One of the passengers on the train bringing Bobby Kennedy’s body from his funeral in New York to his burial at Arlington National Cemetery looked out a window at the mourners lining the tracks and asked herself, “What did he have that he could do this to people?”
It’s a question that I tried to answer in my book about his 1968 campaign.
It’s also a question we might ask ourselves in 2018, fifty years after his assassination: What did Robert Kennedy have, for example, that has brought us all together tonight, almost fifty years after his death, in this place, at a conference bearing his name?
It’s a question whose answer may help you make decisions that take into account justice, human rights, the environment, and poverty.
I came across the question at the archives of the JFK Library in Boston while reading a collection of oral interviews conducted with passengers on that twenty-one-car funeral train bound for Arlington on June 8, 1968.
Passengers on that train looked out and saw what may have been the most dramatic and moving display of public grief ever displayed for an American never elected to the presidency. Trains carrying the remains of presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt had traveled at a slow and mournful pace, but Kennedy’s train had been scheduled to travel nonstop and a normal rate of speed. Crowds were expected, but no one had imagined that on a steamy Saturday afternoon in early June two million people would spontaneously head for the tracks between New York and Washington, wading through marshes, hiking into meadows, filling tenement balconies, climbing onto factory roofs, standing in junkyards and cemeteries, looking down from bridges, and creating a 226-mile-long chain of grief and despair.
Once the train emerged from the Hudson River tunnel into New Jersey, it encountered so many people jamming station platforms and spilling onto the northbound tracks that the engineer had to reduce speed, and reduce it even more after a tragic accident in Elizabeth, New Jersey, when those in the train could look out the windows and see their grief reflected in the faces of mourners lining the tracks.
They saw men in suits, sport shirts, uniforms, and undershirts, crying, saluting, standing at attention, hands over hearts. They saw women in madras shorts and Sunday dresses weeping, kneeling, covering their faces, and holding up their children.
They saw American flags dipped by American Legion honor guards and waved by Cub Scouts, and because anyone with a uniform seemed to have decided to wear it, they saw policemen in gold braid and white gloves, fire companies standing at attention next to their trucks, and veterans in overseas caps snapping salutes.
They saw the kind of white working-class voters who had supported the 1964 candidacy of Alabama governor George Wallace for the Democratic nomination, and who might vote again for Wallace or Richard Nixon in November, although until four days earlier many had been planning to vote for Kennedy, even though he was an acknowledged champion of black Americans and had condemned an American war as “deeply wrong.”
The NBC commentator David Brinkley had called Kennedy “the only white politician who could talk to both races,” and compared his assassination to Lincoln’s. So the passengers saw black Americans who had embraced Kennedy more passionately and completely than any white politician since Abraham Lincoln, and who sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as the train passed through Philadelphia and Baltimore.
The passengers remembered five nuns standing on tiptoes in a yellow pickup truck, black militants holding up clenched fists, a white policeman cradling a black child in his arms, and a line of Little Leaguers standing at attention along the baselines, heads bowed and caps held over hearts.
A Life magazine reporter, Sylvia Wright, saw a wedding party standing close to the tracks in a Delaware meadow. The bridesmaids were holding up the hems of their pink and green dresses in one hand and their bouquets in the other. As the last car carrying Kennedy’s coffin approached, they extended their arms and threw their bouquets against its side. After seeing this Wright asked herself the question that has become the descant of much that has been said and written about Bobby Kennedy since, “What did he have that he could do this to people?”
I think that the best way to answer it is to examine Bobby’s 1968 campaign, one that a reporter covering it called a “huge, joyous adventure.” It was that, and more, and no presidential candidate since has run so passionately—or, if you will, recklessly—or put poverty, justice, and human rights so squarely at the center of a campaign, or criticized the American people so brazenly.
Try to imagine a politician now saying, as Kennedy did in a New York Times essay shortly before he announced his candidacy, “Once we thought, with Jefferson, that we were the best hope of all mankind. But now we seem to rely only on our wealth and power.” Or say, as Kennedy did on Meet the Press, “I am dissatisfied with our society. I suppose I am dissatisfied with my country.”
