Bobby Kennedy – Don't Gel Too Soon

FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

By the time Robert Kennedy decided to run for President, in March of 1968, just days after Eugene McCarthy’s great New Hampshire primary showing demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson’s weakness and the real unpopularity of the Vietnam war, I was already neck-deep in McCarthy’s campaign. I’d been involved since the summer before, in what, before McCarthy agreed to run, we called Dump Johnson. When Allard Lowenstein (himself assassinated in 2000), recruited us for it at the 1967 National Student Association (NSA) meeting, he’d say "You can’t beat somebody (LBJ) with nobody." So he had worked very hard to get Bobby to run, but he refused.

It was Gene McCarthy who agreed to stand for all of us against the Johnson administration and the war. After NSA I organized the Smith campus. We were among the first students to go each weekend to New Hampshire to work for McCarthy and against the war. So when Kennedy announced, just days after our great New Hampshire triumph, that he would also run, we were devastated, and angry.

Over the months of campaigning though, I came to have enormous respect for Senator Kennedy and his campaign. There was no way to watch him without feeling the power of his connection with all kinds of Americans and his compassion, poetry and sense of justice. This moment, just as an inner city Indianapolis neighborhood learned of the death of Martin Luther King, is typical of him at his best:

By June the campaign was tense; such an important issue and the two Senators were running against one another as well as (and sometimes, it seemed, instead of) the war. Kennedy won Indiana. McCarthy won Oregon. We moved south to Los Angeles(one of many places I saw for the first time from a campaign bus) criss-crossing the state from Chico to San Francisco and back to LA. Just before the midnight after the primary, as June 4, 1968, election day, became June 5, we knew we’d lost, so we went to Senator’s concession in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton and then back upstairs to mourn. We weren’t even watching the rest of coverage. Suddenly, running through the halls of the staff floor of the hotel, one of McCarthy’s closest advisors shouted "Turn on the TV! They’ve done it again!"

Continue reading FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

SAD NEWS; SENATOR TED KENNEDY

Catherine Morgan, star of stage, screen, (well not really, but she should be) and (yes this is true) blogs including Political Voices of Women, has sought posts on the news that Senator Edward Kennedy, seen here with Senator Barack Obama, whom he endorsed, is suffering from a malignant brain tumor. It really is a sad thing. People make jokes about the Senator, some of them really cruel, as I discovered while searching for images for this post. And he’s made mistakes, including those surrounding the tragic events at Chappaquiddick.

But as a great speaker and legislator, he’s used his talents to be a champion of the “downtrodden” and many of the rest of us, for over 40 years. Coal miners, civil rights advocates, children who need better schools, American who need access to health care, soldiers in Iraq and veterans of every war and dozens of other causes; he’s been a mainstay of support for them all, often when not too many people were willing to be.

Since he lost his two brothers, President John Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy, to assassins, he’s also been the protector of their children: JFK’s two, John and Caroline, and Bobby’s eleven. He’s buried John’s son and two of Bobby’s. His own son Edward contracted bone cancer and had a leg amputated at the age of 12. Kennedy himself nearly died in a plane crash in 1964. And there’s plenty more; take a look at this Wikipedia entry on the “Kennedy curse” which left him with burdens of care for so many. Weddings, illnesses, even funerals, it was he who was there for them all.

When I first came to Washington, I was a very young researcher in the CBS News Washington Bureau. Because I was so young, I was assigned to call the Kennedy “boiler room girls” – campaign workers who knew the young woman who had died in that car in Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo Kopechne, to see if they would talk to us. I called. All of them. Every day for a year.

Every day for a year they took my call. Every day for a year they were polite, gentle and silent on the subject of the crash. And so they have remained. Since I know many other people who have worked for Teddy and shown a devotion and loyalty seldom seen in public life, I am not surprised; that’s how people are in the Kennedy universe. It says a lot about the Senator and his family and the sort of commitment they inspire.

