Remembering Robert Kennedy 50 years later
A half-century after his death, Robert Francis Kennedy is remembered as a rebel, a reformer and an idealist who became an emblem of the 1960s.
When he died of an assassin’s bullet on June 6, 1968 in Los Angeles, it ended a surging presidential campaign that had become a crusade for African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, the poor and the white working class. Kennedy was an unlikely folk hero, a tribune of the forgotten and the dispossessed.
Today it is easy to think that RFK was always that impassioned agent provocateur pursuing social justice and racial equality in 1968. He wasn’t. For most of his public life, he was seen as conservative, anti-communist, a ruthless and abrasive family consigliere. His insurgent candidacy would have been unthinkable.
His passage from torchbearer to flamethrower took shape in the spring of 1963, when he was attorney-general in the administration of his brother, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Bobby wasn’t thinking about his own political future; he was planning to run Jack’s re-election campaign in 1964.
But an eerie, evocative speech he gave in 1963 offers a preview of RFK’s dawning moral consciousness — and opens an early window on his metamorphosis. There he identifies the causes and constituencies that would animate the last feverish chapter of his abbreviated life.
On June 2, 1963, Kennedy addressed graduates at Trinity College, a Catholic liberal arts institution for women in Washington. His commencement speech was filmed by documentarian Robert Drew and deposited in Drew’s archive in Hollywood, where it was unseen for decades.
Before the doe-eyed ingenues seated before him in the chapel, Kennedy touched on a host of social challenges facing America — civil rights, poverty, Native Americans, the mentally ill and the shifting expectations of modern women.
Foreshadowing his political awareness, he was like a moth emerging from a chrysalis.
Having congratulated the graduates on joining the nine per cent of Americans with a college degree, he asked boldly: “How are you going to use it? What are you — and I mean you, as individuals — what are you going to do with this hard-earned and priceless power?”
They could use it to advance their personal status, he said. Or, they could use their minds “to the full, for the benefit of others.” Be more than wives and mothers, he urged, declaring that conventional role “belongs to simpler times than ours — and simpler minds than yours.”
His advice seems subversive for the time. He warned about the notion of family life as “an air-tight capsule of coziness and consumership from which all the range and clamour of the world is shut out. Don’t let his happen to you.”
In a sense, Kennedy foresaw the rise of the women’s rights movement. He was counselling women to reject traditional roles that they would begin to doubt later in the decade with the rise of the women’s liberation movement.
He challenged his audience as well on civil rights, the country’s great moral imperative. A week before JFK unveiled his landmark civil rights bill, RFK spoke of “establishing those reforms which we all know in our heart, should have been made long ago.”
He lamented that the living conditions of Native Americans, “seldom publicized, are so poor that I could devote the rest of my talk to them alone.”
He lamented the one in eight Americans who was mentally ill or mentally disabled, bemoaning inadequate facilities for treatment.
Beyond civil rights, none of these issues were prominent in 1963. But as a senator, Kennedy would become a champion of black Americans and women.
He would publicize the conditions of Native Americans in Pine Ridge, South Dakota; investigate poverty in the Mississippi Delta; and call out institutions for the mentally challenged in New York, like Willowdale, which he called “a snakepit.”
All this he raised in June 1963, unaware of what was to come, as if shooting flares into the future. In five months Jack would be dead, shattering his world; in five years Bobby would be dead, shattering ours.