A recent article by Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in the
New York Daily News recalls her memories of her last weekend with her father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.
Kathleen was the oldest of the 10 Kennedy children who were born during Kennedy's lifetime (his 11th child was born a few months after his assassination).
In February 1968, when Bobby Kennedy was on the verge of announcing his bid for the presidency, Townsend recalls a visit her parents made to her high school in Vermont. The senator had agreed to speak to the student body, so he and his wife took some additional time to spend with their daughter.
"During what turned out to be our last weekend together, we raced each other down ski trails in the brisk air, discussed my paper on Wordsworth by the fire and talked about his running for president," Townsend writes.
"I hope today's young people can learn, as I did, from my father's own sense of justice. I have never known another like it. It combined righteous anger with love and compassion."When Kennedy was alive, the combination of those qualities was misinterpreted as
"ruthlessness."Kennedy's life tragically came to an end in June 1968.
And, for 40 years, I have believed Kennedy's death was a political turning point for this nation.
After Kennedy's death, the Democratic Party nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey for the presidency. Humphrey never won a primary in 1968. He was nominated the old-fashioned way -- with the support of delegates that were hand-picked by a state's party leadership.
Outside that convention hall in Chicago, antiwar protesters and the city's police clashed in the streets.
But, four years later, changes in party rules allowed an insurgent named George McGovern to win the nomination through an expanded but still limited primary schedule -- although it was not yet typical for any candidate to enter every primary.
At that time, candidates chose which primaries to enter for a variety of reasons -- regional appeal, apparent strength (usually as demonstrated in current polls), a need for exposure -- whatever (it was hoped) would give them the most bang for their campaign bucks. They bypassed the primaries where they weren't well known or where it was believed they couldn't do well.
Quite a few delegates were still chosen the old-fashioned way, but not as many.
Jimmy Carter changed that in 1976. Two hundred years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Carter put his name on every primary ballot and won the nomination and the election.
Since that time, popular primaries have had an increasingly important role in nominating presidential candidates. There aren't even as many caucuses as there used to be.
Perhaps that political development was the legacy of the Kennedy assassination.
One tends to remember turning points with vivid clarity -- whether it's the 9-11 attacks, the JFK assassination or Pearl Harbor.
I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing 40 years ago next Thursday. For me, it was perhaps the most memorable event in a year filled with memorable events.
I was 8 years old. I had just finished the second grade, and school had shut down for the summer. My father was a college professor, and he had just completed his academic year as well, so our family had come to Dallas to visit my grandparents for a week or so.
We always stayed with my mother's parents, even though both sets of grandparents lived in Dallas. My mother's parents owned a house with a spare bedroom and they had a couple of rollaway beds as well, so they were much better equipped to house a family of four than my father's parents, who lived in a one-bedroom apartment.
And, even though my father's father had been deceased for more than a year by June 1968, there still wasn't enough room for five people in his mother's apartment.
So, while we visited my father's mother frequently on our visits to Dallas, we stayed with my mother's parents.
There was a certain routine that every member of the family had when we visited my grandparents.
My father was a morning person, often up before the crack of dawn and waiting with his father-in-law near the front window for the newspaper to be delivered.
My grandmother often got up when my grandfather did and went to the kitchen to make coffee and breakfast while he watched the local news on TV. In fact, my grandmother always seemed to be in the kitchen. In most of my childhood memories of my grandmother (with the noteworthy exceptions of holidays, like the Fourth of July and Christmas), she was in the kitchen or her backyard garden.
She's been gone for nearly 20 years, yet, to this day, I associate my grandmother with the smells of her kitchen, the colors of her garden, and the taste of ice-cold Dr Pepper on a hot summer day.
My mother was more of a night person, and she usually stayed in bed until breakfast was ready.
My routine? Well, I was 8 years old. When I visited Dallas, one of the things I loved to do was watch a children's morning TV show called
"Peppermint Place," hosted by local TV personality Jerry Haynes, who dressed up in a red-and-white striped sport jacket, wore one of those turn-of-the-century flat-top hats that singers in barbershop quartets wear and went by the name of
"Mr. Peppermint."(Ironically, as I was to learn later, a quirk of fate had made Haynes the first local TV personality to report the assassination of John F. Kennedy from the scene of the shooting more than four years earlier.)
Cable was a phenomenon of the future, still many years away. Forty years ago, local network affiliates, the local public broadcasting affiliate and a few independent channels in the larger cities were all that TV viewers had for news and entertainment.
And network morning news shows weren't as abundant in those days. In fact, almost all of the morning news programming was local. The
Today Show had that time period virtually to itself -- no national network competition.
I don't recall who competed in Mr. Peppermint's time slot in those days. I think that, for at least part of his program, Mr. Peppermint was in competition with network personality Captain Kangaroo.
I'm not even sure what the time slot was -- 7 a.m., I think -- but I guess it didn't matter to me. Apparently, I had concluded that Mr. Peppermint was the best choice.
To my 8-year-old mind, the show had everything I wanted. Mr. Peppermint's show had various recurring guest characters, and it aired a lot of cartoons. Most, if not all, of the cartoons featured
"Felix the Cat."We didn't see Felix the Cat cartoons in the Little Rock viewing area, so I always looked forward to trips to Dallas because that meant I would get to see them.
Not so on the morning of June 5, 1968.
When I got up that morning, I found my father and grandfather transfixed by the TV. A TV reporter was talking with an empty ballroom in the background. At the bottom of the screen was text that read
"News Bulletin."If you weren't around in those days, you have to understand something. The '60s were like that. TV programming was often interrupted by
"news bulletins."Especially in a volatile time like the '60s.