He delivered the first speech of his campaign on March 18 at the Kansas State University field house, to a record-setting audience of 14,500 students at a conservative university in a conservative heartland state. He was nervous about kicking off his campaign there, but before deciding to run he had agreed to deliver a speech commemorating the Kansas governor and former presidential candidate Alf Landon. The night before, he told Kansas governor Robert Docking, “What I’m going to say isn’t very popular.” Quite a statement for a candidate for the presidency to make on the eve of launching his campaign.
He told these supposedly conservative students that America was “deep in a malaise of the spirit,” and suffering from “a deep crisis of confidence.” He admitted his own complicity in the Vietnam War, saying, “I was involved in many of the early decisions on Vietnam, decisions which helped set us on our present path,” adding, “I am willing to bear my share of the responsibility before history and before my fellow citizens.” He closed by saying, “Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our own misguided policies—and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once told us was the last best hope of mankind.”
The students rushed the stage, cheering, weeping, tipping over chairs, grabbing at his hands and shirtsleeves. Stanley Tretick of Look magazine stood on the platform, photographing the melee and shouting, “This is Kansas, effing Kansas! He’s going all the way. He’s going all the effing way.” A reporter called Kennedy’s speech and the students’ reaction to it “the first indication that we were about to embark on something unlike anything we had ever experienced.”
Three days later, Kennedy embarked on a ten-day, thirteen state cross-country tour. His first stop was at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where as attorney general he had sent in federal marshals to enforce the registration of black students. Going there was courageous, or foolhardy, perhaps both. He told students he had come because he believed, “any who seek higher office this year must go before all Americans: not just those who agree with them, but those who disagree; recognizing that it is not just our supporters who we must lead in the difficult years ahead.” And he said that he would count his campaign a failure if it left Americans as divided as when he began it.
This would be one of many things that he said during his campaign that seem to reach across the five since decades and speak to us today.
He flew to California and demonstrated that his appeal went beyond the nation’s college campuses. The crowd at the Stockton courthouse contained a large contingent of Hispanics, many of them farmworkers. Kennedy told them that “Decency is the heart of this whole campaign,” and that “poverty is indecent. Illiteracy is indecent. The death, the maiming of brave young men in the swamps of Vietnam, that is also indecent. And it is indecent for a man to work with his back and his hands in the valleys of California without ever having hope of sending his son on to college. This is also indecent.”
He did not tailor his message to an audience. Later that afternoon he spoke at a shopping center in Sacramento and said the same thing to a white, middle-class audience, telling them, “It is indecent for a man on the streets of New York City or Cleveland or Detroit or Watts to surrender the only life that he has to despair and hopelessness.”
Nor did he pander to black audiences, and when he drove through Watts several days later in a motorcade that the Los Angeles Times called “uproarious, shrieking and frenzied” and “a spectacle without parallel in the American experience,” he told one of many street-corner audiences that he addressed, “And I tell you here in California the same thing I told those in Alabama with whom I talked. The gulf between our people will not be bridged by those who preach violence, or by those who burn or loot.”
His first primary would be in Indiana, and no northern state seemed less promising for a politician campaigning on racial justice and the indecency of poverty. It had cities with large white ethnic blue-collar populations who felt threatened by black progress and had given George Wallace 30 percent of the vote in the 1964 Democratic primary. Yet Kennedy launched his campaign there with a speech at Notre Dame containing nothing to appeal to backlash whites. He said, ‘in the midst of our great affluence, children—American children—are hungry, some to the point where their minds and bodies are damaged beyond repair.” During the question period he returned to his continuing theme of national redemption through good works, of healing the wounds that Vietnam had inflicted on the national psyche by eliminating hunger and poverty, and asked, “What other reason do we have really for our existence as human beings unless we’ve made some other contribution to somebody else to improve their own lives?”
While he was flying to Indianapolis afterward in a small chartered plane, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Kennedy was scheduled to address a crowd in a black neighborhood. The police chief met him at the airport and urged him to cancel the rally, telling him, “It’s not safe for you to go there.” He went anyway and delivered the finest speech of his campaign, perhaps the finest extemporaneous speech ever delivered by an American politician. All he had was a few notes scribbled on a sheet of yellow legal paper.
