USA TODAY International Edition
HOW KENNEDY COUNTRY BECAME TRUMP COUNTRY
In eastern Kentucky, political tides have turned
BARWICK, Ky. The line of big cars pulled up outside the one-room schoolhouse, which had a potbelly stove for heat and an outhouse in back. The senator burst in the door, followed by a pack of politicians, aides and journalists. ❚ Robert F. Kennedy had come to learn about rural poverty. Instead, his arrival petrified the students, who sat riveted to their ancient desks with their heads down, afraid to even look at the great man and his entourage.
He sized up the problem. Instead of making a speech for the media, Kennedy moved quietly among the students, stopping to reassure them.
He’d squeeze a hand, murmur in an ear. “What did you have to eat today?” he asked one girl. “I know you’re scared,” he told a boy, “but it’s gonna be all right.”
Few who were there would forget how this powerful man reached those poor children with nothing but what the author William Greider, then of the Louisville Courier-Journal, would call “his physical humanity.’’
That was almost 50 years ago — Feb. 13, 1968. Bobby Kennedy was a month from declaring for president and four months from an assassin’s bullet.
For two days, he met people as poor and isolated as he was rich and famous. Somehow, they clicked.
The implications were not lost on Peter Edelman, a Kennedy aide.
“I was certain that these people would be Democrats their whole lives,” he recalls, “and their children’s lives.”
But no. Beginning in 2004, the six counties Kennedy visited began to shift Republican in presidential races. And in 2016, Donald Trump carried each with 70% to 80% of the vote.
What was Kennedy country is Trump country. Children of Kennedy Democrats are Trump Republicans. And for those inspired by RFK in 1968, what should be a happy anniversary is instead an occasion to puzzle a drastic reversal of political fortune.
By February 1968, the Vietnam War had soured. Kennedy felt intense pressure to challenge its prosecutor, President Lyndon Johnson, for re-election. In the midst of his agonized deliberations, he came here to study the effect of Johnson’s four-year-old War on Poverty. Eastern Kentucky had 20 of the nation’s 30 poorest counties; coal mining, one of the few sources of prosperity for the region, had begun its long decline. RFK’s political reputation was for ruthlessness; he was John F. Kennedy’s hatchet man in the 1960 presidential campaign. But he had been shattered by his brother’s assassination. He could identify with people who were suffering. So it was in eastern Kentucky — and the Mississippi Delta, the fields of California, the Indian reservations — where he established a political tradition that his family, his party and his country have never quite forgotten. Cynics called it a “poverty tour.”
In two days, Kennedy traveled 200 miles, often over poorly paved, curving mountain roads, visiting places that had seldom seen anyone half as famous.
People slipped paper for autographs through the slit in his car window and held children up to see him over the crowds.
He had to shake so many hands his grip lost all strength.
“I love these people,” Kennedy told Greider. “It’s terrible to have all this in a country as affluent as ours.”
And on March 16, Kennedy entered the presidential race.
Two weeks later, Johnson said he would not seek re-election. Early on June 5, hours after he won the California primary, Kennedy was shot in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen while shaking hands with a busboy. He died 24 hours later.
Fifty years later, eastern Kentucky is more prosperous.
Fewer than a quarter of residents live below the poverty line, compared with more than half 50 years ago. There are four-lane highways, regional hospitals and Wal-Marts.
Yet the six counties Kennedy visited are among the sickest in one of the nation’s sickest states, and an epicenter of the opioid epidemic.
Rates of premature death and infant mortality are roughly twice the nation’s.
Many of the kids in the Barwick class that Kennedy visited had to move away to find work. Several who stayed died of drug overdoses. One killed himself.
The schoolhouse was closed in the early ’70s and today is a ruin; the county librarian calls Barwick itself “almost a mountain ghost town.”
Recently, Bonnie Jean Carroll, who taught the class, returned to visit the school. She’s 82, a lifelong Democrat.
She thinks about Kennedy and what might have been: “He was concerned about us. He wanted to help. If he’d survived …”
She looks at a photo of her class and sees all the missing faces.