[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Real Bobby Kennedy

[Bill Totten]

History and Hagiography

by Joe Allen

www.counterpunch.com (June 7 / 8 2008)


"I think we can end the divisions in the United States ... the violence,
the disenchantment with our society, the divisions, whether it's between
blacks and whites, between the poor and the affluent, or between age
groups, or over the war in Vietnam - that we can start to work together
again. We are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate
country ... So my thanks to all of you, and it's on to Chicago, and
let's win there."

Robert F Kennedy said this to ecstatic supporters at the Ambassador
Hotel following his triumph in the California Democratic primary on June
4 1968. Shortly after his victory speech, Kennedy left the stage, and as
he was entering the crowded hotel kitchen to greet supporters, he was
shot and mortally wounded. Two days later, he died.

For many liberals, the hopes for progressive political change died with
him. "The 1960s came to an end in a Los Angeles hospital on June 6
1968", Richard Goodwin mournfully declared in his popular memoir
Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (1988). Goodwin was a
former White House staffer during the Kennedy-Johnson administrations
who had resigned over the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He would
later become a speechwriter for Senators Eugene McCarthy and Bobby
Kennedy during their 1968 presidential campaigns.

Jack Newfield, one of the leading journalists of the Village Voice,
wrote in his memoir of Robert Kennedy that after his death "from this
time forward, things would get worse".

Goodwin, along with historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr and many
members of an adoring press corps who could barely contain their
enthusiasm for Bobby Kennedy's quest for the White House when he was
alive, would transform his life and death into a powerful liberal myth
that has lasted to this very day.

Bobby Kennedy - in reality, an arrogant and intolerant political
operative obsessed with his older brother John F Kennedy's political
career - is now remembered as a thoughtful, pained prophet who
identified with the dispossessed and forgotten of American society.

He has been placed alongside his brother and Martin Luther King Jr as a
trio whose assassinations collectively put America on the wrong
historical path. Had they lived, much of the "turmoil" of the 1960s -
the urban rebellions, the war in Vietnam and the long decades of
conservative rule begun with Richard Nixon's election to the presidency
in 1968 - could have been avoided.

Bobby Kennedy was the last hope - so goes the myth - for peaceful,
progressive change. In the words of Michael Harrington, author of The
Other America (1962), "he was a man who actually could have changed the
course of American history".

The question we have to ask four decades later is whether any of this is
remotely true.

* * *

Robert Francis Kennedy was the third son of Joseph P Kennedy, Sr, a
ruthless and politically ambitious businessman from Massachusetts.
Kennedy Sr made a fortune from a variety of enterprises, including real
estate, moviemaking, the stock market and bootlegging alcohol during
Prohibition.

Joe Kennedy had extensive ties to organized crime and corrupt
politicians, who helped make him very rich and to pursue his political
ambitions. His own ambition to be the first Irish Catholic president of
the United States, however, was thwarted by Franklin Roosevelt, and he
transferred his dream to his sons. Three out of four would either become
president or run for the presidency.

It is one of the great ironies of US political mythology that the
Kennedy family, viewed today as the very symbol of liberalism, was, in
fact, deeply conservative.

Joe Kennedy was openly supportive of the pro-fascist forces in Spain
during that country's civil war in the 1930s. He was appointed US
ambassador to Great Britain by Roosevelt in 1938, and was known as an
"appeaser" - one of those who supported making concessions to Hitler on
the eve of the Second World War. Herbert von Dirksen, the German
ambassador to Britain, told his superiors that Ambassador Kennedy was
"Germany's best friend" in London. Kennedy was fired as US ambassador in
1940.