Robert Kennedy remembered 40 years after assassination
Jun. 4, 2008 06:28 PM
San Jose Mercury News
Forty years ago today, the dream died again. Robert Kennedy, gunned down in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen, clutched a rosary handed to him by a busboy as he bled from a head wound. Amid shrieks of despair, his wife Ethel comforted him as his life ebbed away.

His brother, President John Kennedy, was killed less than five years before. Martin Luther King was assassinated two months earlier. By June 1968, violence from the inner cities to Vietnam was tearing the country apart, and had robbed the nation of three of its most inspiring leaders.

Forty years later, the story of Robert Kennedy's life, cut short at 42, and the ripples from his brief, passionate campaign for the presidency remain powerful. He was killed celebrating his greatest triumph, winning the California primary as he fought for the Democratic nomination.

The double blow of the King and Kennedy assassinations remains a raw wound for many who worked with them or were inspired by them. "We saw two bright lights snuffed out, our hopes and dreams shattered," recalled John Seigenthaler Sr., the former NBC anchor's father, who worked for Kennedy when he was attorney general.

It's still surprising today, given his distinguished career, that Kennedy was only 42 when he died. If he were alive now he would be 82, one year younger than former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.

Kennedy's 82-day campaign for the presidency, with its urgent themes of ending the Vietnam War, attacking poverty and bridging the racial divide, was a "noble moment, brutally truncated," said Todd Gitlin, a political writer and sociologist.

Ethel Kennedy, in a brief interview, said she hoped the 40th anniversary of her husband's death this week will highlight two aspects of his legacy - his focus on poverty and his ability to attract young people into politics and public service.

Many voters this year say Barack Obama reminds them of John or Robert Kennedy, and Ethel Kennedy did not shy from that comparison. Wearing an Obama button at the recent RFK Journalism Awards in Washington, she said her husband and Obama "were cut from the same cloth - they reached out to people and inspired them."

Kennedy's campaign was marked by substance, spontaneity and a willingness to tell audiences what they did not want to hear. That's a standard that may be difficult for Obama and his Republican opponent, John McCain, to match. But they are candidates of substance who have shown a penchant for independence - Obama, for example, rejected a gas tax holiday as a "gimmick," and McCain supported the troop surge in Iraq when many Republicans didn't want to talk about it.

Frank Mankiewicz, Kennedy's press secretary, said he was one of the few politicians who could attract white and black votes, and often challenged audiences to confront issues they might want to ignore. He chided comfortable students for using deferments to avoid the draft while poor blacks and whites died in Vietnam - sometimes eliciting boos.

"These days, you don't find politicians telling people what they don't want to hear, but he did that all the time," Mankiewicz recalled.

To grasp Kennedy's appeal, it's important to understand the chaos and divisions of 1968. Riots convulsed more than 100 cities after King was killed, and Army troops patrolled the nation's capital. Casualty rates in Vietnam soared much higher than in Iraq today, and the war and draft had alienated many young people.

Kennedy called the war immoral, and took responsibility for some of its early planning as his brother's closest adviser. He visited the poorest corners of America, broke bread with Cesar Chavez and striking farmworkers in California, and told black and white audiences that racial injustice was a stain on the country, but that lawlessness could not be tolerated.

"He gave people hope when there was plenty of reason not to have hope," recalled Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, a Stanford student at the time.

At a rally in St. James Park, in San Jose, Calif., in March 1968, Kennedy drew 10,000 people, pledging to resist "the erosion of our national decency."

"Poverty is indecent. Illiteracy is indecent. The maiming and death of young men in the swamps of Vietnam is indecent," he told the crowd. "It is indecent for a man to labor with his hands and back in the valleys of California, with no hope of sending his sons to college."

The political rules of 1968, with only a handful of primaries, were different from today. Kennedy started the race taking on President Lyndon Johnson, but antiwar activists had already rallied behind Sen. Eugene McCarthy and disparaged Kennedy as an opportunist.

After Johnson decided not to seek re-election, party bosses who would dominate the convention in Chicago began to support Vice President Hubert Humphrey, but some held back as Kennedy racked up primary wins in Indiana and Nebraska. Then Kennedy lost Oregon to McCarthy - which made the California contest on June 4 crucial.

"He knew if he lost California, it was all over, so he drove himself harder and harder," said historian Thurston Clarke, whose new book The Last Campaign chronicles Kennedy's race. "He was loved and hated more passionately in California than anywhere else."

Kennedy drew huge crowds from Chinatown in San Francisco to Watts in Los Angeles. His base of Latinos and blacks turned out by the thousands and carried him to victory.

"On to Chicago and let's win there," Kennedy told a jubilant crowd at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Moments later, just past midnight on June 5, a Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan who was angry about U.S. support for Israel shot him in the head. He died 26 hours later, on June 6.

The specter of violence had hung over the campaign for weeks. He received numerous threats. The night King was killed, Kennedy told a friend, "It could have been me." He predicted an attempt on his life in one interview.

Mankiewicz recalled that FBI agents gave him photos of people who might be a threat. "Hell, going through an airport, how was I going to spot a disaffected Teamster?" he said, referring to the union whose leader, Jimmy Hoffa, was sent to jail by the Kennedy Justice Department.

"Kennedy's campaign was an act of physical courage and, I believe, moral courage," Clarke said, noting that presidential candidates began receiving Secret Service protection after Kennedy's death.

Jerry Abramson, a former leader of Students for Kennedy who is now mayor of Louisville, Ky., saw that courage up close when Kennedy informed a largely black crowd in Indianapolis that King had been killed. Angry, armed men circled the tense crowd as Kennedy, with no police protection, talked extemporaneously of peace and compassion, and the need to "tame the savageness of man."

Unlike other cities, Indianapolis did not erupt in riots that night.

Forty years later, Abramson said Kennedy's relevance for any political leader is clear: "He told it like he felt it, and pulled no punches. He challenged our complacency. He was a good listener and never spoke down to people. He was a remarkable leader





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