I do believe that RFK was a man of considerable morality - a challenge given his environment. Such morality from a man who as President would have final say on Intel, Military and ultimately on the Executive's foreign policy- which I suspect was a prime reason for his elimination. In any case, his and his brother's murders deprived the nation of its best chances to begin to correct the mis-steps that were undertaken in the extreme paranoia that began following WWII.
There have been a few others of such principle since then. Dennis Kucinich comes to mind. Here he discusses that troubling question of how the Democratic Party became an even bigger war Party than the Republicans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b079rbpYIzU
I remember watching that interview with Dennis Kucinich, Roger. Really sharp. I agree with almost everything he says. He truly knows how corrupt the system in DC is. After all, he lived it and was opposed to it--and paid the price.
I saw Dennis speak at a small movie theater in Seattle. He was there for the opening of Michael Moore's movie "Sicko".
My wife and I were impressed with Dennis. And quickly realized why they gerrymandered him out of the swamp.
And of course, the films focus on the US health insurance and the pharmaceutical industries, and the US for-profit non-universal healthcare system - changed nothing!
Kiwi's whine and bitch about their not-for-profit universal system, not knowing how lucky they are. No paperwork, no bills, same treatment for EVERY PERSON.
Yes, you have to wait a few months for a knee replacement - but if you are diagnosed with cancer, you are in your hospital bed the next day receiving state-of-the-art care.
New Zealand choses to spend its tax money on healthcare - not bombing other countries on the other side of the world that are no threat to folks in Wellington, Auckland or Christchurch.
And NZ'ers get better health outcomes at half(!) the cost. And their taxes are no higher than in the US. NZ spends 9% of GDP on health care. In 2021, U.S. national health expenditure as a share of its gross domestic product (GDP) reached 18.3 percent. And as I said, with no better health outcomes.
EDIT: In 2007 "Sicko", produced on a $9 million budget, grossed $25 million in North America. "Bowling for Columbine's" box office gross was $22 million. Making the fat slob a very rich fat slob.
Actually, on a national level, our (US) health statistics are far worse as infant mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy and other health measures are the worst of all developed nations. So we pay far more and get far less.
Good on you, Roger, for mentioning Dennis Kucinich. He was my Congressman for years, and I always respected him completely. I had the honor of working on a couple of his campaigns, and he was a stand-up guy.
I mistakenly wrote "RFK, Jr." as he's in the news nowadays and RFK (whom I was writing about) is mostly gone into the memory hole (though thankfully, not from Bill's nor our memories here.
John, Martin, and Bobby. Had any of them lived, the world might be very different today. Instead, the dark forces won, the dreams died with those leaders, and we descended to the reign of Nixon and Kissinger.
You are forgetting Johnson. He wanted his reputation to be the 'great war time president'. He wanted high numbers of VC deaths. He did not care if the people were women, children, old, unarmed. The death count was not just VC soldiers it was anyone who was Vietnamese.
KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES by Nick Turse goes into detail about the US soldiers. He names the generals and other who encouraged the slaughter of the innocent. He also names those who blew the whistle on those who were horrified to what was happening.
JFK got Vietnam going. He approved the Bay of Pigs. He was fully behind the big buildup of nuclear weapons. He never questioned American Empire. What made him different is that he had media (that means CBS, NBC and ABC) in his pocket with his winning smile and easy going press conferences. He was likeable, looked good on TV and couldn't have been smoother.
The only people to be trusted with power are those who do not wish to have it and are fearful of it if they do. JFK was born to power and wealth and was quite ready to walk into the White House with the beautiful Jacqueline (to whom he was unfaithful) on his arm. We the people lapped it up. Fabulously wealthy as he was, fully supportive of rule by the elite as he was, I see no reason to believe he would stand in the way of wealth which is the core problem of our times.
He did approve the Bay of Pigs--and regretted it. Even turning against the CIA. He was comfortable with the media, who protected him, but he also spoke his mind. He didn't need every word to be approved and tested before he spoke.
And of course he gave the Peace Speech in 1963 that represented a major advance in diplomacy, a new foreign policy that could have paid dividends in 1964 and after. We'll never know, since he was killed a few months later.
Things were certainly different then in that diplomacy did exist and the Secretary of State had influence and did something other than be an errand boy for the President. There were honest voices in Congress, William Fulbright and William Proxmire come to mind. The challenge for JFK would have been, as it was for LBJ, Vietnam. It was with that war that the MIC asserted itself in the "guns vs butter" contest where LBJ funded both. As you say, we will never know. My point is that it is easy to proclaim a dead person as a savior if only.
