Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him. 

 

                                                 CRYING FOR A POLITICIAN

I’m not somebody who is easily moved to tears (apart from family tragedies and bereavements, of course). I remain particularly un-tearful when it comes to films and politicians. But I can remember two occasions when I was a teenager and I blubbed. One was when I was fifteen and, as I said on this blog some years back, I teared up watching the film The Informer . The other was a year or so later, in 1968, when I was sixteen.

It happened like this.

Being the youngest of the family, I was the only one of my siblings who still lived with my parents, all the others having moved on into adult life. One evening I was alone at home as my parents were out at, I think, a play. The news came through that Bobby Kennedy had been killed – shot dead by an as-yet unidentified gunman at a hotel where he was addressing a rally. What? After JFK and Martin Luther King yet another one struck down! It was unbelievable. It was horrible. I burst into tears.

My parents came home a few hours later. I must have still looked pretty upset.

“You don’t look very happy. What’s the problem?” said my father.

“Haven’t you heard the news?” I said.

They hadn’t.

“Bobby Kennedy’s been assassinated,” I said.

Dad sank into a chair.

I can’t remember him saying anything other than “Oh God. Americans!!” but I think he also said some choice things about trigger-happy American gun nuts.

And that, I assure you, was the only time I cried over a politician. Ever.

I don’t think that, as a teenager, I was too naïve, but there were a lot of things I didn’t know. As far as I then understood, Robert Francis Kennedy was on the side of right, a supporter of the civil rights movement, an advocate for the Mexican farmworkers in California who were being exploited by their employers, a decent man in his family life. He had recently announced that he was going to run for president, because Lyndon Johnson had announced he wasn’t going to run for another term. To me, he seemed like the perfect candidate.

Okay – I’m older and wiser over half a century later. I know that the Kennedy clan was not always a savoury bunch. I know that patriarch Joseph Kennedy was a devious banker who pushed and almost blackmailed his way into office under Roosevelt and got to be ambassador to England. I know that matriarch Rose was gushy in her religiose displays and the “author” or an autobiography that reads like solid PR mush. As for the “Camelot” legend of JFK, it was more tinsel than gold. Remember JFK was involved in such dubious enterprises as the attempted “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba. Remember, too, that the so-called “Cuban missile crisis” was not the legendary “eyeballing the other fellow and he blinked first”. It was resolved by a quid pro quo where the Russians removed missiles from Cuba on the condition that the Americans removed missiles from Turkey. Which they did. Remember, too, that JFK was the president who ramped up American involvement in Vietnam. And despite verbally supporting the civil rights movement, JFK did nothing to legislate on the matter. The important civil rights acts had to wait for Johnson to pass them. Most damaging for the “Camelot” legend, it is clear that JFK’s marriage was a sham, despite having glamorous photogenic Jackie at his side. JFK was a serial philanderer with a sleazy sex life. This is all very depressing, isn’t it? I’ve long since come to the conclusion that the only reason JFK is remembered with reverence by some people is that he was young, good-looking, bore himself like a movie star and died tragically by an assassin’s bullet. It’s really the traumatising assassination that he’s remembered for.

And what of Bobby Kennedy? Yes, it was very questionable – sheer nepotism in fact – for him, a man with no training in the law, to be appointed by his brother as Attorney General. And yes, he did for a short time, in the 1950s, act as a partisan of Joseph McCarthy in his witch hunts. But by the late 1960s he was past all that. He had long since refuted Joe McCarthy and his ways and he really was on the side of the civil rights movement and the cause of exploited immigrant farmers. Unlike his brothers (including younger brother Ted Kennedy, who was disgraced by the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969, a mere year after Bobby’s death), Bobby was an exemplary father and husband, having eleven children with his wife Ethel – an awful lot even by my standards. I sometimes think that the most patient and sane of the extended Kennedy clan was Ethel Kennedy, a valiant woman who has lived on for years pursuing causes worth supporting.

In spite of everything, there was genuinely a lot to like about this guy Bobby Kennedy and my teenaged attitude wasn’t too far off centre.

Now why am I rattling on about all this?

Because recently my wife and I watched all three episodes of the documentary series Bobby Kennedy for President which is currently available on Netflix. Irrationally but justifiably, it stirred up in me all those feelings I had on the day Bobby was shot.

Bobby Kennedy for President made clear all the negative things I’ve already noted here, and added a few extra. It really does seem to have been a little opportunistic for Bobby Kennedy to have presented himself as the “peace candidate” who promised to withdraw the USA from the Vietnam war when there was already a candidate with the same platform. This was Eugene McCarthy, who was building up a following before Kennedy entered the race. Yet despite Eugene McCarthy’s popularity with college students, it seems highly unlikely that either the uncharismatic McCarthy, or the doubly uncharismatic Hubert Humphrey (who was eventually the Democrat party’s official candidate) would ever have been elected president. With his very relatable personality - and, yes, with the legend of his older brother putting some wind in his sails - Bobby Kennedy at least stood a chance. As for Kennedy’s commitment to civil rights and his support for the immigrant farm-workers, Bobby Kennedy for President showed that these really were causes that Kennedy supported. He was not using them as a form of self-promotion.

Only one thing about the Netflix series threw me off balance a little. This was the possibility it presented that it was not Sirhan Bishara Sirhan who killed Bobby Kennedy. This thesis was presented with some plausibility in the series’ last episode, but I don’t want to wrangle with conspiracy theories.

Anyway, goofy, toothy grin and all, Bobby Kennedy was the only politician who ever moved me to tears. In my maturity, I’ve never found another who was worth it.