Robert Kennedy’s Example
Thirty-three years ago, after winning the California presidential primary, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy was struck down and violently removed from the center of Democratic politics at the worst possible moment for the party. By June 1968, the Democrats' once sturdy New Deal coalition was buckling under the Vietnam War's exposure of the weighty contradictions in Cold War liberalism. The party was divided, and Kennedy was mid-way through a high-stakes process of pulling the party apart so that it might be put back together again under his leadership. He hoped that through grassroots citizen mobilization the emergent peace wing of the party could shunt aside and replace the committed hawks among the party leadership, who controlled the Democratic National Committee and all of the levers of power of the Presidency.
Well, it didn't work out that way. On June 6, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was dead, and it was the peace wing that ended up being shunted aside at the disastrous Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August. Richard Nixon's 1968 victory over Hubert Humphrey, who had toed the line on Lyndon Johnson's war until it was politically fatal, ushered in -- save for Jimmy Carter's single term -- a quarter century of Republican domination of the White House, and along with it a prolonged identity crisis for Democrats.
Some of Kennedy's insights about American society are as relevant today as they were thirty-three years ago. In March 1968, he pointed out to an audience in Des Moines, Iowa that the economic yardstick of the Gross National Product" counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our streets of carnage. It counts the special locks for our doors and jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of natural wonder to chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and television programs which glorify violence to sell toys to our children." Two months later, the 42-year-old Senator and presidential candidate said:"In my judgment it is imperative that we lessen the gulf which divides those who have and those who do not. I do not believe our nation can survive unless we are able to accomplish a change which brings with it an acceptable way of life for all. If one segment of our society is impoverished, it impoverishes us all."
In the decades since Kennedy's untimely death, it seems that Democratic leaders have ceded to the Republicans the nation's political agenda on taxes, deficits, crime, welfare, military spending, and class inequality. This is an unfortunate development because for millions of working people who are struggling to get by, and have been losing ground for the last twenty years, the Democratic Party is all they have.
In February 1968, in an often overlooked but watershed speech, Kennedy told the nation that it was"time for the truth" about the Vietnam war, and outlined what he called the five deceptive illusions upon which Johnson's Southeast Asia policy was based. He did so in a time of intense polarization with the nation at war, and a large percentage of the population feeling a martial spirit.
Where are the Democratic leaders today who are not afraid to tell the nation that it is"time for the truth" on a host of current issues such as the unfairness of regressive tax cuts, the injustices of the prison industrial complex, the obscene rate of incarceration of young African-American men, the waste and senselessness of the"Star Wars" missile defense scheme, and the disgrace that one in five children in this country still lives in poverty. Instead of falling over each other to take credit for the least offensive parts of the GOP's agenda, Democrats should get back to basics, and look to Robert F. Kennedy's three years in the Senate for some new ideas about the meaning of leadership.