But I'm not talking about the
"Breaking News" reports that we've had in recent years -- like Michael Jackson showing up for trial in his pajamas or Britney Spears being hospitalized after flipping out in her home.
The
"news bulletins" of the '60s usually reported truly newsworthy events, like the launching of rockets into space or Soviet invasions of countries in eastern Europe -- or the shootings/deaths of leaders.
A TV
"news bulletin" meant something serious had happened. In the 1960s, the soap opera lives of a Michael Jackson or a Britney Spears wouldn't make the first cut.
The reporter on the TV that morning was telling the audience that Robert Kennedy had been shot a few hours earlier, after delivering his California primary victory speech in Los Angeles. He had been taken to a hospital where he had undergone surgery, and his condition was critical.
I knew the name of Kennedy. I knew it was the name of a man who had been president just a few years earlier, and I knew his brother was running for president. I even had a vague idea what being
president meant.
And, unfortunately, I also knew what
"assassination" meant. Martin Luther King had been shot and killed only two months earlier.
I think my father had to explain to me what
critical meant.
The bigger a story was, the more time the networks would give to the coverage of it. And, it seems to me, the coverage of Kennedy's condition went on all that day. I don't recall seeing TV coverage that extensive for anything -- except for the coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
After lunch, my grandfather and I went into the alley behind his house and walked to the backyard gate belonging to one of his best friends. We went in through the gate and walked to the backdoor of the house.
My grandfather's friend was at home, so we all went to his backyard shed, where the men would sit, drink iced tea, smoke cigars -- and talk.
On that early June afternoon, it wasn't as hot as it would be in Dallas in another month, so we were comfortable with just the windows open in the shed. In a few weeks, we would need a box fan to keep the shed reasonably comfortable.
The conversation that afternoon was about Bobby Kennedy, nothing else. In football-crazy Dallas, anything that blocks the Cowboys from a male-dominated conversation in June, even in those early days of the franchise, is pretty significant.
"Do you think he'll live?" my grandfather's friend asked.
"No," my grandfather replied.
"If he does, he'll be a vegetable."I don't think I was sure what he meant by
"vegetable," but I knew it didn't sound good.
We went inside the house and switched on the TV set. The
"news bulletin" was continuing, with film clips from Kennedy's final speech, followed by clips of Kennedy laying on the pantry floor after the shooting, followed by camera shots of the hospital. A group of people had gathered outside the hospital, many holding placards that said,
"Pray for Bobby."I know there were prayer vigils for Kennedy all that day and into the night. But, by the early morning hours of June 6, the battle was over. Death had won.
A few years later, Don McLean recorded a song called
"American Pie," which had the memorable line,
"The day the music died."If the song is about what is truly the
"day the music died," as I've heard, about the 1959 plane crash that claimed the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and
"The Big Bopper," it seems to me that June 6, 1968, should be remembered as
"the day faith died."Because that's what Bobby Kennedy represented to so many people. He represented the faith that we had it within our power to change things for the better -- to end a war, to eliminate poverty, to rid our society of racism and sexism.
Bobby Kennedy was the last politician I can remember in my lifetime who could truly bridge gaps. He could speak to blacks, he could speak to whites. He could speak to the rich, he could speak to the poor. He could speak to the young, he could speak to the old.
He was a young white male born to wealth and privilege, but he could make sense to each group.
Hardly anyone -- regardless of age, race, gender or economic status -- tries to do that anymore because it's so hard to accomplish.
For many people, faith was a casualty in a decade that already had witnessed President Kennedy's assassination, the escalation of the Vietnam War, the murder of Martin Luther King and riots in the streets of American cities.
At least, truth was a casualty -- so much so that, even today, there are still people who don't believe they were ever told the truth about the triumphant Apollo 11 moon landing the following year.
My mother, who supported the insurgent candidacy of Gene McCarthy in the spring of 1968, later confessed to me that, in her own words, she believed the
"myths" she had heard about Kennedy in his lifetime -- that he was
"ruthless," that he was
"ambitious" and
"opportunistic."(She later told me that she had stopped believing those things about Kennedy in the years since his death.)
It seems to me that what the Democratic Party has been lacking in most of its presidential nominees in the four decades since Kennedy was killed is the
tenacity that he had for doing the right thing --
morally.
That's a quality that was derided as
ruthlessness during his lifetime, but that's a false label.
Kennedy had what the voting public wants. Or, perhaps more importantly, he had what the republic needs.
The American people want leaders who emulate Superman.
Those leaders don't have to
"leap tall buildings in a single bound" or be
"more powerful than a locomotive" or any of that other superhero stuff.
It's enough if they believe in the principles of
"truth, justice and the American way" and devote their energies to promoting them.
I'm not talking about the
"my way or the highway" approach of George W. Bush or the
"extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" attitude of Barry Goldwater.
I'm talking about the steely-eyed determination that was shown by Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II or John F. Kennedy in staring down the Russians during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Bobby Kennedy's widow, Ethel, is still alive. Now 80, she lives at the family compound in Hyannisport, Mass. She has endorsed likely Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, saying
"Barack is so like Bobby. ... With courage, caring, and charisma, Senator Obama is leading us toward a kinder, gentler world."If it is true that Kennedy's death was a political turning point -- and if it is also true, as some have said, that turning points come once in a generation -- then perhaps we are due for another one in 2008. A
better one?
If he is to be the true agent of change, Obama should remember that eloquence has its place. FDR, JFK -- and Bobby Kennedy -- had that gift, too. So did lesser politicians who never reached the heights those men reached.
But FDR and the Kennedys also knew that actions can speak louder than words.