The atmosphere at the small neighborhood park in the black neighborhood was electric, and edgy. The organizers were afraid Kennedy would be attacked and had told some men to climb trees and look for snipers in the surrounding buildings.
Kennedy did not discount the importance of physical courage. He had copied Emerson’s line “Always do what you are afraid to do” in his daybook and had rafted through treacherous waters and climbed challenging mountains. Even so, he considered moral courage more difficult to demonstrate. In 1966 he had told students in South Africa that moral courage was “a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence,” and extolled it as “the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world.”
In Indianapolis he demonstrated the physical courage to address a black audience two hours after a white man had murdered the most beloved black leader in US history, the moral courage to announce his death to this crowd (and many in it would hear the news for the first time from Kennedy) and then deliver a speech offering comfort and hope. He also demonstrated the same political courage that had led him to speak in Kansas, the University of Alabama, and other potentially hostile venues, because if a riot had broken out during or after his speech he would have been blamed for causing it.
Because of his courage, Indianapolis would be the only major American city to escape the riots and violence that wracked 119 others in the wake of the King assassination.
He spoke haltingly at first, repeating phrases and words, groping for the right ones. Pausing after each sentence to compose the next. His voice was hollow, close to breaking, and tears welled in his eyes. The spotlights made him look pallid and haunted.
He demonstrated more physical, moral, and political courage the next day. He was driving into Cleveland in a white convertible when an aide with a mobile phone reported that the police believed that a sniper was hiding in a steeple overlooking the hotel where he was about to address an audience of business and civic leaders and suggested he wait by the side of the road.
Kennedy said, “No. We’ll never stop for that kind of threat” and continued into town with the top down. One day after King’s assassination, when riots were continuing in dozens of American cities, he told these 2,200 civic leaders that white Americans bore some responsibility for the violence. He was solemn and muted, as if delivering a eulogy, as he said, “Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them,” adding, “violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.” He followed this with what were, even for 1968, profoundly radical words. He told these pillars of the Cleveland establishment that their own public and private institutions had contributed to the unrest that had roiled their city after Dr. King’s assassination. “For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly as the shot or the bombing in the night,” he said. “This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction, and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor.”
Two days later he demonstrated more courage by walking through the riot zone in Washington, DC. Fires were still smoldering and National Guard troops were on the streets. The crowd following him grew so large that guardsmen at first mistook it for a gang of looters. A woman stared at Kennedy in disbelief and asked “Is that you?” When she saw it was, she said, “I knew you’d be the first to come here, darling.”
On April 16 he visited the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Of the approximately seventy events that he attended during the first month of his campaign, ten were on Native American reservations or in Native American schools in the Southwest and Midwest. His aides thought he was wasting his time and tried to remove these appearances from his schedule. He called these aides “callous sons of bitches” and put them back. He had two days to campaign in South Dakota before its primary and elected to spend most of one of them on Pine Ridge, a Connecticut-size reservation with only sixty miles of paved roads and not a single bank, supermarket, or library.
He stopped in a one-room shack that was home to nine people, including Christopher Pretty Boy, a ten-year-old Lakota Sioux whose parents had died in an automobile accident the week before. A photograph taken by a Jesuit father from the local mission (because Kennedy had asked reporters and news photographers to remain outside) shows Kennedy, hand jammed into his trouser pockets and smiling, as if there was nowhere else he would rather be than sitting on a worn blanket with a heartbroken orphan in a shack in Calico, one of the poorest communities on the poorest reservation in North America.
When Kennedy emerged from the shack he was holding Pretty Boy’s hand. The two remained together all day, and Kennedy frequently leaned down to talk to him. While Kennedy was flying to Rapid City he told an aide to call the Holy Rosary Mission and tell the fathers that he had invited Pretty Boy and his sister to spend the summer with his family in Hyannis. Pretty Boy died before he could go there. Some on Pine Ridge told me he died in a car accident, others that he had killed himself, although he would have been younger than most of those who committed suicide on the reservation.
