robert f. kennedy: C/D?

Clearly, politicians are just like rock stars.

kind of a bastard, mostly

agreed

But a bastard for good. If only for Jack-whispering so much of the civil rights policy. There have been a number of good bios lately (see: anything by Larry Tye), and a couple of hometown-boy radio segments that've been quite interesting.

http://www.wbur.org/radioboston/2017/05/23/kennedy-brothers

http://www.npr.org/2016/07/05/484780316/from-runt-of-the-litter-to-liberal-icon-the-story-of-robert-kennedy

Larry Tye's Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, published last year, is a convincing attempt to show how RFK was one of the few public figures who did legit "evolve."

i nned to be convinced he didn't get lib in '66-68 bcz that's where the votes were.

also see the James Baldwin doc of last year for the Lorraine Hansberry meeting story.

Both those points are true and doesn't discredit what he was doing and voting on in his last couple years.

And I hate Kennedy blarney

i think the "bastard" image was part of a good cop/bad cop thing RFK deliberately played w/ his brother, not too dissimilar from some of LBJ's arm-twisting tactics. certainly his record as attorney general was p good.

re: "that's where the votes were," well yeah. FDR did that too, that's why politicians do things. at any rate i don't think RFK made up his mind to run until mccarthy entered the race in '68, and his "evolution" started well before then.

Matthews touts his Bobby Kennedy book as being about "empathy." My God, Bobby was the only man Johnson was afraid of.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) December 6, 2017

total asshole, but he would have won, probably twice, and then we wouldn't have had four decades of unprocessed mcgovern trauma, and trump wouldn't be president. maybe we'd even have unions.

hmmm could be, or maybe that's a bit too TV time-travel episode for me.

Any president in 1969 would have been sullied by Vietnam.

But we might have been spared Watergate, the Southern Strategy, and the Right sharing its bed with evangelicals.

if rfk's 68 approach to building a post-civil-rights dem party had become the strategy of a winning president, the party would imo BOTH have kept in-tent many of the blue-collar voters now assumed to be congenitally republican AND continued to move the party left on race and social justice, taking those voters with it. mcgovern believed the right things but if you didn't have a full class schedule he came across like he was worried you'd bite him. not saying it'd've been an idyll but an rfk administration would have made the 60s-70s realignment shake out differently and imo inoculated the democrats against the idea that being an effective antiracist party means being a professional-class party that's still mostly racist.

used to hate this guy (as evidenced by this thread) but he is undeniably a fascinating, haunting figure, way moreso than most (any?) major us politicians since. the nasty side of him actually makes him more interesting to me now, certainly he was no more of a jerk than LBJ (who was a sociopathic monster in many ways that can't be separated easily from his legislative genius). there's nothing quite like the arc his career traced in any other politician's career. reading about his '68 campaign is p heartbreaking. i used to have a very kneejerk anti-kennedy thing that i think i got from gore vidal (and, if i'm honest, growing up in a republican family) more than actual knowledge of any of the kennedys. but he was a good attorney general and yeah, def would have been elected twice. but a modern america without watergate (and everything that followed) would be so unrecognizable that it's hard to speculate beyond that.

certainly he was no more of a jerk than LBJ

classic nemeses!

also lol i have a kneejerk anti-kennedy thing that i got from growing up in a democratic family, so. no way out imo

I hate King Arthur stories.

man, certainty about hypothetical elections... c'mon

hey now, the sword in the stone is a good king arthur story

winning twice is probably a stretch, but no nixon victory in '68 is a pretty major difference, no matter what happens next

should have said "certainty of winning twice"

50th anniv hagiographies tomorrow.

I do legit remember my dad coming home from his night shift that morning and hearing him tell my mother the news. We were Irish Catholic, so you can imagine the commemorative Kennedy relics around the house.

One of my earliest memories (maybe the earliest?) is of seeing That Photo on the front page of the LA Times. Nixon was right, Bobby was a holy warrior and Teddy was the best politician of them all.

SIrhan Sirhan stabbed in prison
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/man-convicted-of-killing-robert-f-kennedy-stabbed-at-donovan-state-prison-source/ar-AAGAgYv?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=iehp

yikes

the washington post ran a really interesting series of articles about him and the rfk assassination last year

Quite disorienting to learn he's still alive and in jail.

Recommendation for parole:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/27/us/sirhan-sirhan-parole-rfk-assassination/index.html

It's about time. If he had shot a gas station clerk and not a Kennedy, he would have been out decades ago.