ROBERT FRANCIS KENNEDY
Rubin, Morris H.
Robert Francis Kennedy by Morris H. Rubin The murder of Senator Robert Francis Kennedy was more than the cruel end of a brilliant career at high tide. It was more than one more tragedy for a...
...It was more than one more tragedy for a tragedy-haunted family...
...The Progressive supported Adlai Stevenson to the end...
...He was a visionary evangelist on the stump...
...It was at a cocktail party preceding the banquet given by the White House Correspondents' Association for his brother, President Kennedy...
...The Reverend Beverly A. Asbury, University Chaplain, Vanderbilt University, writing in Katallagete (Be Reconciled), the journal of the Committee of Southern Churchmen vinced, of Robert Kennedy...
...There was a moment of painful silence...
...He radiated charisma...
...The first time I met Robert Kennedy I saw the latter quality and, near-sightedly, failed to detect the former...
...Much rubbish was being spoken and published as these notes were written about the meaning of Robert Kennedy's death...
...he was also a practical man skilled in the bookkeeping chores of politics in the back room...
...Deport Stokely, and see if crime and turmoil disappear...
...Over the years, The Progressive has expressed many reservations about Robert Kennedy, and we feel no compulsion, in retrospect, to withdraw them...
...The President of the United States is wrong when he suggests that "crime in the streets" is the real issue...
...Demand law and order, and watch for the results...
...But no one who has watched him search for the bitter truth in the presence of the bloated bellies of starving black children in Mississippi, no one who has followed him as he hunted for the facts and answers in the rat-ridden slums of Harlem, no one who has seen him in combat in behalf of the harshly neglected American Indians—who can hardly swing a single precinct—and no one who has heard his passionate demand for a measure of justice for the long exploited Mexican American migrants struggling for survival in the rich fruit fields of California—no one who has observed him in action along these dead-end streets of America could doubt the depth of his concern or the passion of his commitment to basic reform...
...He was a cool pragmatist to his fingertips...
...he was also an ardent idealist to his toe-tips...
...Still, we can't resist the reflection that Senator Eugene McCarthy was right when he spoke, as Tom Wicker of The New York Times expressed it, for those who "sought compulsively for a collective response, a sort of national soul within which to weep...
...He was a compulsive competitor—in sports as in politics— and he always played to win...
...It was both, to be sure, but it was also the gunning down of yet another American liberal leader who was dedicated to peaceful—but fundamental--reform in the domestic and foreign policies of our stricken and tension-ridden country...
...Senator Kennedy was a shy man...
...he was also a gracious loser and a player who loved the game for itself...
...Even more nonsense was being tossed about regarding the kind of memorial that should be fashioned in his honor...
...Imprison Rap, and see what is improved...
...In recent years, however, we have come to admire what we described in our May issue as his "progressive position on the issues that count...
...If we understood the man at all, we can think of no more fitting memorial to Robert Kennedy than the early enactment of legislation designed to abolish the disgrace of widespread poverty in the richest nation on earth, an agonizing reappraisal among Americans to end the racism he regarded as the most destructive force in American life, and the prompt conclusion of the war in Vietnam which he saw as a major source of our sorrows at home and the underlying cause of our country's low estate abroad...
...The cause of the violence is...
...After a while, I muttered a "nice-to-have-met-you" and drifted away to more congenial company...
...This was not true, we are conViolence Is Not the Issue Violence is not the real issue...
...I was convinced I had been snubbed because the Attorney General's much publicized long and hostile memory had fingered me as an editor who had not been a pro-Kennedy zealot before and during the 1960 Democratic National Convention...
...he also was dour and aloof...
...Many men born to wealth come to adopt liberal policies either because of some patronizing adherence to a concept of noblesse oblige or because, as hard-headed realists, they know they are vastly outnumbered by the poor and the underprivileged to whom they feel they must pay a modest ransom to retain their control...
...They knew he cared...
...The cause of crime is...
...Countless acres of newsprint have been consumed in the orgy of self-analysis and national psychoanalysis that swept the country after that black night in Los Angeles...
...Like so many men of stature, he made bitter enemies...
...Then I tried some small talk, but his response added up to no more than a distant and doleful look and stony silence...
...A mutual friend introduced us and then left us to ourselves...
...The nation bears too great a burden of guilt for its neglect of problems in our own land, he suggested...
...He was an intense man, a man of vibrant energies who loved the clash of strenuous combat...
...Long afterwards, our mutual friend told me that Robert Kennedy had expressed regret that the words that might have made for some civilized conversation had not seemed to come to him and that such was his mood at the moment that he could only stand there and wait hopefully for me to ignite a dialogue...
...And the assassination is a reflection, in part, "of violence which we have visited upon the rest of the world...
...It is no simple task to write of Robert Kennedy...
...It is not enough, said Senator McCarthy, to fasten all the blame on "one deranged man, if that is the case...
...If the pundits and the politicians scoffed at Robert Kennedy as champion of America's forsaken minorities, the people didn't...
...Murder Malcolm and see what has been ended—Watts, Detroit, Newark, Nashville...
...The ingredients of his character and personality, like those of so many of the rest of us, were often in collision...
...We shall see, Congressmen, if riots cease after you make it illegal to cross state lines with the "intention" of inciting violence...
...Some of his words and acts, of course, were politically motivated...
...and he was a brusque man...
...He was not a simple man...
...Some of it may be useful, but we have no intention of drawing on our slender supply of paper to add to the confusion...
...he also made fiercely dedicated friends—as we of The Progressive rediscovered before his death when we began to average a half dozen to a dozen cancellations a week because our support of Senator McCarthy inevitably involved rejection of Senator Kennedy's candidacy...
...he was also a quiet man, a man who loved children and dogs and poetry...
Vol. 32 • July 1968 • No. 7
