http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/06/9452/
by David Emblidge
Published on Friday, June 6, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Even after all these years, Canton, New York is still a long way from
anywhere. The closest major city is Ottawa. But in February 1966,
Senator Robert Kennedy made the trek to the north country to take our
pulse on the issues of the day, in particular, Vietnam.
My friend, Timothy Evans, and I seized an opportunity and taped the
senator's speech, on my reel to reel machine. That tape stayed in my
hands for forty-one years until I had it copied for the St. Lawrence
University archives.
Bobby Kennedy's talk that day may have been routine for him, but it
was electric for us. The closer you got to him, the more you felt the
positive charge. Everywhere he went and not just because he carried
the banner of his assassinated brother, the President Bobby infused
his circumstances with crackling energy. His political jokes about
the loyal opposition were trenchant but never ad hominem. His
perorations on poverty in the third world, Appalachia or Harlem were
founded on data he memorized with compassionate attention and driven
by a compelling moral logic that said "this is not right." His sheer
earnestness was palpable. At the end of the speech, Bobby passed
straight up the auditorium aisle, the better to press the flesh. I
ran downstairs to shake his hand. We shared a nanosecond of eye
contact, and I felt the searing heat of his incandescent smile. I
have never forgotten the frisson of that encounter.
Reviewing his St. Lawrence speech nowadays, however, I see that the
Bobby we heard then is not the Bobby most of us choose to remember.
He was still months away from concluding that his brother's policy of
military engagement in Viet Nam, intended to staunch a spreading
communism in Southeast Asia, was a geopolitical strategic mistake. He
had yet to admit to himself what so many college students had already
surmised, that the American-sponsored South Vietnamese government was
incorrigibly corrupt; that North Viet Nam's leader, Ho Chi Minh, was
a revolutionary fighter against whom no assemblage of military
hardware and no number of troops would ever win a decisive victory.
And, he could not yet see that the war would become so unpopular
among younger, Americans that it was soon to be lost on the home
front. Nor could Bobby foresee how this fruitless war would bring
down President Johnson, opening a door for Eugene McCarthy, or even
for Robert Kennedy, to run for president on an anti-war platform.
At SLU, Bobby spun a web of rhetorical questions about staying the
course in Viet Nam, intensifying the bombing, leveraging the parties
to the negotiating table, engaging with or disregarding the Chinese
and Soviets. Clearly, he was churning options in his own mind, while
maintaining apparent loyalty to LBJ's war which was, after all, an
extension of JFK's.
Yet, in time, with the increasing polarization of the country and the
stunning surprise of a successful presidential primary campaign in
New Hampshire that catapulted Senator McCarthy to prominence as the
anti-war candidate…, in time Bobby changed his entire posture. He
plunged into the race, pushed upstart McCarthy aside, and reveled in
the open space created by LBJ's withdrawal from consideration for
another term. We all know the rest. After a string of inspiring
primary victories, culminating in California, Bobby, like his
brother, and like Martin Luther King just months earlier, was brought
down by a dissident's bullet.
From grad school in Charlottesville, I watched Bobby give his
victory speech in that California hotel, late at night on June 6,
1968. He flashed the victory sign, saying "And now let's move on to
Chicago and the convention…." I turned off the TV, went to bed, and
only heard about the shooting the next morning, from my roommate. I
was speechless. Later that day, driving homeward toward Buffalo to
see my parents, I pulled off to the roadside and wept uncontrollably.
What explains the intensity of all this emotion emanating from
Bobby Kennedy and swirling around him? It was not just his abundant
charm with its high political value. He had rare power because he
carried within him the amalgam of his own hopes and his dead
brother's, for the country and the world. Most of all, the magic lay
in a simple fact. It was his resolute belief in himself, plus our
willing belief in him, that he would become that he could indeed
make us all become agents of transformative change. Bobby compelled
us to think that profound social change was never merely about
tinkering with legislation or jiggering government budgets. Rather,
fundamental change requires subjecting to honest scrutiny deeply held
values that might have outlived their usefulness or might never have
had any genuine legitimacy.
Last year, visiting Powell's Books, in Portland, I found something
priceless in the rare book room. A smallish book, rebound in blue
calf, with new end papers, spine stamped in gold leaf, inscribed to a
friend by its author in about 1967. Robert Kennedy's To Seek a Newer
World reflects his growing discomfort with the way things were
trending in America and abroad. It's the roadmap Bobby would have
taken, had he lived to win the presidency. He did not live, and
there's the pity, and yet he does.
Bobby was no saint. Occasionally ruthless, he even served for a time,
at his nefarious father's behest, as assistant counsel to Senator Joe
McCarthy's infamous anti-communist committee. Yet, Bobby had a
capacity for growth, right in the public eye, as few politicians ever
do. He investigated, pondered, analyzed, and changed course, drawing
us onwards with him. Today, when the world seems, again, to be going
to hell in a hand basket, with all of us complicit in the planet's
undoing, Bobby's model is tonic.
It was the courage to confront the errors of our ways and the losses
in our lives that humanized Bobby Kennedy. Victim though he was, he
was also triumphant, for he embodied the tragic vision of Aeschylus:
"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the
heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God."
Moving, now, toward the November election, and slouching toward our
collective future, we all have regret and shame on our hands, and
yet, as Bobby would have had us remember, we can change, and we must,
and it can be for the better.
--
David Emblidge edited Beneath the Metropolis: Secret Lives of Cities
(Running Press), "My Day" Eleanor Roosevelt's Acclaimed Columns (Da
Capo), The Appalachian Trail Reader (Oxford Univ. Press). Emblidge's
essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, Saturday
Review, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and numerous scholarly
journals. His essay "The Palmer Method: Penmanship and the Tenor of
Our Time" won the McGinnis Prize for best nonfiction, 2007, in
Southwest Review. Formerly Editor-in-Chief at The Mountaineers Books,
he is now Associate Professor, Emerson College (Writing, Literature
and Publishing Dept.) and is writing a narrative history of American
bookstores.
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