Why lessons from Robert F. Kennedy's life still resonate in divided America
10 lessons for modern politics and the reasons the reluctant politician still matters today.
His body was transported from Penn Station to Union Station in Washington for burial on a grassy slope at Arlington National Cemetery. The four-hour, 362km journey took twice as long because of the hundreds of thousands of Americans, black and white, young and old, rich and poor, who lined the route.
They held aloft signs. Stood to attention and saluted. They took off their hats and placed hands over their hearts. Bands played. The Battle Hymn of the Republic was sung. Men, women, children in pristine uniforms, dirty work clothes and finest outfits. Priests and nuns. Scouts and sporting teams. As the 21-car train rattled along the tracks, mourners watched from the windows in astonishment, sharing their collective grief.
Few politicians have touched the hearts and minds of so many from such a diversity of backgrounds, and around the world. In life and in death, Kennedy unified Americans, disadvantaged and privileged, all creeds and colours, with a promise to end war, address poverty, restore law and order, provide freedom, opportunity and hope.
The centenary of Kennedy’s birth – November 20, 1925 – serves as a powerful reminder of his life and legacy, and the lessons that still can be learnt.
Chris Matthews, author of biographies of Robert and John Kennedy, a former television host, a top aide to former US House of Representatives speaker Tip O’Neill and a speechwriter for president Jimmy Carter, has written a new book about RFK’s life and what can be learnt.
He settles on 10 lessons to illustrate how Kennedy still matters: heal the divide; have some guts; admit your mistakes; pursue ideals; uphold human rights; seek peace; enforce the law; be tough; know when to concede; and be prepared to sacrifice.
Matthews argues that Republicans today are too submissive to the President while Democrats are too weak, and both can heed elements of Kennedy’s life and approach to politics. It is a worthwhile addition to the many books on the Kennedys because it offers a practical guide for action.
Robert Kennedy’s time in the national political spotlight was brief – bookended by running his elder brother John’s successful 1960 campaign and his own brief bid for the White House in 1968 – distinguished by his time as US Attorney-General (1961-64) and senator for New York (1965-68).
After serving in the US Navy and working as a journalist, Kennedy had some notoriety in the 1950s as assistant counsel to the US subcommittee on investigations examining suspected communists, working with Republican Joseph McCarthy, and later as chief counsel with the Senate rackets committee taking on corrupt union leaders and mobsters.
He was born into a famous family with wealth and privilege yet he made his career standing with the poor, the disadvantaged and the marginalised: African-Americans, migrant farm workers and Native Americans. Perhaps it was because he felt he was an outsider, born seventh out of nine children to Joseph and Rose Kennedy, and known as the “runt” or “black sheep” of the Kennedy clan. He was intensely loyal to those who had been loyal to him.
What I admire about Kennedy is that he understood that politics, like life, requires constant learning. He grew as a person, especially after his brother’s assassination in November 1963, and people identified with this. He was known to be ruthless, uncaring, cold, a hater. But he changed. He admitted mistakes. He changed course on policy. After JFK was murdered, Robert Kennedy became melancholy, reading and quoting Greek poets, and it served to deepen his compassion.
He was slow to see civil rights as a priority as attorney-general but urged his brother to send a landmark bill to congress, spoke of it as a moral issue, defended freedom riders and enforced federal orders to see African-American student James Meredith enrol at the segregated University of Mississippi.
During the Cuban missile crisis, when the Soviet Union placed offensive missiles in Cuba, RFK initially favoured an invasion that could have escalated to a nuclear conflict but switched to advocate a naval blockade and backchannel negotiations, which he led with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, that led to a peaceful resolution.
It was not Camelot nostalgia with dreams of a Kennedy restoration that fuelled his own political rise, as some critics charged. There were calls for him to take the mantle from Lyndon Johnson in 1968 or earlier to serve as Johnson’s vice-president. Kennedy and Johnson shared a mutual contempt, author Jeff Shesol chronicled, so a Johnson-Kennedy ticket was never likely.
Americans saw in RFK a deeper and more profound man. He was never nakedly ambitious; he was driven by policy goals. He knew the expectation that lay on his shoulders, having had eldest brother Joe killed in war and John killed by a political assassin. But he was a reluctant political candidate.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, academic and presidential adviser, in his magisterial book A Thousand Days (1965), characterised JFK as a realist disguised as a romantic and RFK as a romantic disguised as a realist. I think this is what those thousands who watched his funeral train saw in RFK. He was vulnerable, gentle, honest, kind, idealistic, but also strong and could be funny. It is why his speeches still resonate. At Cape Town in June 1966, he spoke of how every time someone stood up for an ideal or struck out against injustice they “send forth a tiny ripple of hope”. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, Kennedy urged “love and wisdom”, not “violence or lawlessness”, and asked people to dedicate themselves to “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world”.
It is this complexity, the light and shade, that personal growth and his inspirational speeches that have drawn me to this Kennedy more than any other public figure since I was a teenager.
One of the greatest joys of my life has been to talk to those who knew RFK and worked with him. William vanden Heuvel knew him at the Justice Department. “Kennedy was a passionate yet practical idealist,” he said. Peter Edelman was on his Senate staff. “He was a decent and loving person, very smart, enormously funny,” he recalled. Speechwriter Jeff Greenfield told me Kennedy spoke from “the heart” with “passion” about war, race, poverty and unemployment.
Edelman recalled that Kennedy was fatalistic. Kennedy knew the danger to his own life if he continued to make politics his crusade. Others also recalled that he lived with this sense of fatality. Jackie Kennedy told RFK that he would end up like his brother, her husband, if he continued in politics. But he was driven by a commitment to “an honourable profession” and noble ideals.
When RFK addressed his supporters just moments before he was killed, he spoke of healing “the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment with our society” that cut across race, wealth and age. He emphasised that America was “a great country” – unselfish and compassionate – that could unite and “work together” to resolve its problems.
In his eulogy, younger brother Ted Kennedy said RFK should not be “idealised or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life”. Indeed, he argued that what mattered – and still matters – was what he said, what he did and what he stood for.
Chris Matthews’ Lessons from Bobby: Ten Reasons Why Robert F. Kennedy Still Matters is published by Simon & Schuster.
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After Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in June 1968, having won the California Democratic primary on a potential path to winning the party’s nomination and the presidency, his funeral was held at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.