Robert F. Kennedy.
The father.
What follows was written by Evan Thomas (more on Evan at the bottom). We asked him to write a piece about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He declined. We asked him to write a piece about Robert F. Kennedy. He said yes.
Evan’s piece first appeared at Political News Items. We’re making it available to all paid subscribers to News Items because……we’re offering a summer special “50% off” Political News Items subscription and thought it might entice you to sign up.
Robert F. Kennedy. by Evan Thomas.
On April 26, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy stood before an audience of doctors and medical students at the University of Indiana. He gripped the podium to steady his shaking hands. The students, who were mostly white and middle class, asked him where he was going to get the money to pay for medical programs for the poor.
“From you,” Kennedy answered.
There were boos and hisses, but he kept on. “You sit here as white medical students while Black people carry the burden of fighting in Vietnam.” Silence from the crowd. Kennedy kept banging on with uncomfortable truths, and a strange thing started to happen. The audience began to applaud. Kennedy won the Indiana primary.
It is hard to imagine a politician today like Robert Kennedy, who dared to tell the truth—not one’s “own truth” but the true facts—and ask for sacrifice from people when he was trying to win their votes. Certainly not Joe Biden or Donald Trump, or Kennedy’s own son, Robert, Jr.
Kennedy was in some ways an unnatural politician. His voice as well as his hands shook when he spoke, and he could look depressed, which he sometimes was. He could sound too hot and angry while speaking to the very people whose votes and money he needed to win the presidency. He was haunted by the death of his brother and would say, when he saw the massive crowds, that they had come for Jack, not him. He never mentioned JFK’s name in his speeches.
RFK’s almost willful refusal to do the sort of things politicians are supposed to do drove his aides nuts. Kennedy had a rueful, self-mocking side. Contemplating all the groups he had alienated as he began his 1968 presidential campaign, he said to an aide, Milton Gwirtzman, “Who else could have brought together Big Business, Big Labor, and the South?” “And the Jews,” said Gwirtzman.
And yet Kennedy was able to put together an unlikely coalition of have-nots and left-behinds—poor inner city Blacks and angry (and sometimes racist) blue collar workers. They sensed his sometimes inarticulate vulnerability and empathy.
On the day Martin Luther King was shot, Kennedy ignored warnings and left his police escort behind to go into what used to be called “ghetto” in Indianapolis. He told the people there of King’s death—not having heard the news, many audibly gasped—and then, haltingly, he talked about what it was like to lose his own brother (without naming him). He quoted the ancient Greeks about learning wisdom through suffering. There were race riots in many American cities that night, but not in Indianapolis.
It is, of course, easy to romanticize RFK. He could be tough and mean (“the Bad Bobby”), and it’s not at all certain he would have won the Democratic nomination in 1968 or beaten Richard Nixon in November. But it is worth remembering that there was once a politician who tried to tell the truth to a people who were willing to listen.
Evan Thomas is the author of eleven books: The Wise Men (with Walter Isaacson), The Man to See, The Very Best Men, Robert Kennedy, John Paul Jones, Sea of Thunder, The War Lovers, Ike’s Bluff, Being Nixon, First, and Road to Surrender. John Paul Jones, Sea of Thunder, Being Nixon, and First were New York Times bestsellers.**
Mr. Thomas was a writer, correspondent, and editor for thirty-three years at Time and Newsweek, including ten years (1986–96) as Washington bureau chief at Newsweek, where, at the time of his retirement in 2010, he was editor at large. He wrote more than one hundred cover stories and in 1999 won a National Magazine Award. He wrote Newsweek’s fifty-thousand-word election specials in 1996, 2000, 2004 (winner of a National Magazine Award), and 2008.
Thomas has taught writing and journalism at Harvard and Princeton, where, from 2007 to 2014, he was Ferris Professor of Journalism.
Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968. He was 42 years old.
** Links are to books by Evan that I’ve read. I highly recommend each one.
Is the uncomfortable truth even true? A quick google search for US deaths in Vietnam War reveals that Black soldiers were 12.6% of total US deaths, slightly above the Black share of the population, but in line with the Black percentage of the population cohorts that fought in the war.