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political careers and conservative causes in more covert ways. He was
very close to the infamous anticommunist Senator Joseph McCarthy in the
1950s, after McCarthy became famous for persecuting liberals and
radicals. During McCarthy's 1952 reelection campaign, Joe made a
sizeable contribution and then asked that his son Bobby be placed on the
McCarthy subcommittee investigating "subversives".

Bobby only stayed on McCarthy's committee for six months, using it as a
springboard for an assignment to another congressional committee that
gained him greater notoriety - the Senate Rackets Committee led by the
reactionary Democratic Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, whom the
conservative labor leader George Meany described as "an anti-labor nut".

As an assistant counsel to McClellan, Bobby carried on his particularly
vicious persecution of Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, gaining a reputation
for ruthlessness in pursuit of his political enemies and rivals. Joe
Kennedy complimented his son on this character trait. "He's a great
kid", Joe said. "He hates the same way I do".

Throughout the 1950s, Bobby remained focused on building his older
brother's political career. He was campaign manager for John F Kennedy's
first US Senate campaign in 1952 and his presidential campaign in 1960.
Bobby was his brother's closest advisor (after Joe Kennedy Sr). When JFK
won the presidency, he made Bobby his attorney general.

* * *

The Kennedy presidency took place during a crucial time for three issues
that would later come to dominate the rest of the decade: the civil
rights movement, the Cuban Revolution and the war in Vietnam.

The Kennedys relied heavily on the Black vote to win the presidency in
1960, making certain symbolic overtures to Martin Luther King during the
campaign. But as Bobby recalled in 1964, "I did not lie awake at night
worrying about the problems of Negroes".

That would soon change as Freedom Riders challenged segregation on
interstate bus lines during the first year of the Kennedy presidency.
The year before, a wave of sit-ins took place across the country to
desegregate everything from lunch counters to public swimming pools. A
mass movement against Jim Crow segregation was emerging - and the
Kennedys did everything they could to contain it.

The Democratic Party was still a Jim Crow party - white Southern
Democrats were known as "Dixiecrats" - with Blacks almost entirely
disenfranchised in the South and the border states. For most of the 20th
century, the Democrats needed the "solid South" (the states of the
former Confederacy voting for the Democratic ticket as a bloc) to win
national elections, and Kennedy was no exception. During his short time
in office, John Kennedy appointed five supporters of segregation to the
federal judiciary.

The Freedom Riders and sit-ins threatened to push the Dixiecrats into
the Republican Party. The Kennedys hoped to pressure civil rights
activists in a direction that wouldn't jeopardize their southern support.

John Kennedy told Louisiana Governor James H Davis that his
administration was trying "to put this stuff in the courts and get it
off the street". As attorney general, Bobby Kennedy famously told
representatives of student civil rights groups, "If you cut out this
Freedom Rider and sitting-in stuff and concentrate on voter
registration, I'll get you a tax exemption".

He told Harris Wofford, special assistant to the president on civil
rights, "This is too much", after King refused to call off the protests.
RFK added, "I wonder if they have the best interests of the country at
heart. Do you know that one of them is against the atom bomb? Yes, he
even picketed against it in jail! The president is going abroad, and all
this is embarrassing him."

Robert Kennedy also authorized FBI chief J Edgar Hoover to begin
wiretapping Martin Luther King's telephone conversations on the grounds
that Stanley Levison, King's closest adviser, was allegedly a closet
member of the Communist Party. Of King, RFK remarked, "We never wanted
to get very close to him just because of these contacts and connections
that he had, which we felt were damaging to the civil rights movement".

The Kennedys put enormous pressure on the organizers of the historic
March on Washington in August 1963 to cancel the event; then, when that
failed, to control it. Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee leader
and future member of Congress John Lewis wanted to say in his speech: "I
want to know: Which side is the federal government on?" The
administration compelled him to take this out because, according to
Bobby Kennedy, it "attacked the president".

Lewis's frustration with the Kennedy administration would have resonated
with many civil rights supporters. One major source of frustration with
the Kennedys was their refusal to provide federal protection to civil
rights activists. Bobby later admitted, "We abandoned the solution,
really, of trying to give people protection".

A generation of civil rights activists became radicalized in the face of
the waffling compromises and inaction of the Kennedy administration.