The invitation to Pretty Boy was a predictable result of Kennedy’s lively moral imagination—his ability to imagine himself, or his children, orphaned and living in Calico; to imagine himself being a migrant farmworker, a disadvantaged urban African American, a Nebraskan farmer, or a child in Washington, DC, who lacked a playground in his neighborhood. While driving through a poor neighborhood there with his children, he said, “Look, there are no playgrounds. There’s no place for these kids to play. They’re just like you; they have the same wants and needs.” Then he raised money to build a playground there and brought some of his children to the opening ceremony.
His brother’s assassination and his experiences among the poor had deepened Kennedy’s moral imagination, so that when he spoke to members of these aggrieved communities they sensed a communion and intimacy that went beyond politics or pity; they sensed a man who understood them, and felt their suffering as if it was his own. His moral imagination was the silent heartbeat of his campaign. It explained why black Americans called him their “blue-eyed soul brother,” why a former Wallace supporter told a reporter, “I like him. I don’t know why, but I like him.”
Telling an audience the opposite of what they probably wanted to hear, or making members of a sympathetic audience ashamed of themselves is a risky political strategy, but Kennedy pursued it throughout his campaign. He told an audience of aerospace workers in California, “We should slow down the race to the moon.” When a bellicose student in Oregon demanded that the government mount a military action against North Korea, Kennedy replied, “It’s not too late to enlist.” When whites in West Virginia complained about being unemployed and with nothing to do he said, “Well, you could remove those wrecked cars from the side of the road.” He defended a new open-housing law to a luncheon meeting of the Indianapolis Real Estate Board, saying, “I think if you are asking people to go fight for us 12,500 miles away and tell them ‘You can die for us but you can’t buy a home’ seems rather inequitable. Don’t you think?” His statement was reportedly met with only “mild applause.”
There was of course much more to his campaign. There was a twelve-hour, five-hundred-mile whistle-stop across Nebraska when he converted crowd after crowd of initially skeptical farmers. His speechwriter Jeff Greenfield remembered it as a revelation for Kennedy’s staff and the press, demonstrating, Greenfield said, his “ability to relate to people who had nothing in common with him at all.”
There was his nine-hour, one-hundred-mile motorcade across northern Indiana that the reporter Jules Witcover would call “one of the most incredible outpourings of sentiment for a political candidate in all of the annals of American campaigning.”
There was his two-hour May 29 motorcade through black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Los Angeles, with people screaming his name, slowing his car to a crawl, grabbing at his hands and arms. As they cheered, he pumped his fist in the air and shouted, “These are my people!”
So, what did he have that he could do this to people? Why did those bridesmaids and their bride wait for hours in that field on a hot day so they could toss their bouquets at his funeral train?
What did he have in 1968 that we need now, in 2018, a time that finds Americans more divided, angry, than 1968?
What did he have that might guide you in your decisions? That might guide all of us?
He had courage: moral, physical, and political courage that he demonstrated again and again throughout his campaign.
And perhaps most important, for a leader seeking to unite a bitterly divided people, he had a lively moral imagination. The ability to imagine what it would be like to be an orphaned Indian boy, or child bitten by rats in a Harlem tenement, or a hungry child in a sharecropper’s shack in Mississippi, or a Nebraskan farmer, a farmworker, or a blue-collar worker in a Midwestern city.
And he not only had this moral imagination, he acted on it. He raised money to build playgrounds for children in Washington, DC. He invited Christopher Pretty Boy to spend a summer in this lovely place where we are tonight.
Congressman John Lewis served on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign staff in 1968. When I spoke with him about Kennedy he told me that before he is about to cast a difficult vote in the House of Representatives he often asks himself, “What would Bobby do?”
It’s a good question, and not just for a politician, but for anyone faced with a decision that has a moral dimension and requires courage.
“What would Bobby do?”
Good question. I hope you ask it of yourselves.
—Thurston Clarke, historian, author, and journalist, from his June 2017 speech at the Kennedy Compound, adapted from his book The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days that Inspired America