The Unfinished and the Unknown

There was a time in my lifetime when an opposition to the economic inequality which fuels the Occupy movement’s fire had a significant champion in this land. But that was long ago, a fog-flogged far away – and burned with more fundamental fervor.

In March 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for president, I was as balls-deep in social-political engagement as I ever became, VISTA volunteering on Chicago’s South Side. My gang kid clients – black and poor as church rats and condemned at birth to the bottom of kick-‘em-in-the-teeth, jam-a-heel-down-their-throat Amerika had the options of junk or jail or shot down dead by 21. Even the community greyheads had never heard of Eugene McCarthy, Kennedy’s competition for the lib-left, anti-administration vote in the Democrat primaries. But pictures of his brother John, snipped from the Daily Defender, hung on their walls beside Jesus.

When the goose-stepping ghouls blew Martin Luther King’s dreams off the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, I hunkered down in my fifth-floor walk-up for two days. When Bobby caught it in the dark corridor between the bright lights of the Ambassador Hotel’s ballroom and the cleavers of its kitchen two months later, the last flesh peeled from hope’s bones, and I strode down 47th Street, ready to swing at the first muttered “motherfucker” or join the heaving of any window-busting bricks.

Random House published David Halberstam’s The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy six months later. I had thought of reading it for years. Then a friend mentioned how much he’d creamed it. So I quit sporadically scouting the “K”s and “H”s in Berkeley’s used book stores and ordered it from Powell’s. It does not read like a hack job rushed to ride the bloody headlines boost. The prose is clean. The characterizations sharp. The insights deep and judgments prescient. It excites; it educates. It nails the times to the page like an ice pick through the medulla oblongata.

Still, I hold quibbles more prep time might have cured. It is shy footnotes and index. Crucial dates are skipped. (It would be nice to know when McCarthy placed strong in New Hampshire, when LBJ flamed out, when each following primary fell.) References to the once commonly known will baffle readers now. (I know William Manchester was JFK’s authorized biographer, but what “the Manchester affair” that tripped out Jackie eludes me.) At times the narrative, which otherwise rolls like Old 99, idles in the station. (In my 214-page Bantam edition, 35 separate Indiana from the next primary, Nebraska.) Thoughts and expressions routinely re-occur. We learn twice that liberals sneered at Bobby Kennedy’s name because he ran against good, old Ken Keating for the senate in ‘64 (pp. 77, 153.) That Jews did because Bobby reminded them of the tough Mick who’d popped them in the nose when they were young (pp. 176, 203). That McCarthy had drawn “the A kids” and Kennedy the B- ones (pp. 56,126). (Author’s Note: I was a solid 2.7 kid myself.) We hear that Gary, Indiana was “a very tough town” twice, two pages apart, and that Dick Tuck, a Kennedy staffer, was “something of a hero” and “something of a folk hero” there within one page of each other.

But maybe I am getting ahead of myself. Maybe you don’t know the story.
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson, vice-president when John Kennedy was killed, won his own full term, shellacking Barry Goldwater by 15 million votes. Johnson passed a major civil rights bill, banned racial discrimination in voting, liberalized immigration, established Medicare. He was a poor boy from the Texas hills sculpting his Great Society on the purple mountains and across the fruited plain. But by 1967, he was in the crapper. His escalations in Vietnam had shredded the country’s soul, butchered its young, and stolen the funds required to mend their lives and spirit. Hundreds of thousands marched. Dozens of cities burned. The resistance sought a candidate for the ‘68 Democratic nomination. It sought Bobby.

Kennedy would have brought their cause glamour, money and connections to power. But he carried baggage. He had worked for Joseph McCarthy, who, to the left, hugged Lucifer close enough to call him “Lou.” He had savaged Jimmy Hoffa with a rabidity that scared big labor out of its Oleg Cassini pants. As his older brother’s campaign manager and Attorney General, he had pinned the sobriquet “ruthless” to his chest. And when he’d moved to New York to challenge Keating, he had tattooed “carpetbagger” beside it. But Kennedy had deepened. The years had committed him to America’s discarded. He was adored in its barrios and ghettos and on its reservations. He had become attuned, Halberstam writes, “to the great and dark questions of American life.” He was “the one major political figure who understood where everything was going and how serious it was.” If, in Kennedy’s words, the “institutions” of our society were destroying its citizens, whether through the dogs of war or the “indifference and inaction and slow decay… (that) is a slow destruction of a child by hunger and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter,” he, far beyond his brother, had committed to changing these institutions.

In February 1966 – before McCarthy – he had split with the administration on Vietnam. In late 1967, when Allard Lowenstein, a prominent anti-war organizer, asked him to challenge Johnson, the young radicals on Kennedy’s staff urged him on. The time was right, they said. The energy and numbers were there. If he did not grab the torch, they would be lost to him. Plus, it was the honorable thing to do. The wise, old pols – Jack’s men – said, “No.” It was suicidal – and disloyal – to run against a sitting president. It would split the party and hand Nixon the election. He should wait for ‘72. Kennedy listened to these men.

