‘Kennedy’ captures appeal of the man, misses bigger picture
If you say the year “1968” to anyone who lived through it, it will automatically prompt a sequence of memory flashes: Martin Luther King, protests, riots, the Chicago Democratic National Convention, the election of Richard M. Nixon, and of course, the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy after he won the California Democratic primary and seemed all but anointed as the next president of the United States.
To say that it didn’t turn out that way is an understatement that reverberates across five decades to modern times. History is not just an arrangement of events in time — it is an infinite, continuing whole with unrevisable
layers and links. The deaths of King and Kennedy formed a defining unrevisable moment for the United States and especially for Baby Boomers coming of age at that time.
“Bobby Kennedy for President” is a four-hour, four-part docuseries on the life, career and death of the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy, available for streaming on Netflix on Friday, April 27. Directed by Dawn Porter, it is a decent film, with an abundance of archival footage and recorded conversations, as well as modern-day interviews with, among others, Rep. John Lewis; activist Dolores Huerta; Paul Schrade, RFK’s labor adviser; entertainer Harry Belafonte; filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker; Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman; and Juan Romero, the former busboy who knelt by Kennedy on the kitchen floor of the Ambassador Hotel, where Kennedy was shot.
If you seek to understand one Kennedy, you need to understand the entire family — Porter gets that, to an extent. As Jack relied on Bobby, Bobby himself
would rely on Ted when both served in the U.S. Senate. What she doesn’t fully explore is the full impact of being a Kennedy in the 1950s and ’60s. The family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, was shrewd, a political and economic powerhouse, who became U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Rose Kennedy’s father, John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, was mayor of Boston. Both men knew how to work the political system in Boston, and younger Kennedys were schooled not only in the understanding that they had an obligation to give back, but how to achieve their goals by working the system.
The first of the four films focuses almost exclusively on John Kennedy’s truncated first term, because that’s when most Americans first became aware of Bobby Kennedy, who had been staff lawyer for the Army-McCarthy Hearings, and managed his brother’s campaign for president. His appointment as attorney general brought cries of nepotism, but JFK trusted no one as fully as he trusted his brother.
Former New Jersey Rep. Neil Gallagher admired RFK, without entirely trusting him at first. He was, Gallagher says, “two people,” and one side could be very aggressive.
“When he’s bent on what he thinks is the right course, he’s rather ruthless,” observed the late journalist Walter Lippmann in archival footage.
“He’s got this other side to him that he wants you to kiss his ‘be-hind’ every time,” said Lyndon B. Johnson, who disliked RFK as much as RFK disliked him. “This is a very ambitious young man.” In a way, Bobby Kennedy shared the kind of keen political acumen with Johnson, and Johnson’s own mentor, House Speaker Sam Rayburn.
As attorney general in the Kennedy administration, RFK displayed that duality of his nature, pushing the boundaries of civil liberties to fight crime and authorizing federal wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr.
RFK’s position on race changed between his brother’s campaign and into his own senatorial career. Like many establishment Democrats in the early ’60s, RFK was afraid of pushing too hard on race issues for fear of alienating the very powerful, long-serving Southern Democrats in Congress. After King was jailed in 1960, a month before the election, JFK called Coretta Scott King to express his dismay. Others in the party openly demanded King’s release. RFK was furious, fearing the position could imperil his brother’s chances in the election.
But Bobby Kennedy also knew King was being treated unfairly. Notwithstanding his chastisement of other Democrats for trying to make an issue out of King’s arrest, Bobby Kennedy placed calls to the governor of Georgia and the judge in the case and got him released. One side of RFK went immediately to the possible political fallout if the Kennedy Democrats pushed for King’s release. But the other side soon took over, the side that believed in justice and decency.
“Kennedy didn’t fully understand the race situation” at first, Lewis observes. Kennedy began to talk about equality and inclusion, but some black leaders, like Wright Edelman, were wary of trusting the man who had worked for Sen. Joe McCarthy’s committee and authorized the government wiretap on King.
But Kennedy did something some politicians are only able to feign: He listened. And not just to civil rights leaders: When he was a senator from New York, he flew to California to march with Cesar Chavez, Huerta and members of what was then called the National Farm Workers Association to urge a grape boycott because of unfair wages and other practices by growers toward migrant workers.
The film includes RFK questioning a local sheriff in a public committee hearing about how he could justify rounding up farm workers just for getting together but not having committed any crime.
“They’re ready to violate the law,” the sheriff answers. Presaging Khizr Khan’s appearance at the Democratic National Convention in 2016, Kennedy responds, “Can I suggest that the sheriff and the district attorney read the Constitution of the United States?”
The forthcoming 1968 election was rightly seen, in part, as a referendum on the Vietnam War. Presuming Johnson would run for re-election, Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy milked the antiwar vote, and ended up only seven points behind LBJ in the New Hampshire primary.
Johnson shocked the nation when he said he would not run for a second full term.
Kennedy got into the race, so did Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and McCarthy fought on. Then, after midnight on June 5, 1968, RFK stood in front of a cheering crowd at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, after winning the California primary.
“And now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there.”
He turned away from the podium, futilely pushed his thick forelock off his forehead. He was supposed to go with Huerta to a victory celebration but instead got sent toward the hotel kitchen.
The shots sounded, as we have gotten so used to hearing over the years, “like firecrackers.”
The final film is a hodgepodge with a laundry list of post-’68 events such as Kent State and Nixon’s resignation. Sirhan Sirhan’s trial, which began almost seven months after he shot Kennedy, is covered in detail, with contemporary commentary from law Professor Kim Taylor Johnson pointing out how inadequate Sirhan’s defense was and the predictability of the outcome.
“Bobby Kennedy for President” is not a definitive work. Yes, it has been carefully researched and is a very useful and important compilation of materials about who RFK was and what he did. In doing so, it captures the appeal of the man, especially to a generation looking desperately for a leader who would bring the nation peace, within its borders and elsewhere.
While the post-assassination events list, including Woodstock, is accurate, it doesn’t capture the intensity of feeling the Baby Boomer generation experienced after 1968. Whether they were members of Up With People or barefoot hippies, the hoped-for election of JFK signaled change to those coming of age at the end of the decade as the nation awoke from from the hermetically sealed 1950s.
Hope was crushed, again and again in the ’60s, beginning with the JFK assassination and continuing through the escalation of Vietnam, violence in American cities as frustration hit the boiling point for African Americans who needed more than passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act the next year. The murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, followed by the election of Richard Nixon in November 1968, made 1968 an annus horribilis for many members of the Baby Boomer generation. A wake-up call and a destroyer of dreams.
At his brother’s funeral, Ted Kennedy paraphrased George Bernard Shaw, with a line once meant to define Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign for the White House: “Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream things that never were and say why not?”
For many people, the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy provided the disappointing, spirit-crushing answer to “why not?”