The Vanity Fair RFK cover story is an excellent article that I recommend everyone read. There are excerpts below the fold.
The thing that strikes me about RFK is directly related to Obama... he was a person who brought right and left together, a unifier, a person who was speaking out against the war, and arguably someone who would have won the presidency on an anti-war platform who went even further than Obama in speaking out on our imperialism and war crimes.
I think RFK would support Obama if he were still around today...and we'd all be the better for it if RFK were still around today.
Before you read, please watch Bobby's speech where he had to announce to his rally that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered.
From the Vanity Fair article (and this is at the most a tenth of the article so I don't think it's infringing on any copyright):
It's a must read.
Two months after John F. Kennedy's assassination, Robert Kennedy traveled to Asia on an itinerary that had originally been planned for J.F.K. During the trip, he visited a girls' school in the Philippines where the students sang a song they had composed to honor his brother. As he drove away with CBS cameraman Walter Dombrow, he clenched his hands so tightly that they turned white, and tears rolled down his cheeks. He shook his head, signaling that Dombrow should remain silent. Finally he said in a choked voice, "They would have loved my brother." Dombrow put his arm around him and said, "Bob, you're going to have to carry on for him." Kennedy stared straight ahead for half a minute before turning to Dombrow and nodding. It was then, Dombrow said, that he knew Bobby would run for president and realized how much he loved him.
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"I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States." After saying that he was running to "close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old," he concluded with a passage that made him sound like his brother, perhaps because it had been contributed in part by Ted Sorensen, who had been his brother's speechwriter: "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 the moral leadership of this planet."
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Nevertheless, on the day that Kennedy announced his candidacy, it was by no means obvious that 1968 would become a watershed year. Most of the year's momentous events would occur after Kennedy's March 16 announcement, with many of the most shocking ones unfolding during his campaign. Had you told anyone in the Senate caucus room that morning that during the next 82 days President Johnson would decline to seek a second term, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy would both be assassinated, and America would suffer its worst racial disturbances since the Civil War, they might have believed that one or two of those things might happen, but not all, nor in such quick succession.
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"Do we have the right here in the United States to say that we're going to kill tens of thousands, make millions of people, as we have, refugees, kill women and children, as we have? ... I very seriously question whether we have that right." Then, continuing to frame the issue in moral terms, he said, "When we use napalm, when a village is destroyed and civilians are killed ... this is a moral obligation and a moral responsibility for us here in the United States.
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The right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler, who had also been a ferocious critic of F.D.R. and the New Deal, welcomed the possibility that, as he put it, "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his [Kennedy's] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies," and J. Edgar Hoover's deputy Clyde Tolson remarked offhandedly, "I hope that someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch."
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Kennedy ate a second breakfast at the student union, where he told a group of university officials and student leaders, "Some of you may not like what you're going to hear in a few minutes, but it's what I believe; and if I'm elected President, it's what I'm going to do."
Before leaving for the Ahearn Field House, where the rally would be held, he stopped in the men's room and stood at a urinal next to Dan Lykins, head of K.S.U. Collegians for Kennedy. Lykins tried making small talk. Kennedy cut him off and asked, "What kind of a reception do you think I'll get?"
"There's more anti-war sentiment here than people think, and my gut feeling is that people loved your brother."
"But what kind of a reception will I get?"
"McCarthy has some support, but I think they'll give you a standing ovation."
"I hope you're right," Kennedy said grimly.
The field house was a hulking stone structure with exposed steel rafters and a dirt ring to accommodate livestock shows and rodeos. Because Kennedy attracted a record-setting crowd of 14,500, students stood in stairwells, sat cross-legged on the basketball court and under the press tables, and perched on the rafters and scoreboard, dangling their legs in space. Their signs said, bobby is groovy! and kiss me, bobby. Others said, gene for integrity and traitor!
The Kennedys walked onto the dais with Kansas State president James McCain, Governor and Mrs. Docking, and former governor Alf Landon. The students jumped up, cheering, stamping their feet, and scuffing up clouds of dust that dimmed the light and hung like smoke.
They cheered because Kennedy was youthful and handsome, John Kennedy's brother, and he reminded them of happier times. Seventeen-year-old Kevin Rochat, the son of a K.S.U. official, cheered because he thought everything had gone wrong since J.F.K.'s assassination, and only his brother could make it right. Ralph Titus, who managed the university radio station, believes these conservative students cheered because Vietnam had made even them uneasy.
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Kennedy opened his attack on President Johnson's Vietnam policy with a confession and an apology. "Let me begin this discussion with a note both personal and public," he said. "I was involved in many of the early decisions on Vietnam, decisions which helped set us on our present path."
He acknowledged that the effort may have been "doomed from the start" and admitted that the South Vietnamese governments, which his brother's administration had supported, had been "riddled with corruption, inefficiency, and greed," adding, "If that is the case, as it may well be, then I am willing to bear my share of the responsibility, before history and before my fellow citizens. But past error is no excuse for its own perpetration. Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom Now, as ever, we do ourselves best justice when we measure ourselves against ancient texts, as in Sophocles [from Antigone]: 'All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and he repairs the evil.' The only sin, he said, is pride."
Kennedy's apology elicited the loudest cheers of the morning so far, perhaps because these students appreciated hearing an adult admit to a mistake, or because they too had once supported the war and Kennedy's mea culpa made it easier for them to admit that they too had been wrong.
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Rene Carpenter watched the students in the front rows. Their faces shone, and they opened their mouths in unison, shouting, "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!"
Hays Gorey, of Time, called the electricity between Kennedy and the K.S.U. students "real and rare" and said that "a good part of it is John F. Kennedy's, of course, but John Kennedy ... himself couldn't be so passionate, and couldn't set off such sparks."
Kevin Rochat was close to weeping because Kennedy was so direct and honest. He kept telling himself, My God! He's saying exactly what I've been thinking!
Jim Slattery, who would later be elected to Congress from Kansas, reread the K.S.U. speech during the second Iraq war and decided it was so powerful "because Kennedy was talking about what was right!"
Kennedy concluded by saying, "Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our own misguided policies—and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once said was the last, great hope of mankind. There is a contest on, not for the rule of America but for the heart of America. In these next eight months we are going to decide what this country will stand for—and what kind of men we are."
He raised his fist in the air so it resembled the revolutionary symbol on posters hanging in student rooms that year, promised "a new America," and the hall erupted in cheers and thunderous applause.
It's long but the entire thing is worth reading, to say the least.
There are few leaders in our history who have shown an ability to unify people and speak out against tyranny, while holding a senate seat, like Barack Obama does. I think Robert Kennedy would be proud... he did it too.
Vanity Fair: The Last Good Campaign
This is the essence of Bobby Kennedy and why I feel he is smiling somewhere and pumping his fist in the air in support of Barack Obama:
If Bobby were still with us today, he would be fighting hard for our side. He was a good man and would have been a great president.