People need to believe they can make tomorrow better than today. Angus Deacon, a Scottish economist, did a study of declining life expectancy among non–college educated whites in America and what the ramifications have been. Basically he found that there’s a clear public health answer for this. It’s a matter of more drug addiction, more alcoholism, more suicide, more diabetes, and such unintended consequences as various types of cancer, heart disease, and stroke. The real answer is not just health insurance coverage, because African Americans and Latinos were hit harder by the crash even than whites, but a lot of them now have more family support and community support than small-town and rural whites. They still believe they can make it better, and too many white people don’t. So Deacon essentially said what I tried to say two or three years ago. Don’t let anybody kid you: these people are really dying of a broken heart. You can’t mend a broken heart with the politics of resentment.

Back in the sixties, George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, won Michigan’s primary once. The antibusing crowd moved into Boston that one time, and there were riots. These are examples of resentment winning a battle or two, but in the end, you can’t deal with all these divisions with the politics of resentment. You might win an election, but then you either have to change course or you can’t do anything. The thing that makes this a great country is not that it’s always perfect. It’s that we have an infinite capacity for evolution and change; we’re always moving toward a more perfect union. Steve Bannon’s definition of a more perfect union is basically a white male patriarchy. He’s said many times that the best America was in the 1950s. All the white guys were tough, we all loved them. Your family won a lot of elections because they had war records, football records, they were macho guys. I think if Robert Kennedy were alive today he would be one of the most forceful advocates for women’s rights, but he’d be smart enough to know it was his history that gave him his street cred to do that. The point is, how to respect people’s culture, and respect people, and still tell them they have to change.

I’ll give you one more example. I put a lot of tobacco farmers out of business when I was president. I went to a tobacco shed in North Carolina to give the announcement: “You did not do anything wrong, but we now know this causes cancer. You don’t want your children to have it, and you don’t want to keep making money by selling cigarettes to the Chinese, who are giving it to their kids. So we’re going to do a ten-year transition plan and here are your three options. Each of these gives you a good chance to come out ahead on this deal.” I will always be grateful to George W. Bush on this issue, because the transition wasn’t finished by the time I left office, and he funded the rest of it.

When President Obama announced the climate-change rules, he was in a hurry, and I understood that, because he very much needed it to get the rules done so he would have some credibility to get a climate change deal in Paris, which we did and it’s worth a lot, even with Trump withdrawing. The EPA director, Gina McCarthy, asked me to endorse it, and I read it, then called and said, “The regulations are fine and achievable. But I have a question. Are you going to announce these next week in Washington?” She said yes, and I said, “That’s a terrible mistake,” and when she asked, “What should I do?” I said instead, the president should go to West Virginia or Kentucky and announce this standing in front of a closed coal mine. That will (a) point out that they haven’t lost a single job to climate change yet; coal has been in decline a long time. And (b) it will show respect. And, he should also announce a big plan for the redevelopment of Appalachia into a whole different economy. I believe Appalachia is also a state of mind; it’s Southeast Pennsylvania, and it’s Southwest Ohio, too. And she said, “Well, you still didn’t carry North Carolina when you ran,” and I said, “I know, but I did win Kentucky, the other big tobacco state.” The challenge is to advocate for sweeping change and still hold people close, tell them they matter. They don’t all have to vote for you, they just have to respect you. That minimizes the politics of resentment, and that’s what Bobby Kennedy would have done. It somehow became second nature to him. Maybe because he’d been around all those hard guys like the crime-buster McClellan. Maybe it was just because he was paying attention. Maybe it was because he saw it in his family, how intergenerational changes happened from his father to him and his brothers. It could have been for a thousand reasons. Some people pay attention and others don’t. Some people absorb things almost viscerally and others don’t. All I know is, of all the people I ever supported when I was young, he had the greatest capacity for growth. He had the greatest instinct about how to reassure people and say we have to change here and we need your help, and you’re part of it, and your life matters. Don’t leave these people behind here in Appalachia and don’t leave them behind in Watts. Don’t leave them behind on the Indian reservation just because you never went to one. You either have an inclusive message or you have an “Us and Them” message. “Us and Them” is much easier in politics and it has often prevailed, but the only thing that takes you to the next step is to be inclusive. It’s something you either believe in or you don’t. You either feel it or you don’t, you either live it or you don’t. You have to recognize that sometimes they are just not going to be buying what you’re selling, but you’ve got to keep selling it, because eventually they’ll buy it or the country will change into something else, something not as good.

And now with all this fake news, the logical conclusion of political coverage over many decades, we’re fighting for the whole idea of democracy in the twenty-first century. A lot of people think there’s so much conflict that after you’ve shattered society into so many little pieces, the only practical outcome will be a kind of gentle authoritarianism that lets people have a social release through the media. That’s what I worry about, because I think even worse than the Citizens United decision was the voting rights decision. I read an article that said something like 7 percent of African Americans eligible by age to vote and 6 percent of Latinos eligible by age to vote could not vote in this election because of the new restrictions adopted in 2016 without their knowing anything about them. We don’t have a way of counting who showed up and tried and failed to vote; it would be good to have a device to track that. If we had electronic voting we could have just put another line in. Meanwhile there’s this amorphous sense in America that people will still have personal freedom but they won’t have citizen equality freedom.

KK: Talk about what drew you to Daddy in 1968.

BC: Bobby Kennedy walked into the biggest storm you could possibly imagine in 1968, with the country coming apart at the seams. He knew he was going to get zinged by some people who blamed him for the Vietnam War and zinged by other people who said he wanted to run away from the Vietnam War. He knew he was going to get zinged for trying to dance on Gene McCarthy’s grave too, but he just kept rising. Probably the speech of his life was the King speech in Indianapolis, when Dr. King was killed, although I love the speech he gave in South Africa, and a lot of others too. The best speech Ted Kennedy ever gave was the speech he gave at your father’s funeral. We tend to forget that politicians are human beings. Your father was a real person, with hopes and fears, with wild ambition and gnawing insecurity, who got hurt when people said crappy things about him and worried about what was going to happen to his family. Teddy painted a picture of your father as a three-dimensional human being growing steadily toward goodness. If we allow our public figures to become two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, the story of the greatest experiment in self-governance in history will come to an end. I wish I could make every Democrat and every thoughtful, troubled Republican read the story of Robert Kennedy’s life. I would like people to see that you don’t have to agree with him on every issue. That’s not the point. The point is that he was a real human being. He was, like the Arthurian knight Perceval, who quested for the Grail, a good man, slowly wise.