* * *

Many of that generation also became radicalized by the Kennedy
administration's foreign policy, particularly when it came to Cuba and
Vietnam. The Kennedy brothers were as committed to defending the
American empire as any reactionary Republican.

For much of the 20th century, Cuba had been, for all intents and
purposes, a colony of the United States, where poverty wages were being
paid - and huge profits reaped - by American corporations. It also was a
haven for the American Mafia.

Castro's nationalist revolution in 1959 drove the American ruling class
to hysterics, and they set out to destroy Castro. The Kennedy
administration inherited plans from the Eisenhower administration and
authorized the CIA's disastrous "Bay of Pigs" invasion of Cuba in early
1961, the most spectacular of the US government's failed attempts to
crush the Cuban Revolution.

But it didn't stop there. Bobby Kennedy led a special White House
committee that oversaw "Operation Mongoose", a wide-ranging covert
program of sabotage, assassination, blackmail and other activities
directed against Fidel Castro and the Cuban government. Bobby declared
that it was "top priority" to get rid of Castro. The US failed, but its
campaign resulted in untold death and destruction across Cuba.

The Kennedy brothers' failure in Cuba only made them more determined to
succeed elsewhere. They became fascinated with "unorthodox" warfare:
counter-insurgency, assassination and covert action. The Eisenhower
administration had authorized the CIA to carry out 170 major covert
operations in eight years, while the Kennedy brothers authorized 163 in
less than three years.

Vietnam became a laboratory for all these deadly programs. By the time
of John F Kennedy's death in November 1963, the United States was
already fighting a proxy war in Vietnam. Its 15,000 military advisors
were leading combat operations and bombing missions in a faltering
effort to prevent the victory of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of
South Vietnam, called derisively by US officials the "Viet Cong".

In early November 1963, after the United States engineered the
assassination of the corrupt South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem,
Bobby said to his brother, "It's better if you don't have him, but you
have to have somebody that can win the war, and who is that?" The "who"
never emerged, but that didn't stop the United States from destroying
large parts of Vietnam in the hopes of winning the war against the NLF
and the North Vietnamese.

After John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, Bobby
remained in the cabinet as a lame-duck attorney general until August
1964, when he resigned and ran successfully for a US Senate seat from
New York.

Despite his personal hatred for the reigning Democratic President Lyndon
Johnson, who triumphed over his Republican rival Barry Goldwater in the
1964 presidential election in part by pledging to keep the US out of a
ground war in Vietnam, Bobby supported Johnson's war policies in
Vietnam. As a US senator, he never voted against any appropriation bills
that funded the war. I F Stone, the great radical journalist, wrote an
article in October 1966 titled "While Others Dodge the Draft, Bobby
Dodges the War".

In the Democratic congressional primaries in 1966, a number of antiwar
candidates ran against incumbents supporting Johnson's war policies. The
best known of these was radical journalist Robert Scheer, who challenged
Representative Jeffrey Cohelan, representing a district covering parts
of Berkeley and Oakland in California. Kennedy endorsed Cohelan.

Even the slavishly loyal Kennedy biographer Arthur Schlesinger was
forced to admit, "Kennedy brooded about Vietnam, but said less in
public". What were Bobby and other Senate liberals "brooding" about? Two
things: the prospect of the United States losing the war, and the
growing dissent in the country that threatened the Democratic Party's
domination of national politics since the early 1930s. How could the
Democrats - the "war party" in Vietnam - capture the antiwar vote?

Antiwar sentiment was bound to find expression in the Democratic Party;
it may have been the governing war party, but it was still the liberal
party, and more importantly, it was the party that had traditionally
played the role of capturing and disarming mass movements for social change.

When Bobby Kennedy made it clear that he would not challenge Johnson for
the Democratic nomination, the field was left open for a little-known
Democratic senator from Minnesota, Eugene "Gene" McCarthy, to run as an
antiwar candidate. In November 1967, at the press conference announcing
his candidacy, McCarthy was quite open about his political objective:

There is growing evidence of a deepening moral crisis in America -
discontent and frustration and a disposition to take extralegal if not
illegal actions to manifest protest. I am hopeful that this challenge
... may counter the growing sense of alienation from politics which I
think is currently reflected in a tendency to withdraw from political
action, to talk of nonparticipation, to become cynical and to make
threats of support for third parties or fourth parties or other
irregular political movements.

