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Now
Emilio Esteve's film Bobby opened
in theaters across the country last week. It received mixed reviews
from most critics, who nevertheless praised Estevez, the son
of actor Martin Sheen, for making a "serious" movie
that attempts to capture the political atmosphere in the U.S.
on the eve of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in Los Angeles
on June 5, 1968.
Whatever its shortcomings as
a film, the major problem with Bobby is political--it regurgitates
all of the myths about Robert Kennedy and his brother, President
John F. Kennedy.
The greatest of all the myths
about the Kennedys is that if the two brothers had lived, then
much of the "turmoil" of the 1960s, particularly the
U.S. war in Vietnam, would have been avoided. For many liberals,
Robert Kennedy's assassination represented "the end of the
'60s"--the end of the road for progressive political change
and the beginning of three decades of conservative rule. Is any
of this remotely true?
*
* *
ROBERT FRANCIS Kennedy was
the third son of Joseph Kennedy, a ruthless and politically ambitious
businessman from Massachusetts. Kennedy Sr. made a fortune from
a variety of enterprises--real estate, moviemaking, the stock
market and bootlegging alcohol during prohibition--thanks to
his thoroughgoing corruption.
His own ambition to be the
first Irish Catholic president of the United States was thwarted
by Franklin Roosevelt, and he transferred his dream to his sons.
Three out of four would either become president or run for the
presidency.
It is one of great ironies
of U.S. political mythology that the Kennedy family, viewed today
as the very symbol of liberalism, was, in fact, deeply conservative.
Joe Kennedy was very close to the infamous anti-Communist Sen.
Joseph McCarthy after he became famous for tormenting liberals
and radicals during the 1950s witch-hunts.
During McCarthy's 1952 re-election
campaign, Joe made a sizeable contribution to his campaign--and
then asked that his son Bobby be placed on the McCarthy subcommittee
investigating "subversives."
Bobby only stayed on McCarthy's
committee for six months, using it as a springboard for an assignment
to another congressional committee that gained him greater notoriety--the
Senate Rackets Committee led by anti-union Democratic Sen. John
McClellan of Arkansas.
As an assistant counsel to
McClellan, Bobby carried on his particularly vicious persecution
of Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, gaining a reputation for ruthlessness
in pursuit of his political enemies and rivals. Joe Kennedy complimented
his son on this character trait. "He's a great kid,"
Joe said. "He hates the same way I do."
Throughout, Bobby remained
focused on building his older brother John's political career.
He was campaign manager for John's first U.S. Senate campaign
in 1952 and presidential campaign in 1960. Bobby was his brother's
closest advisor and was appointed attorney general in the Kennedy
administration.
* * *
THE KENNEDY presidency took place during a crucial time for two
issues that would later come to dominate the rest of the decade:
civil rights and the Vietnam War.
The Kennedys relied heavily
on the Black vote to win the presidency in 1960, making certain
symbolic overtures to Martin Luther King during the campaign.
But as Bobby recalled in 1961, "I did not lie awake at night
worrying about the problems of Negroes."
That would soon change as Black
students started sit-ins against segregated restaurants and other
public facilities, and the Freedom Riders challenged segregation
on interstate bus lines. A mass movement against Jim Crow segregation
was emerging--and the Kennedys did everything they could to contain
it.
The Democratic Party was still
a Jim Crow party--Southern Democrats were known as "Dixiecrats"--with
Blacks almost entirely disenfranchised in the South and the border
states. For most of 20th century, the Democrats needed this "solid
South" to win national elections--including John F. Kennedy.
The Freedom Riders and sit-ins
threatened to push the Dixiecrats into the Republican Party--two
of the most famous "Dixiecrats," Sens. Strom Thurmond
and Jesse Helms, eventually did--so the Kennedys hoped to push
civil rights activists in a direction that wouldn't jeopardize
their Southern support.
As attorney general, Bobby
Kennedy famously told James Farmer of the Congress of Racial
Equality: "Why don't you guys quit all that riding and sitting
shit, and concentrate on voter registration. If you do that,
I'll get you tax-free status."
At the same time, he authorized
the FBI to begin wiretapping Martin Luther King's telephone conversations.
This decision contributed to the FBI's notorious COINTELPRO program
against the civil rights movement and other radical organizations.
The Kennedys put enormous pressure
on the organizers of the historic March on Washington in August
1963 to avoid any criticisms of the administration. Yet at the
march, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee leader--and
future member of Congress--John Lewis could pose a question that
resonated with many: "Which side is the federal government
on?"
