"He trusted his crowd"

I’ll admit it. I'm precisely the kind of person for whom "belated birthday" cards were made, but this time I really, really blew it. A couple of days ago I realized I'd recently let what would have been Robert Kennedy's 80th birthday (November 20) pass unobserved.

My memories from the time of John's death are very spotty, so my first mental image of Robert was a picture in a newspaper or magazine of a man in a suit and tie, sitting on the dirty wooden floor of a shack, and holding a sickly black child in his arms. What struck me was that here was a man obviously out of his element, yet possessed of such concern for this child, that he would sit down in his suit and hold it. And he didn’t just pick it up, he sat down and held it. It wasn’t something a politician would do. It was something a dad would do. When I think of compassion, it’s this image that comes to mind. Although I've never been able to locate that specific photo, the image to the right (taken in Stockton, CA) also captures this feeling. Notice how he is crouched down instead of standing over the child. By putting himself at the child's level he not only puts the child at ease, but also gives the sense that he believes what the child has to say is important, and is truly being heard.

A few years ago, while reading Evan Thomas' biography “Robert Kennedy: His Life,” this image of him and that child in the shack was brought back to me and the details were filled in:

"In April [1966], Kennedy, as a member of the Senate Select Committee’s newly created committee on poverty, traveled to rural Mississippi to hold hearings. Appalled by the testimony, he went out into the fields. Kennedy was hardly new to scenes of want and deprivation, but he was still shocked by the living conditions of poor blacks in the Delta. The stench and vermin in the windowless shacks overwhelmed his senses. He sat down on a dirty floor and held a child who was covered with open sores. He rubbed the child’s stomach, which was distended by starvation. He caressed and murmured and tickled. No response. The child was in a daze.

“Kennedy was highly agitated when he returned to Washington that night. He walked in on his kids at dinner at Hickory Hill, ’ashen faced,’ recalled Kathleen, his eldest daughter. ’In Mississippi a whole family lives in a shack the size of this room,’ he announced to his nine children, ages fifteen to two. ‘The children are covered with sores and their tummies stick out because they have no food. Do you know how lucky you are? Do you know how lucky you are? Do something for your country.”

My next strong association of him was in March of 1968 when he went to Delano, CA to visit and take communion with UFW leader Cesar Chavez during Chavez' hunger strike. Because I grew up in Fresno, this was a story which made the local news, and literally brought Kennedy close to home. I've since read that it was Kennedy's admiration of Chavez' courage that provided the final step in his decision to run for President.

Then, less than three months later, came the California primary. When Johnson gave his “I will not seek, nor will I accept” speech a voice in my 9 year old mind said "start paying attention, this stuff is important," so by the time the primary rolled around I had a reasonably good awareness of the participants and was also aware that our primary could determine the Democratic nominee. Besides this, I also sensed the almost Beatlemania-like enthusiasm over the prospect of another Kennedy in the White House. I watched the returns that night with the interest that other kids might’ve shown for a World Series game 7 (much to the apprehension of my conservative parents) and, although it was a school night, stayed up late enough for to hear the projections that Kennedy had pulled off a win.

It wasn’t until I got up the next morning that I found out that he’d been shot. Although he was still alive at the time, the prognosis was that he’d suffered brain damage and I understood that this meant there was little chance of "recovery," even if he lived. As with most people, it seemed incredulous that this could be happening again. Later that day, the word went around school that he had died. As a nation, we’ve experienced many periods of hard times, but I can’t think of a greater example of sheer heartbreak as during those two months when we had to face the dual losses of King and Kennedy. It wasn't so much a matter of what we'd lost, but what we now would never have. We were already at the point of severe division, distrust and hatred, and suddenly our two best chances for finding a way out of it were gone.

