HOW KENNEDY COUNTRY BECAME TRUMP COUNTRY
Political tides have turned in eastern Kentucky
February 1968:
Sen. Robert F. Kennedy visits students in rural Breathitt County, Ky., a region long left behind by economic prosperity.
August 2017: President Trump rallies with supporters at the Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington, W.Va.
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.
Kennedy, heir to a fortune, “is now one of the faceless hungry,” reported the Knoxville News Sentinel: Not since FDR’s Depression-era campaigns in the South “had so many forlorn turned out with such hopeful enthusiasm.”
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.
RFK’s ‘poverty tour’
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 4-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 the region had known, had begun its long decline. Many people lived in conditions not that different from those of their ancestors in the 19th century.
At this point in his career, 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. “This was history,” says Dee Davis, who as a high school junior combed his hair like Kennedy and went to see him walk through Hazard’s black neighborhood. “You wanted to be part of it.”
In a speech, Kennedy said: “I saw a family of six who have milk only one day a month. And many of the families we saw spend no more than 30 cents a day for a child for food.”
“I love these people,” Kennedy told Greider. “It’s terrible to have all this in a country as affluent as ours.”
On March 16, Kennedy entered the presidential race. Two weeks later, Johnson said he would not seek reelection. 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.
A Kentucky stunner
Nowhere was Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory more striking than eastern Kentucky, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans and people of both parties fondly recall the Kennedy brothers.
That includes two Republican Trump supporters: Tyler Ward, 32, a lawyer whose father, a Democrat, is the chief executive of Letcher County, and Colin Fultz, 46, an entrepreneur whose father was elected magistrate as a Democrat.
Ward’s grandfather was a “yellow dog” Democrat (he’d vote for a yellow dog before a Republican) who always said that Democrats care about people and Republicans care about money. “But now it seems the roles have been reversed,” Ward says: Republicans care about people, like coal miners; Democrats care about intangibles, like climate change.
How did Kennedy country become Trump country? The men would appear to share little more than a New York address and a Palm Beach tan.
Kennedy in 1968 promised to use government help people; Trump in 2016 promised to get government off their backs. Kennedy promised to help miners recover from what he described as the irreversible decline of coal; Trump promised to bring coal back.
Trump blamed others — immigrants, environmentalists, the Chinese — for America’s problems. Kennedy blamed Americans: “How can we allow this?” he asked of hunger here.
And neither would seem to be to the taste of mountain people, who, rendered cynical by many unmet political promises, “will tell you real quick to go kiss your ass,” says Steve Cawood, who as a young law student accompanied Kennedy.
How did Kennedy country become Trump country? The men would appear to share little more than a New York address and a Palm Beach tan.
50 years later, mixed progress
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.
But 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.