In his eulogy two years after this address, Ted Kennedy told the mourners in St. Patrick’s Cathedral that his murdered brother “need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life.”
At least to some extent, the documentary record about Camelot and the cries of scandal-mongers alike ensured for our skeptical age that Robert Kennedy would indeed escape this fate. He could be the most complicated mixture imaginable of idealism and steely-eyed, brass-knuckle determination in pursuit of a goal.
Even so, and despite realizing that a yawning gap frequently exists between words and performance, I couldn’t read the above excerpt from
his Capetown address (also known as the “Ripple of Hope” speech) without
feeling that something immense was lost when he was cut down by an assassin’s
bullet in Los Angeles after winning the 1968 California primary for President.
At some level, the words of politicians do matter. Even
when using talented speechwriters, what they choose to say (or not) conveys
what they regard as important and indicates some measure of their character.
Kennedy’s words in particular reflect an elevated tone
befitting the magnitude of worldwide issues, a responsibility for alleviating “the
imperfections of human justice.”
That gravitas, I’m sorry to say, is missing in today’s
discourse. You can call this diminished rhetoric a casualty of a Sixties decade
that didn’t achieve its lofty goals, of more than a half century of advertising
sound bites that left listeners unable to absorb sustained arguments, or of the
countless casual cruelties and callousness of Donald Trump.
But it was gone at both parties’ conventions this summer.
Forget about that “When they go low, we go high” cry of the Democrats eight
years ago. Just think of Barack Obama’s hand gesture to simulate Trump’s
obsession with crowd size.
My sadness increased when I heard today that Robert Kennedy Jr. would be suspending his independent campaign and backing Trump
for President. It would take a psychiatrist to plumb all the depths and traumas
that led the son of the martyred Democratic candidate of the late Sixties to
this decisive point in his own misbegotten Presidential race.
But it only takes an ordinary moral sensibility to
know that the candidate who won his endorsement not only did not
measure up to the job that Robert Sr. sought and Jack Kennedy achieved, but
that he corroded the dignity of the Oval Office, widened the gap between rich
and poor, and encouraged the forces of evil at home and abroad.
Robert Sr.’s Capetown address—one of the most famous
in his short career—inspired inhabitants of Africa—a continent that Trump has dubbed, together with Haiti and El Salvador, as “s—thole countries.”
It is even more astonishing to realize that the crusade that Robert Jr. conducted so fervently these last couple of decades—conservation—was abandoned and utterly forgotten in his support for a former President whose administration took 74 actions that weakened environmental protection, according to an August 2020 Brookings Institution study.
Twenty years ago this month, Robert Jr. published Crimes Against Nature, a polemic with the most pointed of subtitles: “How
George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking
Our Democracy.” If he felt this way about Dubya, then what on earth did he
think Trump was doing in his term in office?
In bowing out, he noted that Trump had “asked to
enlist me in his administration.” Assume that he does get tapped for such a
position. How long do you think before, like so many others who agreed to serve
the Former Guy, he awakens one morning to find via X that he’s been fired?
Robert Kennedy Sr. brought conscience with his
indignation to the problems of the world and his country. His namesake forgot
the conscience part.
His latest choice has dismayed members of his immediate family, who issued a statement rightly denouncing his endorsement as “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.” They understood better than their brother that their father appealed to the best instincts of humanity in general and his countrymen in particular, while Trump has never missed a chance to call forth the ugliest of both.
But RFK Jr. has also disappointed the millions of Americans who like Robert Sr. have hoped to “wipe away
the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the
world.” Those sufferings will only increase because of the side with which he's thrown in his lot.
