FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

Rfk_bw_2By the time Robert Kennedy decided to run for President, in March of 1968, just days after Eugene McCarthy’s great New Hampshire primary showing  demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson’s weakness and the real unpopularity of the Vietnam war, I was already neck-deep in McCarthy’s campaign.  I’d been involved since the summer before, in what, before McCarthy agreed to run, we called Dump Johnson.  When Allard Lowenstein (himself assassinated in 2000), recruited us for it at the 1967 National Student Association (NSA) meeting, he’d  say "You can’t beat somebody (LBJ) with nobody."  So he had worked very hard to get Bobby to run, but he refused. 

It was Gene McCarthy who agreed to stand for all of us against the Johnson administration and the war.  After NSA I organized the Smith campus.  We were among the first students to go each weekend to New Hampshire to work for McCarthy and against the war.  So when Kennedy announced, just days after our great New Hampshire triumph, that he would also run, we were devastated, and angry. 

Over the months of campaigning though, I came to have enormous respect for Senator Kennedy and his campaign.  There was no way to watch him without feeling the power of his connection with all kinds of Americans and his compassion, poetry and sense of justice.  This moment, just as an inner city Indianapolis neighborhood learned of the death of Martin Luther King, is typical of him at his best:
 

By June the campaign was tense; such an important issue and the two Senators were running against one another as well as (and sometimes, it seemed, instead of) the war.  Kennedy won Indiana.  McCarthy won Oregon.  We moved south to Los Angeles(one of many places I saw for the first time from a campaign bus) criss-crossing the state from Chico to San Francisco and back to LA.  Just before the midnight after the primary, as June 4, 1968, election day, became June 5, we knew we’d lost, so we went to Senator’s concession in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton and then back upstairs to mourn.  We weren’t even watching the rest of coverage.  Suddenly, running through the halls of the staff floor of the hotel, one of McCarthy’s closest advisors shouted "Turn on the TV!  They’ve done it again!" 

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