The lockdown has introduced me to an inseparable company—the Netflix. Last week I watched the documentary film titled Bobby Kennedy for President. It featured Robert Francis Kennedy, better known as “Bobby” and his quest for the US presidency. Before I watched the film, I didn’t have a favorable impression of the guy. To me, Bobby was the ruthless member of the politically minded Kennedy siblings and a political opportunist who joined the 1968 Democratic primary elections after Sen. Eugene McCarthy had pierced the supposedly invincible armor of President Lyndon Johnson who everyone believed then was running for reelection. John F. Kennedy was definitely my King Arthur while Sen. Ted Kennedy was my Lancelot. Bobby’s image was not definitely helped by his earlier role as legal counsel of the Senate Committee headed by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, which investigated alleged communists in the government during the early1950s.
Bobby was the second most powerful official in the government of President John F. Kennedy. Aside from being the President’s brother, he served as the US Attorney General and had the full ears and complete trust of the president. He strongly advocated civil rights and pursued battle against organized crime. When his brother died, he resigned from his post and successfully ran for the US Senate representing New York. As a senator, he championed racial equality, clean government and social justice. He also opposed the Vietnam War, earning the ire of President Johnson.
Bobby was a changed man and matured ahead of his age after JFK was assassinated. As the oldest surviving male member of the Kennedy clan, the torch was inevitably passed on to him. While Ted Kennedy became a Senator ahead of him, Bobby was seven years Ted’s senior and the Kennedys looked up to Bobby as the rightful heir of the political legacy of JFK. And he was fully aware that such an eminent role came with an awesome responsibility. In a speech he gave in South Africa in 1966, he boldly said: “Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.” Post JFK, Bobby was the compleat person he described.
And so he decided to seek the US presidency. It was just eight months into the elections when he announced his candidacy. He campaigned fast and furious and crisscrossed the country to gain support and catch up. He called on his deep friendships with Martin Luther King, Jr., the farm workers led by Cesar Chavez, the industrial labor through Walter Reuther and the legions of JFK’s loyalists. Early campaigner Sen. Eugene McCarthy who had the support of the young voters was breathing down his neck, but Bobby gained the upper hand before his campaign was ended by an assassin’s bullet on June 5, 1968, exactly 52 years ago today. It would have been the second Camelot.
In eulogizing his brother, Ted Kennedy said of Bobby: “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” But to Juan Romero, Bobby was larger than life. Romero was the 17-year-old busboy in Ambassador Hotel who aided Bobby when he was shot in the kitchen of the hotel. He comforted Bobby, wrapped a rosary around his thumb and held his bleeding head so it would not touch the floor. Bobby had just shaken Romero’s hand when several shots exploded. “I will never forget his handshake and the look…with those piercing eyes that said: I’m one of you. We’re good. He was not looking at my skin, he was not looking at my age, he was looking at me as an American,” Romero recalled. Dolores Huerta, Bobby’s campaign coordinator, wanted to bring Bobby to the ballroom of the hotel to meet more supporters but another person led Bobby to the kitchen to get to his room faster. It was a wrong turn, which changed the course of history.
Bobby never became a president of his country, but almost. Sirhan B. Sirhan shot him to death after Bobby had just delivered his victory speech for winning the Democratic Party primary elections in California. He was on his way to become the official presidential nominee of his party. He could have stopped Richard Nixon from becoming the 37th President of the US and saved the nation from the trauma of Watergate. He had a great vision for the American people, which he encapsulated earlier by saying, “Some men see things as they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?” An assassin denied him the opportunity to make his dreams come true, and America is still reeling from that loss.