When I think of the Senator though, it’s not any of that I think about. Or of the fact that he can be hilarious, self-effacing and very kind to those around him. My strongest, and most unambiguous memory, is of his eulogy at the funeral of his brother Bobby* in the summer of 1968. You’ll see why.

*This is audio accompanied by cover footage; I couldn’t locate any video of the speech although I remember it vividly and can see it in my head. Can’t get that up on the Web though, at least not yet.

WHO WANTS HILLARY? WHO WANTS BARACK? WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE? WHAT’S AT STAKE?

You really need to read this guest post at Political Voices of Women, Catherine Morgan‘s remarkable combination of editorial and aggregator. There are links there to more than 400 women who blog about politics – and guest posts. And (full disclosure) yes, sometimes that includes to my work. But I digress.

On Wednesday, April 23, just after the Pennsylvania primary, Slim, whose blog is called No Fish, No Nuts, was Catherine’s guest blogger. Slim’s post, which first appeared on her blog, wrote a loving but sad analysis of the Clinton supporters at her county convention where local Democrats elected their delegates. Listen to this:

Obama’s voters are looking toward Obama as a standard
bearer, as a point man for the change they want to see in the country.
Hillary’s supporters, at least the older women among them, are voting for their
surrogate: because they want to see a woman in the Oval Office before they die,
and because they themselves were denied so many opportunities for advancement
in their own lives.

I do not doubt that they also desperately believe in
Hillary Clinton, but their investment in her goes much deeper than politics.
Hillary Clinton is proof that they had it in them all along, the fire, talent
and creativity, and they could have been leaders but for the glass ceiling that
seemed to rise only inches a decade.

Slim also wrote that she was reluctant to offer these observations but that given polls showing many Clinton supporters saying they will vote for McCain if Obama gets the nomination, and some the other way around, she felt that times were so desperate that she had to weigh in. In her view, "We cannot afford another 4 years of war, debt and economic stagnation,
the prescription of a McCain presidency. So we Dems cannot allow
Clinton voters (or for that matter, I add, Obama supporters if it goes the other way – though they report this feeling somewhat less frequently) to take their ball and go home come November."

To that I say "amen!" I was a member of the "Children’s Crusade" that was the 1968 anti-war presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy. We worked like demons through New Hampshire, did so well there that it was considered a win even though, technically, we lost, then saw Bobby Kennedy enter the race against us. We persisted, as did his supporters, until his assassination in June of 1968. After that, many of his supporters joined us, working still to try to elect a president who would stop the war. And then.

The riots in Chicago. The nomination of Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s vice president and for way too long a staunch supporter of the war. And then. Many, many of my colleagues and friends indeed picked up their footballs and went home. To stay. Not only did they not work for Humphrey – that would have been very hard after what had happened in Chicago. They didn’t even vote for him. Or vote at all. And that, my friends, is how we got Richard Nixon. Which is how we got Watergate. Which is how we got Jimmy Carter– who made such a mess that we got Ronald Reagan. Who took apart so much social safety net, environmental and regulatory and other federal function that we thought more was impossible. Until we got George Bush. Who decimated much of what was left, including much of our hope. Until now, when we have two candidates who stand for so much.

Of course that’s simplistic, but what really really upsets me is that every time we educated activists, in our righteousness, take a walk because things aren’t perfect, we aren’t the ones who get hurt the most. People who are poor, whose kids go to bad schools, whose unemployment insurance runs out too soon, who no longer can afford even in-state tuition or, for many, community college tuition, to say nothing of HEALTH INSURANCE (an issue which reaches up into the middle class) — and of course the war, where low-income people do most of the enlisting…these people are the ones who are hurt the most.

We let our singular perception of what’s perfect become the enemy of the good – or at least better than bad – that we could help to bring into being. It’s infantile. It’s sad. It’s shameful. And unless all of us in the blog universe who feel this way make a lot of noise and take lots of friends to lunch no matter WHO gets the nomination, it’s going to happen again.

Thanks to Slim for her great post that inspired this rant.