Flights of Angels

Thirty-six years ago tonight, Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He had just won the California Democratic primary and seemed to be on his way to the party's nomination for president which his brother had won en route to the White House eight years earlier.

It takes time to really gauge and appreciate where different political leaders rest in the eyes of history. When I was 19 or so, I became obsessed with RFK and his last campaign. Two years later I wrote a senior honors thesis about it in college; around the same time, I started making notes for a novel called "Meditations on the Death of Robert F. Kennedy," which I still hope and plan to get back to at some point. (I decided to write another one first.)

Bobby Kennedy's words obviously still have the power to inspire us, and his story--particularly the political and personal growth he showed in the four and a half years between his brother's assassination and his own--remains incredibly compelling. The story might seem especially relevant today, with the United States as polarized and divided over a foreign war as we were when RFK made his run. But if we're really to consider the parallels to 1968, it's useful to consider how he might have seemed at the time.

After the Democrats took big losses in the 1966 Congressional elections, many on the left started thinking about how to mount a meaningful primary challenge to President Lyndon Johnson in hopes of either defeating him or forcing changes in policy. Kennedy, who had never liked Johnson and hadn't even wanted him to run on the ticket with John Kennedy in 1960, was the obvious first choice. But throughout 1967, he rebuffed every plea. He didn't want to divide the party... and his advisors, some of the smartest people in the business, had told him that he was a lock to win it all in 1972. In the fall of that year, Sen. Gene McCarthy of Minnesota entered the race, running primarily on a platform of opposition to the Vietnam War. McCarthy was in some ways the Howard Dean of his time--much more personally understated than Dean, but a similarly innovative campaigner whose eccentricities charmed a cadre of incredibly devoted volunteers, especially the young, and who turned the conventional wisdom on its head by nearly beating LBJ in the March 1968 New Hampshire primary.

About two weeks later, Bobby Kennedy entered the race. The McCarthy kids--whom Kennedy himself considered to be the best and brightest--generally condemned him as an interloper and an opportunist. He was riding Gene's wave, and working the traditional channels of power--trying to cut backroom deals with people like Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago and Democratic Party honcho Jesse Unruh of California. McCarthy, they said, was the real man of principle in the race. He beat RFK in Oregon and very nearly caught him in California.

Then Kennedy was killed, and all the fight seemed to go out of McCarthy as Hubert Humphrey moved to secure the nomination without winning a single primary. All these threads of political and social conflict culminated in the Democrats' self-destruction at their national convention in Chicago, and suddenly it became clear that RFK had been the last man who could have brought the country back together. Ethnic whites of the type later known as "Reagan Democrats" seemed to love him as much as African-American voters who would cram the streets just to touch his car. McCarthy was a crank (and later proved himself to be far more of an opportunist than RFK had appeared, running for president again and again, endorsing Reagan in 1980 and generally making a joke of himself); Robert Kennedy was a martyr. Even right-wingers try to claim his legacy today, as a crime-fighter and an idealist.

Just a reminder that the seemingly evident "truths" around us are subject to extreme revision in hindsight. But the comparison is useful in its larger point: we need Bobby Kennedy's courage, idealism and generosity of spirit today as much or more than we did thirty-six years ago. Rest in peace.