So McCarthy stepped in. He was a poet, a thinker, unpretentious, appealingly self-deprecating, with an incisive political mind. He was also petty, prideful, stubborn, low-key to the point of lazy, and intellectually snobbish. The anti-war students and professors and New York Review contributors rallied around him. Polls proclaimed Johnson would win 60-to-70% of the vote to McCarthy’s 10-to-20. But in the first primary, New Hampshire, it was Johnson 49% percent and McCarthy 42. The media trumpeted the biggest upset since Bobby Thompson unloaded on Ralph Branca.

Four days later, Kennedy tossed his hat – reinforcing his opportunistic image. Then Johnson, who hated Bobby and feared his threat, quit the race. His pledged delegates passed to Hubert Horatio (“The Happy Warrior”) Humphrey, his veep. Humphrey had been a liberal’s liberal – 20 years before. Now his lap-dog like support of the war tarred him. Labor, the big city machines, and southern Dems hoo-rayed. Elsewhere, it was, “Dump the Hump.”

The campaign seemed impossible. Even if Kennedy won the remaining primaries, he would need three-quarters of the delegates outside the south to stop HHH. And Johnson’s withdrawal aided McCarthy. It reduced Vietnam’s significance as an issue and increased race’s where Kennedy’s identification with blacks, amidst the riots and “Black Power” cries, scared whites to their cells. But Kennedy believed he could win over white voters while holding black ones. His aim – borne out of his political sense, as well as moral and emotional commitment – was to forge, what another chronicler of the campaign, Jules Witcover, in 85 Days, termed a “have-not coalition” to pit against the “powerbrokers.” Once achieved, Humphrey delegates would slip away. Even McCarthyites would swallow hard and fall in line.

Kennedy won red-white-and-blue conservative Indiana with 42% of the vote to Humphrey’s 31% and McCarthy’s 27%, carrying two-thirds of the Slavic wards. He won 51.5% of the vote in Nebraska (McCarthy 31%, Humphrey 14%), winning 60% of the blue collar vote and 88 of 93 farm wards. He lost Oregon, a state with few Catholics, fewer blacks, and many comfortable, suburban, middle-class whites, (McCarthy 45%, Kennedy 34%, Humphrey 16%) but won a majority of the delegates. He beat Humphrey, in his birth state, South Dakota, by 20 points and McCarthy by 30. And he won California, the campaigns biggest prize, (Kennedy 46%, McCarthy 42%, Humphrey 12%), besting McCarthy15:1 among Mexicans and more than 9:1 among blacks. In every state, the size of Kennedy’s crowds and the heat of their passion were unequaled.

Halberstam’s account of these contests is thrilling. And he weaves much though his telling that resonates today. How planes and television altered campaigning. How newspapers grew irrelevant. How “the rich were getting richer in America, and the poor were getting poorer.” (He and Kennedy should see us now!) But one thing present in Kennedy has been missing from the consciousness and voice of any major national political figure since: the devotion to, what Halberstam calls “the love and wisdom and compassion… (and) feeling of justice” he called forth for those in our country who suffer most.

That call is as absent from contemporary American political discourse as competing chants of Benedictine monks. Championing have-nots appeals to candidates today as much as advocating fair play for jihadists. They trip over one another rushing to embrace the middle class while single-mother households barely rate a nod. Nearly 40 million of us live ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated. Our children, if born poor, are less likely to escape its grip than those in any other developed country. In 1963, when Michael Harrington’s The Other America focused attention on the scandal of the 40 million maimed by financial deprivation in a country with “the ability to provide a decent life for every man, woman, and child,” a War on Poverty resulted. Now bug-splatters on the windshields of Escalades receive more attention.

Odyssey is not perfect – but it is magnificent. The book begins with Lowenstein’s visit. It ends with Kennedy receiving the news that he has won California. Before he exits his suite for the hotel ballroom. Before the eight-shot Iver Johnson .22 revolver fires.
I went to sleep revitalized by that victory. When I awoke, the world had altered. McCarthy barely resisted Humphrey’s roll to the nomination. After the tear gas and blood bathed Chicago, Nixon rolled through Humphrey. My future wife voted for Eldridge Cleaver. My VISTA partner went for Dick Gregory. I abstained.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe Humphrey would have held his delegates. Even if he hadn’t, maybe we would have stuck in Vietnam’s mud. Maybe the “institutions” would never have permitted the number of impoverished to be reduced. But I remember Ray Bradbury’s “The Sound of Thunder,” when Eckles, whose journey back in time to hunt a Tyrannosaurus Rex led him to step from the authorized trail and crush a butterfly, returns to a present no longer a liberal democracy but one ruled by fascistic thugs. The smallest thing, Bradbury writes about the crushing, “could upset balances and knock down a line of small big dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes all down the years across Time.” It is true that Kennedy’s killing has not had 65 million years to germinate. But neither was he a butterfly.

And when the oldies station plays “Abraham, Martin and John,” the pain still breaks my heart.

From July, 2012