A life unfinished I for one would have liked to have seen his accomplishments if he had lived. We always said up here in Ma. near Kennedy Compound that the best Kennedy's were killed Jos.P. in WW ll, Bobby & Jack...
TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER by C Hitchens explains how Kissinger betrayed the US, using the CIA other government agencies. Always under the table. He is responsible for many assassinations and interfering with legitimate elections in other countries.
Wow, thanks for the link to this great interview with Bobby Kennedy. I hardly knew anything about him. His honesty and concern, especially at the end of the interview, leave me speechless... There are few people of his caliber left in politics.
He gave his Life for this Country...:/ like Jack & Joe P., also will never forget the Funeral Train, or him climbing Mt. Kennedy, the 20 minute ovation at the 64 DNC, and lastly how he kept more cities from Burning in his impromptu/ improvised speech after MLK was murdered. The Sixties were rough.
You mention that he understood that war was sometimes necessary. How can this be so for the world's superpower? And with nuclear weapons, can the destruction of civilization ever have a justification?
A little note from history that I read. The Inquisition, notorious as the horror that it was, was responsible for about 13,000 deaths. GW Bush, with the Iraq war, was responsible for how many tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, let alone the 5,000 or so Americans that died. And yet the Iraq war is now ho-hum history and there is no chance, and never was, of GWB being tried as a war criminal. With this in mind, pray tell me what remains of the American way that we would like to think RFK understood? Innocence, once lost, cannot be recovered.
You wrote that TV was more serious back then. I'd say that everything was more serious back then. Now everything is for fun, for laughs, every commercial is some silly gag with foolishness and eye rolling. Entertainment is everywhere, on your phone, in your car, on screens large and small. Laugh! Smile! Never be serious.
And yet now of all the times in history, we need to be serious because by being us in such huge numbers living lifestyles that admit of no limits we are striding boldly into disaster and perhaps that is why there is so much emphasis on taking everything light and easy...we don't want to face the fact that we are at the limit. Screw authority, bring on Trump!
As for RFK vs Harris/Walz, isn't the difference that RFK spoke his mind whereas Harris/Walz are carefully calculating what to say, thinking of how it will be received? I don't think I am wrong in drawing a parallel in advertising. At one time it consisted of plain speaking. Present the product and tell what it can do. Now, ads are little slices of vaudeville that say almost nothing about the product but make the viewer laugh. We must not be serious because if we thought about our consumption seriously we might become anxious, we might hold ourselves responsible, we might start to think about our lives in general instead of thinking about what to buy.
What rules is: stay cool, stay loose, be different not by character but by possessions, get that tattoo that is yours alone. It all started with don't be square. Can this be turned around? Yes, but only by hitting the wall and not before.
The funny thing is that I am saying something that I repudiated back when rock and roll was coming in. There were plenty who said it was mindlessly sensual and thoughtless. In the 1950's and 60's stiffness in all things, particularly sexual, needed some relaxation, but in the history of the US since, I think the critics have been proven correct in that there has been no stopping the collapse of seriousness to the point that it is now treated with contempt.
As a 7th Grader in Junior High School at that time we and my HR Home Room Teacher a Art Teacher Miss. Ellen Snyder loved Bobby. She cried and was visibly shaken the next morn. in class after the night he was shot. I remember to this day her passion for RFK in Class HR after he died. Our Generation missed out on having him as President..!
Twice you have mentioned conscience in this article. Conscience is critical. We have buried our collective consciences under the military industrial complex, nra, me first attitudes and on and on.
For 25+ years we have been working with the Golden Rule Project, which brings many formulations of the Golden Rule, from throughout all time, to schools in Utah. Wouldn't that be great if such things like this most common of principles were taught in schools.
Honor is no longer considered important in ones conduct.
There was German flight master who told his pilots if he ever found out they shot at a man in a parachute he would ground them permanently.
Compare that to the German pilots who shot, in the back, fleeing Belgium women, children trying to stay alive. Going south trying to stay ahead of the German blitzkrieg in 1940. Shooting in the back, using mothers and children for target practice.
I was a 24 year old student when RFK was interviewed. What strikes me is the intelligence and eloquence of both the interviewee and the interviewers. This is has completely disappeared in the political environment. The dumbing down of intellectual discourse in politics and among the general public shows how “sick” our society has become. Regarding RFK’s specific points regarding U.S.’s Vietnam war shows how was still emotionally and intellectually chained to the ideology of American exceptionalism. He seems to disregard the fact that America in 1967 was functioning in the foreign policy arena in a matrix that began in the 19th century. Would another Kennedy administration have made a real difference in the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy? I am not even sure he would have won against Nixon. America did get the opportunity to initiate an alternative when George McGovern was Nixon’s opponent in 1972. The American electorate decided against it. It was then that the Democratic Party began its move towards a conservative political platform. Lastly, I disagree that war is sometimes necessary as RFK stated and too many “progressives” still argue. War is always pure evil, but unfortunately always glorified and celebrated while millions of people are sacrificed on the altar of Mars and especially of mammon.
