OPINION

PHILIP MARTIN: Robert Kennedy on making America great

Robert F. Kennedy gives a speech in New York’s financial district on Oct. 24, 1964, during his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate, where he served until his assassination in June 1968.
Robert F. Kennedy gives a speech in New York’s financial district on Oct. 24, 1964, during his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate, where he served until his assassination in June 1968.

f our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vision and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow."

Robert F. Kennedy didn't write those words. He merely quoted them, in a speech at the University of Kansas he gave 50 years ago today, two days after he'd officially announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. The man he was quoting, William Allen White, was a newspaper editor from Emporia, a prairie town halfway between Topeka and Wichita, whose name is on the University of Kansas journalism building. He was a progressive, and could fairly be described as a liberal Republican.

RFK drew a laugh from the crowd when he described White as a "notorious seditionist."

"He is an honored man today," Kennedy said. "But when he lived and wrote, he was reviled as an extremist and worse. For he spoke, he spoke as he believed. He did not conceal his concern in comforting words. He did not delude his readers or himself with false hopes and with illusions. This spirit of honest confrontation is what America needs today. It has been missing all too often in the recent years and it is one of the reasons that I run for president of the United States."

Four months later, Bobby Kennedy was shot in the head and died. A Palestinian with Jordanian citizenship is still in prison for the murder. I was 9 years old. It seemed impossible to believe it had taken place less than 60 miles from our house in Rialto, Calif.

Time both inflates and reduces. It rounds off corners and simplifies, distilling the difficult and complex down to something easily digestible, a nursery rhyme or children's story. Sophisticated enough to understand we can't grasp it all, we keep in our heads flashcard images of a thousand historical figures; we think we know Napoleon and Robert E. Lee because we have on hand a cache of facts, because when we hear one of those names a face, a bearing, a costume surfaces--a familiar, friendly ghost.

Ghosts are not real, but they still have influence. They can be put to whatever use we may have for them. We need them, for we are a superstitious people, and their presence gives us comfort. We would like to believe that Lincoln's interest in the union is abiding, that Washington would approve (or disapprove) of what his children have done. And so we dot our capitals with monuments to elicit the spirit of the great dead, to remind the living of what men can be and do.

There is no marble monument to Robert F. Kennedy, and no handy summation of his life. I liked him when I was 9 years old because he wore his hair the way he did, because he seemed so much younger than all those other staid gray men did back then. Knowing what I know now, having read what I've read and talked to who I've talked to, I'm pretty ambivalent about RFK.

It is an essential part of his legend to assume that if not for Sirhan Sirhan he would have become president. And had he not been elected in 1968, at least he would have helped the Democrats unite behind Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon's presidency would not have occurred. So, this line of logic holds, there would have been no Nixon White House, no Watergate, no breaking of faith with Washington, no reason for Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan.

But his presidency was not a certainty. Had he lived, he might have won the Democratic nomination, and might have beaten Nixon in November, but even after winning California there was no certainty he could even catch Vice President Humphrey. He could have come up short, he could have been seen as an opportunistic spoiler who derailed any chance Eugene McCarthy's serious anti-war campaign had of succeeding.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once wrote of RFK that he was not "a simple man," but "many simple men," yet the popular modern understanding of the man--the flashcard--is of a Janus figure. There are two faces of RFK: On one side we have the ruthless prosecutor, the driven political guerrilla, the littlest Kennedy forever battling to prove his toughness, an opportunist capable of being wounded by slights and driven by vengeance.

The other face is of a saintly idealist, a champion of the poor and powerless, a presidential candidate of exceptional dimension and moral courage--the martyr.

"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things," he told that Kansas crowd as he argued the U.S. gross national product was an inadequate measure of greatness.

"[It] counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them," he said. "It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities ... [it] does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

RFK believed "we as a people are strong enough, we are brave enough to be told the truth of where we stand." He didn't "want to win support ... by hiding the American condition in false hopes or illusions."

It's weird to think that, 50 years ago, when our country seemed to be flying apart, someone might have won an election talking like a grownup.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

www.blooddirtangels.com

Editorial on 03/18/2018

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