RFK Meant Electoral Hope to Dispossessed

Mr. Kennedy came over to Brooklyn a lot. I must have spoken to him four, maybe five times. He just would come to the park and walk around and talk to us--about school, our jobs, anything. I last saw him in late April. He seemed tired but we talked a bit. Mr. Kennedy was the only politician I knew. Those other guys--Nixon, McCarthy, Rockefeller, Humphrey--I don't know them from nothing. --a black youth from Bedford-Stuyvesant outside St. Patrick's Cathedral last week

Kennedy was damn smart. Most American leaders aren't. When he came to South America he knew what was going on. Hell, he knew more about student problems than some of the students did.   --a Brazilian student at Harvard outside Lowell House this week

The weeping hasn't stopped. It probably won't for a number of years. Robert F. Kennedy's most fervent supporters seem convinced that the events of the next four years--under a Nixon or a Humphrey--will only intensify the frustration and violence which have come to typify American political and social life in the last few years. One Harvard professor said Monday night, "It's time for another Long March to Yenan."

Why this despair, this sense of resignation? Part of the answer undoubtedly lies in Robert Kennedy's ineffable ability to make his cohorts--professors, lawyers, entertainers, sportsmen, and kids--feel he was not merely their boss or leader or public advocate, but their true friend. Most of his professional associates soon became pals of one sort of another. Tragedy, moralism, and fatalism seemed to give Kennedy a warmth and compassion his detractors denied him to the end.

But the much-maligned James Michael Curley had this same ability to forge personal, emotional bonds with his aides and cohorts. Shy, anxious Bobby Kennedy had something else: his backers were certain that he alone could move to heal the racial, generational, and international crisis hobbling America. As one Boston female lawyer back from the funeral said Sunday. "He had more imagination, guts, and heart than the rest." According to his long-time adviser Adam Yarmolinsky, his constant refrain was "What can I do about it?"

Robert Kennedy, then, made America's problems personal causes. He baited white, suburban audiences throughout the country this spring with tales of life in the ghetto and on the Indian reservations. He told Oregon's hunters that easy access to guns was immoral. His personality, his bristling hope, and his eclecticism were his politics.

So far as his advisers were concerned, this was Robert Kennedy's long suit. Despite the obvious difficulties posed by his bluntness and verbal outrage, Kennedy's message had a purpose: to console and reassure America's "outs"--bitter blacks, exploited farm workers, and war-weary students. These were the groups which were falling out and had to be pulled back in. This is why Kennedy saw himself as the candidate of reconciliation. Given the circumstances, it didn't seem as important if the groups which fought him--generally the wealthier elements, hidebound Republicans, and segregationists--were a little miffed. Besides, it was quite possible that a Kennedy Administration could take care of opponents by giving them economic stability and fewer riots and student take-overs. A dream, but why not?

Bob Kennedy had a good deal of trouble getting his dreams across. Most of the nation's newspapers seemed more anxious to catch his occasional slips, to dwell on his so-called "ruthlessness," than to explain--or even just to analyze--the thrust of his campaign. In their zeal to discuss Joe McCarthy and wiretapping, editorial writers somehow forgot that Bob Kennedy defended the right of Americans to send material aid to North Vietnam and fought bills to cut back the Supreme Court's landmark criminal procedure decisions. They refused to admit that the Bob Kennedy who relentlessly exposed the costs of labor racketeering was the same man who assaulted apartheid on it's home territory. They seemed to forget that the drive for a nuclear non-proliferation treaty began only after Kennedy publicly raised the issue in a 1965 Senate speech. They didn't see that Kennedy meant as much to the frenzied crowds as they did to him. They refused to take his humor for its own sake, but insisted it was his sly reaction to the "ruthlessness" tag.

Though Kennedy's supporters felt he was getting a raw deal, they felt less badly about it by the end of the California primary. It finally appeared that John Kennedy's slight, shy brother had carved out a winning campaign style and more important, one that was his own. Few rhetorical flourishes, high-minded slogans; more caustic straight talk and grueling face-to-face contact. Kennedy gave the nation, as his press secretary Frank Mankiewicz, said, the rare belief that he was a politician who would do what he said, that his "campaign promises" were promises.

There is no way of telling, of course, whether Bob Kennedy would have made the White House on this run. A summer of riots, the impasse in Paris, and rising Vietnam casualty rates could well have eroded Vice President Humphrey's delegate lead. And much of Senator McCarthy's liberal, affluent support might have resigned itself to the former Attorney General. Yet the importance of the Kennedy campaign--or, indeed, the post-1963 Kennedy career--doesn't lie merely in what it might have been. Grief-stricken Kennedy backers should take some solace in a contribution Kennedy has made to the American political culture which in time may overshadow the importance of the Cuban missile crisis or even Vietnam.