Kennedy's "broodings" got worse after the Tet Offensive by the NLF and
its North Vietnamese allies at the end of January 1968. A large majority
of the US population concluded from the offensive that the war had
become a "quagmire" and couldn't be won. The leading candidate for the
Republican presidential nomination, Richard Nixon, was proposing "peace
with honor" to the Democrats' war policies.

Gene McCarthy's campaign would have gone down as a footnote in history,
but because of the Tet Offensive, he won 42 percent of the vote in the
first primary contest in New Hampshire. It shocked Johnson, leading him
to withdraw from the race. It was at this moment that Bobby announced
his candidacy for the presidency.

* * *

It's important to be clear that Robert Kennedy never advocated
unilateral withdrawal of US forces from Southeast Asia; in fact, he
voted against this. While he peppered most of his campaign speeches in
1968 with rhetoric about the need for "peace" in Vietnam, he offered
little more than talk of a "negotiated settlement", which was not very
different from what Johnson or Nixon proposed, while they continued to
wage war against the Vietnamese people.

Bobby's chief political goal, like Eugene McCarthy's, was to capture the
support of the antiwar movement and to deliver it into the safe confines
of the Democratic Party.

With a political record like his, why did Bobby Kennedy's campaign
generate such excitement? Kennedy attracted large, enthusiastic,
sometimes frantic crowds that just wanted to reach out and touch him.
His most bland speeches elicited roaring approval from supporters. The
media at the time described him as having a "pop star" appeal to the young.

In many ways, Kennedy became the receptacle for the hopes of those
millions of Americans who still desired change through the established
political system.

He encouraged these illusions in him. He met with well-known antiwar
activists like former Students for a Democratic Society president Tom
Hayden and former Yale professor Staughton Lynd. He had a
well-publicized meeting with United Farm Workers union leader Cesar
Chavez while he was on hunger strike.

Kennedy would also confide to reporters, "I wish I'd had been born an
Indian" and "I'm jealous of the fact that you grew up in a ghetto, I
wish I'd had that experience" - or even more ridiculously, "If I hadn't
been born rich, I'd probably be a revolutionary".

But he could also strike a chord with people. On the night of Martin
Luther King's assassination, he spoke to a predominately Black audience
and told them that he could identify with their anger because "his
brother was killed by a white man".

Kennedy, however, worked both sides of the street. While crafting a
left-wing, even rebellious, image for the younger generation, he also
sought the support of the party bosses for his campaign. He sought but
failed to get the support of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, the very
symbol of Jim Crow in the North, for his presidential bid. "Daley's the
whole ballgame", Kennedy declared.

One of his earliest supporters was Jesse Unruh, the speaker of the
California State Assembly, who is attributed to popularizing the saying,
"Money is the mother's milk of politics".

Kennedy also didn't sound very progressive on many key issues. He
opposed economic sanctions on South Africa for its apartheid policies,
and he opposed busing to integrate schools. Kennedy even attacked Gene
McCarthy during their televised debate prior to the California primary
for his support for building public housing in the suburbs. Kennedy said
incredulously, "You say you are going to take 10,000 Black people and
move them into Orange County".

McCarthy believed that Kennedy advocated a "segregated residential
apartheid". Kennedy's big idea to alleviate poverty in the inner cities
was to provide tax breaks to corporations to move into blighted
neighborhoods. Then-California Governor Ronald Reagan believed that
"Kennedy is talking more and more like me".

With all this in mind, how could Bobby Kennedy be turned into such an icon?

The American myth-making machine is very powerful and usually does two
things. It elevates people like the Kennedy brothers to a status that
they do not deserve, while washing away the real radical politics that
were at the core of activists like Martin Luther King. They are all
mushed together into a candy-coated picture of the alleged greatness of
American society and its political system. "The yearning for Robert
Kennedy - or someone like him - is an open wound in some parts of
America", wrote one reporter two decades after his death.

Some would say Barack Obama is an example of "someone like him" today.
Yet when we remember Robert Kennedy, it should not be as someone who
promised hope and idealism, but as an opportunist who was part of a
political establishment responsible for the things the movements of
1960s struggled against.
_____

Joe Allen is the author of Vietnam: The (Last) War the US Lost (2008).

http://www.counterpunch.com/allen06072008.html


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