through the awful grace of God.
As I said, it is a fine essay, and, like the story of our country without RFK since that terrible night 50 years ago, great, good chunks were left out by sad necessity.
Do yourself a favor and read it all.