In the ensuing years, as things got bad, then worse, I’d often find myself wondering how the country, and the world, might have been different if he’d been President. A friend and I have had this debate and he believes that the swing to the right was already too powerful, that the desire for revenge over the elections of ‘60 and ‘64 almost guaranteed Nixon‘s election. I still disagree. Kennedy’s blend of compassion and pragmatism could have been exactly the thing needed to counteract and prevent our slide towards blind adherence to ideology that is the source of so many of our present problems.

Whenever I hear that question “if you could meet anyone, living or dead, who would it be?” I immediately think of him. Partly, it would be to learn his impressions of events from his life, but also to hear his thoughts and opinions about what's happened in his absence.

Last September, my friend Mona and I attended the anti-war rally and march in Washington D.C. That Sunday, we wanted a quieter, more private observance, and decided to go to Arlington to visit the graves of Iraq War vets. In a cruel twist to the question "what noble cause?" we found that (unlike other headstones that indicate World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam) the Iraq are inscribed "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Not even the dead are immune to this administration's marketing of this war. Especially sobering was that, in sharp contrast to the sensation you get at Arlington that you are walking through history, three of the graves were very new. Less than a month earlier, these men had been alive. Most heartrending is that if you stand at the back of the three or four rows of Iraqi war graves, you look out at a large, open expanse. "George's punchcard," as Mona said.

Before we left we went to the Kennedy graves. After visiting the graves of John and his family, Mona (who'd wanted to locate the grave of her son-in-law's grandfather, and had done more hiking on the hills of Arlington than me) wanted to rest, so I went alone up the pathway to Robert's grave, which is at the base of the hill in front of the Lee Mansion.

Across from the grave is a shallow, reflecting pool with a panel containing two quotes from his speeches. I’d visited his grave when I went to Arlington during the summer of 2002, but unlike my previous visit, I first went to the panel and read the inscriptions. 

The first I practically know by heart. It is from his address at the University of Capetown in South Africa in 1966. It is the “ripples” quote that I have at the top of my blog and if I had to pick a political credo, this would be it.

Then I read the quote on the other two panels. It is the conclusion of a speech given the evening that Martin Luther King was assassinated. That night, Kennedy had a campaign appearance in a predominately African-American section of Indianapolis. Despite of urging of police to cancel the appearance (and without police protection), Kennedy refused to cancel. This was characteristic of him. Fear and bravery were inextricably connected, and when confronted with danger, his response was to step into it, not back away.

Upon learning that the crowd did not yet know about King, he abandoned his campaign speech and broke the news to the crowd, reminding them that he had lost a member of his family to violence and imploring them to overcome their hatred and desire for revenge and to replace it, as King would have, with understanding, compassion and love.

Because I'd heard both a recording and had seen film of this speech, I could hear his voice as I read the words, and felt as if he was standing behind me:


Then I turned and faced his grave. In comparing the two brothers, Arthur Schlesinger is said to have observed that John was "a realist, brilliantly disguised as a romantic," while Robert was "a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist." If that's accurate, it's a dichotomy which they literally carried to their graves. Despite the grandeur and stateliness of John's grave, it's Robert's that I have always found the most affecting. A plain white wooden cross (the only such grave in all of Arlington) and a white marble marker with his name and dates. The grave of a soldier, of Everyman. Simple, unassuming, and yet stunningly unordinary.

I looked at this grave and with his words and his voice in my mind I thought about the savageness of our time, how we not only still suffer from those old divisions, but how new reasons to hate are created and nurtured. As I thought about the way the words compassion, law, and justice have been warped and perverted, how so much that Robert fought against has now become accepted, tears came to my eyes. I can’t say that I prayed, because I don't, but I did kneel down and implored to whatever part of his spirit is out there that he help us through this terrible time.

I hope I was heard.

Postscript:
The title of this post comes from the song “Sin City” by Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman of the Flying Burrito Brothers. Because the song was written in Los Angeles sometime during the late summer of 1968, I've always thought that they had Kennedy in mind when they wrote the following lyrics:

A friend came around
Tried to clean up this town
His ideas made some people mad

But he trusted his crowd
So he spoke right out loud
And they lost the best friend they had