Today is the 40th anniversary of the death of Robert Francis Kennedy. This, in many ways, is the day hope died in America. John Kennedy's assassination was a body blow to the country--it knocked the wind out of America. But the twin assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and of Robert Kennedy in April and June, 1968, were the knockout punches. 1968 descended into chaos after that; the country, into despair; the Right, into repeatedly abusive exercise of power.
Fear (of lawlessness) is what got Nixon elected in 1968--and he turned out to be one of the most lawless of Presidents. I always used to say Watergate made Nixon, hands down, the worst president in US history, because Nixon knew better. Nixon knew history, understood history, and understood America's uniqueness and that America's genius lay in her systems of government requiring compromise to get things done. Nixon signed the original Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, for goodness' sake.
But because Watergate allowed the Radical Right to destroy the moderate wing of the Republican Party, and thus ultimately to let Dubya and his minions take control of our government, Nixon is in large part responsible for the mess we're in today. Dubya and his minions have turned using fear to manipulate the populace into an art form. A perverse art form, but an art form. The reason I now say Dubya's administration is the worst in US history, however, is that Dubya's administration doesn't even care about the pretense of adhering to uniquely American values and ways of doing things. No one in the current government knows a thing about history, judging from the things Dubya and others have said and done. Their only goal was getting, keeping, and expanding their political power by any means at all.
But back to Bobby Kennedy.
As much as I admire John Kennedy's accomplishments, intelligence, genuine wit, and vision for the country, I have to admit that Bobby Kennedy turned out to be the better man. He didn't start out that way--his public, political persona was the conservative hatchet-man, from his start as an investigator/prosecutor of organized crime to his days as his brother's Attorney General. Something in his brother's death changed him, however. It took him time to find his true voice, but by 1968, he was speaking eloquently about our need to help those Americans who could do him no good politically--the poor, the disenfranchised, the educationally and economically marginalized. The people who didn't need a hand out, but who did need a hand. Our fellow Americans, who should have been our primary focus, and not proxy wars overseas which brought naught but suffering to the civilian populations in the countries unlucky enough to be the battlegrounds.
The trait that I admire the most in Bobby Kennedy is the same trait I admire most in Abraham Lincoln: the ability to learn and to grow as a person, and to change one's thinking and focus in line with higher principles as opportunities to do so arose. John Kennedy, for all his progressive ideas, was by today's standards very conservative economically. He used to say "a rising tide lifts all boats." In modern terms, that's "trickle down" economics, a philosophy discredited among those who've taken the time to study the matter objectively. Bobby Kennedy, by 1968, knew that insisting the poor and disenfranchised wait longer was wrong. He was going to work to solve their problems right then and there.
Yet they are still waiting. John McCain accuses Barack Obama of embracing the "failed policies of the past," like "big government." He's wrong. He's the one embracing the "failed policies," like endless WAR. War spending, on unnecessary wars, like the war in Iraq, is what has failed the country. War spending has diverted and squandered our money and our young men's and women's lives, all for the sake of a military-industrial complex which cares only for making ever more money off the most destructive enterprise on the face of the Earth.
Forty years later, and how little has improved. Maybe this November will mark the true beginning of what Bobby Kennedy tried to start in the early, heady, optimistic days of 1968.
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