A generation of civil rights
activists became radicalized in the face of the waffling compromises
and inaction of the Kennedy administration. And in turn, a wider
generation of youth became radicalized by the Kennedy administration's
foreign policy, particularly when it came to Cuba and Vietnam.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- -
THE KENNEDYS were as committed to defending the American empire
as any reactionary Republican.
They inherited plans for and
authorized the CIA's disastrous "Bay of Pigs" invasion
of Cuba in early 1961, the most spectacular of the U.S. government's
failed attempts to crush the Cuban Revolution.
But it didn't stop there. Bobby
Kennedy led a special White House committee that oversaw "Operation
Mongoose," a wide-ranging covert program of sabotage, assassination,
blackmail and other activities directed against Fidel Castro
and the Cuban government. Bobby declared that it was "top
priority" to get rid of Castro. The U.S. failed, but its
campaign resulted in untold death and destruction across Cuba.
By the time of John F. Kennedy's
death in November 1963, the U.S. was already fighting a proxy
war in Vietnam. Its 15,000 military advisors were leading combat
operations and bombing missions in a faltering effort to prevent
the victory of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam,
known to U.S. officials as the "Viet Cong."
In early November 1963, after
the U.S. engineered the assassination of the corrupt South Vietnamese
dictator Ngo Dinh Diem, Bobby said to his brother, "It's
better if you don't have him but you have to have somebody that
can win the war, and who is that?" The "who" never
emerged, but that didn't stop the U.S. from destroying large
parts of Vietnam in the hopes of winning the war against the
NLF and the North Vietnamese.
After John was assassinated,
Bobby remained in the cabinet as a lame-duck attorney general
until August 1964, when he resigned and ran successfully for
a U.S. Senate seat from New York.
Despite his personal hatred
for the reigning Democratic President Lyndon Johnson--who triumphed
over his Republican rival Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential
election in part by pledging to keep the U.S. out of a ground
war in Vietnam--Bobby supported Johnson's war policies in Vietnam.
As senator, he never voted
against any of the appropriation bills that funded the war. In
1966, Ramparts magazine editor and anti-war activist Robert Scheer
ran against a pro-Johnson liberal Jeffrey Cohelan in California's
seventh Congressional district, which covered Berkeley and Oakland.
The main issue was the war. Kennedy endorsed Cohelan. Scheer
still got 45% of the vote.
later that year, I.F. Stone,
the great radical journalist, wrote an article in October titled
"While Others Dodge the Draft, Bobby Dodges the War."
Even the slavishly loyal Kennedy biographer Arthur Schlesinger
was forced to admit, "Kennedy brooded about Vietnam, but
said less in public."
What were Bobby and other Senate
liberals "brooding" about? Two things: the prospect
of the U.S. losing the war, and the growing dissent in the country
that threatened the Democratic Party's domination of national
politics since the early 1930s. How could the Democrats--the
"war party" in Vietnam--capture the antiwar vote?
These "broodings"
got worse after the Tet Offensive by the NLF and its North Vietnamese
allies at the end of January 1968. A large majority of the U.S.
population concluded from Tet that the war had become a "quagmire"
and couldn't be won. The leading candidate for the Republican
presidential nomination, Richard Nixon, was counterposing "peace
with honor" to the Democrats' war policies.
But it was only after Eugene
McCarthy, a U.S. senator from Minnesota who was little known
nationally, challenged Johnson in the Democratic presidential
primaries and won 42 percent of the vote in the first primary
contest in New Hampshire that Bobby finally decided to run for
president.
Once Johnson announced that
he wouldn't run for reelection, many people believed that Bobby
could have won both the Democratic nomination and the presidency.
Robert Kennedy never advocated
unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from Southeast Asia. He
peppered most of his campaign speeches in 1968 with rhetoric
about the need for "peace" in Vietnam, but offered
little more than talk of a "negotiated settlement"--which
was not very different from what Johnson or Nixon proposed while
continuing to wage war against the Vietnamese people.
Bobby's chief political goal
was to capture the support of the antiwar movement and derail
it.
When we remember Robert Kennedy,
it should not be as someone who promised hope and idealism--but
as an opportunist who was part of a Democratic Party establishment
responsible for many of the things that the 1960s movements struggled
against.
Joe Allen's writes regularly for the International
Socialist Review and Socialist Worker. His three-part history
of the Vietnam War in the International Socialist Review has
the facts about the Kennedy administration in Vietnam. Start
with part one: "Vietnam: The War that the U.S. Lost"
available on the ISR Web site. Email: joseph.allen4@att.net
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