Lessons from RFK

I was eight years old when Bobby Kennedy was killed. My mother came into my room and shook me awake with the news. Most mornings, she simply screamed my wake-up call from the kitchen. Somehow, that no longer seemed all that jarring.

Though I had not been around all that long, even I knew 1968 had been a particularly tumultuous year in a particularly tumultuous decade. To this day, I couldn't say whether I truly remember the day JFK was shot or whether it's that picture, of Jackie, dressed so much the way my own mother would dress, holding the hands of her young son and daughter, almost exact contemporaries of me and my brother. There was no such picture to go with the news of Bobby; just the rude awakening from an eight year old's dream.

In my young brain, that morning, I thought political assassinations to be the norm, and wondered why anybody in his (her?) right mind would ever risk a run. Martin Luther King had been shot only months earlier, and the nightly news was filled with images of violence and despair. In my Brooklyn Jewish enclave, Vietnam was little more than background noise;  middle class Jewish boys were safe -- they got deferments. It was the seemingly constant sacrifice of telegenic, articulate leaders that was so terrifying, struck so perilously close to home.

At eight, I was probably spared from the depths of despair, probably went off to school that day without giving Bobby Kennedy or politics or the state of the Union much thought at all. Years later, though, as the world would teeter on brinks and recover only to teeter again, I often wondered what would, or could, have been. Had Oswald missed. Had Bobby not chosen to run when he did.

Having just finished Chris Matthews' book -- Bobby Kennedy -- A Raging Spirit  -- I find myself wondering, yet again. As I turned the final pages, knowing things would not end well, I kept hoping I was wrong. In every Bobby quote, I could see a prescient warning of where we are today. In his favorite passages from favorite poets, I see ancient predictions of the sorry place we all seem so surprised to find ourselves in today. I re-read the last few chapters, looking for what we all must have missed, wishing we could wake Bobby, for just a moment, to ask him how we set ourselves back on a right -- or righteous -- path.

I despair as I realize there is no less ignorance today than there was back then, in the throes of the Civil Rights movement. We came far then, and we have certainly made strides since then, but evil is insidious. And, now, we have, at our helm, a person who knows nothing of public service and everything about self-service and self-aggrandizement and greed and abuses his power to stoke whatever hateful impulses lurk beneath the surface to catapult us back into the dark. And, ostensibly in the name of potentially swelling pocketbooks, scores of otherwise decent people are willing to look the other way. Exquisite.

I remember that wake-up call in 1968, though I am certain nobody could have imagined, on that day, what was in store. Chris Matthews ends his book with a favorite quote of Bobby's: Always do what you are afraid to do.  Touche.