Kennedy Robert F - The last campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 days that inspired America

ROBERT F. KENNEDY AND 82 DAYS THAT INSPIREDAMERICA

THURSTON CLARKE

Copyright 2008 by Thurston Clarke

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Lyrics to "Clack Clack / The Oldest Living SonMedley" and "Lincoln's Train," courtesy of John Stewart.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData
Clarke, Thurston.
The Last Campaign : Robert F. Kennedy and days thatinspired America / Thurston Clarke.st ed. p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-7792-6 ISBN-10: 0-8050-7792-8

1. PresidentsUnited StatesElection1968. 2.Kennedy, Robert F., 1925-1968. 3. United StatesPolitics andgovernment1963-1969. I. Tide.

E851.C63 2008

973.922092dc2 2 2007045880

[B]

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Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote somany years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle thelife of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say aprayer for our country and for our people.

Robert F. Kennedy, speaking in Indianapolis on April4, 1968, two hours after the assassination of Dr. Martin LutherKing Jr.

June 8, 1968

In 1968, America was a wounded nation. Thewounds were moral ones, and the Vietnam War and three summers ofinner-city riots had inflicted them on the national soul,challenging Americans' belief that they were a uniquely noble andhonorable people. Americans saw news footage from South Vietnam,such as the 1965 film of U.S. Marines setting fire to thatched hutsin the village of Cam Ne with cigarette lighters and flamethrowersas women and children ran for safety, and realized they werecapable of atrocities once considered the province of theirenemies. They saw smoke rising over Washington, D.C., during theriots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.,soldiers with machine guns guarding the Capitol, federal troopspatrolling the streets of American cities for the first time sincethe Civil War, and asked themselves how this could be happening intheir City Upon a Hill.

Nineteen sixty-eight was an election year,and the presidential candidates all promised to win or negotiate anend to the Vietnam War and to pacify America's cities with newsocial programs, draconian law enforcement, or both. But only onecandidate, Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, recognized themoral wounds and promised to heal them. Days after announcing hiscandidacy on March 16, he accused President Lyndon Johnson'sadministration of abandoning "the generous impulses that are thesoul of this nation" and said he was running to offer "a way inwhich the people themselves can lead the way back to those idealswhich are the source of national strength and generosity andcompassion of deed."

During his campaign for the Democraticnomination, Kennedy told Americans that they were individuallyresponsible for what their government had done in their name inVietnam and for what it had failed to do at home for minorities andthe poor. He said they could not acquit themselves of thisresponsibility simply by voting for a new president and newpolicies. Instead, they would have to participate in the healingprocess. Because Kennedy had managed his late brother's 1960presidential campaign and served in his cabinet as attorneygeneral, he understood that following a crude and divisive campaignwith a high- minded presidency would be difficult, and healing amorally wounded nation after running an immoral campaign would beimpossible. Because he understood this, his campaign is a templatefor how a candidate should run for the White House in a time ofmoral crisis.

Since 1968, the word hopehas become the oratorical equivalent of an American flag lapel pin,a de rigueur rhetorical flourish amounting to a vague promise ofbetter days. But the hope that Robert Kennedy offered was specific:that Americans' belief in their integrity and decency could berestored. His assassination on June 5, eighty-two days after he hadannounced his candidacy, represented not just the death of anotherKennedy or of a promising young leader, but the death of this hope.This explains why the most dramatic display of public grief for anAmerican citizen who had never been elected to the presidencyunfolded on June 8, 1968, when a twenty-one-car funeral train, itsengine draped in black bunting, carried Kennedy's body from hisfuneral in New York to his burial in Washington.

Trains carrying the remains of PresidentsAbraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt had traveled at a mournfulpace, passing bonfires, bands, and weeping crowds, and stopping fortributes. But Kennedy's train was scheduled to travel nonstop andat a normal rate of speed. Crowds were expected, but no oneimagined that on a steamy Saturday afternoon two million peoplewould head for the tracks, wading through marshes, hiking acrossmeadows, and slithering under fences, filling tenement balconies,clambering onto factory roofs, standing in junkyards andcemeteries, peering down from bridges, viaducts, and bluffs,placing 100,000 coins on the tracks, waving hand-lettered GOODBYEBOBBY signs, and forging a 226-mile-long chain of grief anddespair.

Political reporter Theodore White, one of the1,146 passengers, wrote, "It was only, however, when the funeraltrain that was to bear him to Washington emerged from the tunnelunder the Hudson that one could grasp what kind of a man he was andwhat he had meant to Americans." Once the train crossed into NewJersey, mourners jamming station platforms and spilling ontonorthbound tracks forced the engineer to reduce his speed. After anorthbound express killed two people standing on the tracks inElizabeth, the Penn Central halted all other traffic on the lineand the funeral train continued to Washington at half speed. Insidethe coaches, some of Kennedy's ten children played with balloons inthe dining car while their mother, her black veil pulled back overher head, walked through the coaches, greeting mourners. Passengersate in the dining cars, drank until the bar car ran dry, orremained determinedly sober. They laughed, cried, or sat in stonysilence, found this impromptu wake distressing or a fittingtribute. But they all stared out the windows and saw their griefreflected in the faces of people whom they usually flew over orsped past.

Looking out those windows were many of thepeople responsible for the political and cultural life of thenation during the years since John F. Kennedy's inauguration: NewYork socialites and Massachusetts backroom pols, Hollywoodcelebrities and media heavyweights, star athletes and famouswriters, architects and opponents of the Vietnam War, men who hadserved in John Kennedy's administration and might have served inBobby's. There was Charles Evers, whom Bobby Kennedy had comfortedafter his brother, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, wasassassinated in 1963, and who was now thinking about Bobby: "Where,dear God, is the man to take his place?" There was Coretta ScottKing, whom Bobby had comforted after her husband was assassinatedin April of that year, and Jackie Kennedy, who had told formerWhite House aide Arthur Schlesinger that she feared "the samething" that had happened to her husband would happen to Bobbybecause "there is so much hatred in this country, and more peoplehate Bobby than hated Jack."