Robert Kennedy's curious ability--and desire--to stir the enthusiasm of black people, young whites, and other traditionally dispossessed groups may very well accelerate radical changes

Photos

The photographs of Robert F. Kennedy in California were taken by Didi Pei '68, who in his junior year was photo chairman of the Harvard Year-book, and who recently was working as a Kennedy campaign staff photographer in California. Some of the pictures were taken on the day Kennedy was shot. in America's procrustean political mechanisms. While Kennedy assured such blocs he would represent them, he also tried to give them a sense that their own participation, wholly apart from his own future, would in time yield results. The upshot of his pitch was a multiple victory: alienated blacks and poor whites voted en masse in Indiana and California, clinched Kennedy wins, and got a brief feeling that their votes actually meant something.

In short, poor white laborers, Mexican-Americans, and blacks were given a sense of possibility about Ameri-politics political bosses heretofore denied them. It remains to be seen whether the dispossessed will form their own local political organizations, but Kennedy has finally given them electoral, and maybe social, hope.

Richard E. Neustadt has called this "urban populism." To the extent that it appeared this spring, this movement is probably one of the main reasons Kennedy met such modest success snaring delegates in northern industrial, non-primary states. Oldstyle political leaders not only feared the possibility of a President dealing actively with upstart urban alignments; they were also chary of Kennedy's rather pronounced enthusiasm for community action projects and increased private investment in ghetto self-development. Much of what Kennedy said was also directly threatening to rural political leaders who frequently rely on minimal voter participation.

But Kennedy's impact does not stop at the power shifts his campaign style encouraged. He brought to the electorate the feeling that political life could be meaningful as well as exciting. Campaigning against the "politics of joy," he was the first American politician since his brother to bring a sense of gleeful buoyancy back to the hustings. Kennedy's name and good looks aside, much of this happy frenzy was due to his audience's knowledge that only Kennedy gave sure promise of ending -- or at least transforming -- the dull pain emanating from the nation's capital these days.

Perhaps this helps to explain the curious coalition Kennedy forged in Indiana--poor blacks and lower-income, frustrated whites who otherwise might have leaned to Governor Wallace. Herein lies the sad paradox of Kennedy's truncated campaign: the most bitterly opposed Presidential aspirant was somehow able to unite briefly America's two most mutually explosive groups.

Kennedy's call was unfamiliar to most Americans. The New York Senator asked for rapid political and economic change, law and order, a halt to war. By the fatal end of his run he was keeping his appeal relatively free of recrimination. His strongest words were reserved not for segregationists, economic malefactors, or regressive political bosses; he harpooned the national leaders of his own party. Richard Nixon was no more than the butt of a few jokes. More than "poor-mouthing," Kennedy evoked a new sense of self-awareness and self-realization--more like Teddy Roosevelt than any 20th century Democratic President. The promise of dignity and security he held out to his "special constituency" was matched by his attempt to teach the well-off the perils of smug self-isolation.

Unlike his brother, who campaigned primarily for a refreshed national leadership, Bob Kennedy sought publicly to invigorate American political and social thought. Like many Republicans, he questioned the efficacy of a burgeoning federal bureacracy. In the same breath, though, he infuriated the G.O.P., insisting that renovated, upgraded state and local government would have to take up any slack. His seemingly conservative outlook on federalism was shaped by a liberal goal--government-backed social and economic justice.

It is too early to tell whether Kennedy's career, his campaign, and the impulses he stimulated will have an immediate effect on American political life. On the national level, where his urgent voice and prod will be most sorely missed, the prognosis is tragically dim. Almost as depressing, the nation has been cut off from perhaps its most educational sport--watching and listening to the noisest, most enterprising U.S. Senator since George Norris.

Yet Robert Kennedy was really a good deal more than a healthy spectator sport, more than a major reformist influence in American society, more than a sympathetic, concerned friend, even more than what Jack Paar called "the most beautiful man I ever knew." In a tragic historical sense, Robert Kennedy was one of the few, and surely the most effective of America's political leaders who liberated themselves from the strangling moralisms of the 1950s. Bob Kennedy got over Communist watching, shucked the blinders of Cold War interventionism, and found ghetto residents more enlightening Congressional witnesses than labor racketeers. Sometime in the decade before his death, Bob Kennedy put the Red threat and the New York Daily News headlines in the back of his mind, took a long look at the American people and decided the needed help. He may not have lived long enough to transmit to his countrymen the compassion and concern he discovered in himself. Maybe that's why Yenan looks attractive.C. C. Pei