Fifty-five years ago this week, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy announced he would be running for president of the United States. This was not universally popular. Many hardcore liberals had already busted their humps for Sen. Eugene McCarthy. The old-line Democratic New Frontier types were reflexively timid about challenging an incumbent Democratic president, even one as dinged up as Lyndon Johnson was in 1968. The people who wanted him to run were begging him to get off the dime.
But there was a tide within RFK pulling him toward the race. He had seen too much of the world and too much of the darker place in this country to resist its pull. And 1968 was a rapidly building storm that made the driving current stronger, well-nigh irresistible.
So on March 16 of 1968, Robert Kennedy took to a podium in the Senate Caucus Room, the same place where his murdered brother had announced his own candidacy eight years earlier. This is some of what he said that day.
I am today announcing my candidacy for the presidency of the United States. I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I’m obliged to do all that I can. I run to seek new policies—policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world. I run for the presidency because I want the Democratic Party and the United States of America to stand for hope instead of despair, for reconciliation of men instead of the growing risk of world war. I run because it is now unmistakably clear that we can change these disastrous, divisive policies only by changing the men who are now making them. For the reality of recent events in Vietnam has been glossed over with illusions. No one knows what I know about the extraordinary demands of the presidency can be certain that any mortal can adequately fill that position[…]As a member of the cabinet and member of the Senate I have seen the inexcusable and ugly deprivation which causes children to starve in Mississippi, black citizens to riot in Watts; young Indians to commit suicide on their reservations because they’ve lacked all hope and they feel they have no future, and proud and able-bodied families to wait out their lives in empty idleness in eastern Kentucky. I have traveled and I have listened to the young people of our nation and felt their anger about the war that they are sent to fight and about the world they are about to inherit. In private talks and in public, I have tried in vain to alter our course in Vietnam before it further saps our spirit and our manpower, further raises the risks of wider war, and further destroys the country and the people it was meant to save. But the issue is not personal. It is our profound differences over where we are heading and what we want to accomplish. I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulties of challenging an incumbent President. But these are not ordinary times and this is not an ordinary election. At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to moral leadership of this planet.
In the long perspective of history, knowing what we know now, the right of the United States to the “moral leadership of the planet” was a pretty dubious proposition. The coups in Iran and in Guatemala, and Kennedy’s own involvement in plots to ice Fidel Castro give the lie to that particular phrase. But at that moment in 1968, Kennedy believed in it as a living aspiration, and people didn’t look at it as a burlesque or an occasion for performative irony. The country was beginning to come apart, and the storm hadn’t begun to break yet, and Kennedy had given himself to the hard-running tide.
Three months later, he’d be as dead as his brother was.
Martin Luther King Jr. with Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
I am impatient with appeals to lost American innocence. There are too many dead Indigenous people, too many enslaved, too many successful appeals to the money power back through time for me to take them seriously anymore. Which is why the current attempts to whitewash our history, and the success that tinpot hacks like Ronald DeSantis have had with it, climb atop my last nerve and never…
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