, author of the new history Vietnam: The (Last) War the U.S. Lost, looks at the life of Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated 40 years ago this week, and separates the myth from the reality.
Socialist Worker, June 6, 2008
I think we can end the divisions in the United States...the violence, the disenchantment with our society, the divisions, whether it's between Blacks and whites, between the poor and the affluent, or between age groups, or over the war in Vietnam--that we can start to work together again. We are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country.... So my thanks to all of you, and it's on to Chicago, and let's win there.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY said this to ecstatic supporters at the Ambassador Hotel following his triumph in the California Democratic primary on June 4, 1968. Shortly after his victory speech, Kennedy left the stage, and as he was entering the crowded hotel kitchen to greet supporters, he was shot and mortally wounded. Two days later, he died.
For many liberals, the hopes for progressive political change died with him. "The '60s came to an end in a Los Angeles hospital on June 6, 1968," Richard Goodwin mournfully declared in his popular memoir Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties. Goodwin was a former White House staffer during the Kennedy-Johnson administrations who had resigned over the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He would later become a speechwriter for Sens. Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy during their 1968 presidential campaigns.
Jack Newfield, one of the leading journalists of the Village Voice, wrote in his memoir of Robert Kennedy that after his death "from this time forward, things would get worse."
Goodwin, along with historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and many members of an adoring press corps who could barely contain their enthusiasm for Bobby Kennedy's quest for the White House when he was alive, would transform his life and death into a powerful liberal myth that has lasted to this very day.
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