Interesting that RFK leads off with a criticism of the press, that they reduce to a personality struggle his objections to LBJ's policies. Maybe the press wasn't so different back then. Maybe they were just as lazy as they are now, where everything reduces to an obsession with getting Trump. And what a different Democratic Party! The idea that they would have a meaningful primary even though they had a sitting president who at least seemed to have full mental capacity. Now they have a party which unquestioningly supported a president who did not such full capacity, to be replaced by a nominee who received no primary votes and had to be chaperoned to her first sitting interview. All without objection from any party leader! Quite a change.
Instead of such wisdom and appeals to human decency, our country has embraced endless war making and militarism. The word peace has been eliminated from political discourse. In place of it, there is an infatuation with "American Exceptionalism." Our political class peddles the ludicrous idea that the US is an "indispensable nation" that has a duty to remake the world in its own image and on its own terms with no regard to international law. If tens of thousands around the world must be killed and wounded, if countries must be destroyed in the process, so be it. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.
If you are interested, there is quite a bit of scuttlebutt on RFK in the book "Gambling with Armageddon" by Martin Sherwin which chronicles the Cuban missile crisis in detail. Bobby doesn't come out sounding very good in the book as he was much more militaristic and belligerent than his older brother.
Pre-soundbite eloquence, no script, no aides hovering about, no teleprompter. Truly, a man from another age.
I do believe that RFK was a man of considerable morality - a challenge given his environment. Such morality from a man who as President would have final say on Intel, Military and ultimately on the Executive's foreign policy- which I suspect was a prime reason for his elimination. In any case, his and his brother's murders deprived the nation of its best chances to begin to correct the mis-steps that were undertaken in the extreme paranoia that began following WWII.
There have been a few others of such principle since then. Dennis Kucinich comes to mind. Here he discusses that troubling question of how the Democratic Party became an even bigger war Party than the Republicans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b079rbpYIzU
I remember watching that interview with Dennis Kucinich, Roger. Really sharp. I agree with almost everything he says. He truly knows how corrupt the system in DC is. After all, he lived it and was opposed to it--and paid the price.
I saw Dennis speak at a small movie theater in Seattle. He was there for the opening of Michael Moore's movie "Sicko".
My wife and I were impressed with Dennis. And quickly realized why they gerrymandered him out of the swamp.
And of course, the films focus on the US health insurance and the pharmaceutical industries, and the US for-profit non-universal healthcare system - changed nothing!
Kiwi's whine and bitch about their not-for-profit universal system, not knowing how lucky they are. No paperwork, no bills, same treatment for EVERY PERSON.
Yes, you have to wait a few months for a knee replacement - but if you are diagnosed with cancer, you are in your hospital bed the next day receiving state-of-the-art care.
New Zealand choses to spend its tax money on healthcare - not bombing other countries on the other side of the world that are no threat to folks in Wellington, Auckland or Christchurch.
And NZ'ers get better health outcomes at half(!) the cost. And their taxes are no higher than in the US. NZ spends 9% of GDP on health care. In 2021, U.S. national health expenditure as a share of its gross domestic product (GDP) reached 18.3 percent. And as I said, with no better health outcomes.
EDIT: In 2007 "Sicko", produced on a $9 million budget, grossed $25 million in North America. "Bowling for Columbine's" box office gross was $22 million. Making the fat slob a very rich fat slob.
That's the Kiwi spirit, Dennis!
Actually, on a national level, our (US) health statistics are far worse as infant mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy and other health measures are the worst of all developed nations. So we pay far more and get far less.
Ditto what you write for Canada per a good Canadian friend of mine.
Good on you, Roger, for mentioning Dennis Kucinich. He was my Congressman for years, and I always respected him completely. I had the honor of working on a couple of his campaigns, and he was a stand-up guy.
I mistakenly wrote "RFK, Jr." as he's in the news nowadays and RFK (whom I was writing about) is mostly gone into the memory hole (though thankfully, not from Bill's nor our memories here.
Notice how the good guys e.g., JFK, RFK, Dennis, Bernie always get elbowed out of the major parties.
Yes and who is it that determines what the major parties do? Wealth.
John, Martin, and Bobby. Had any of them lived, the world might be very different today. Instead, the dark forces won, the dreams died with those leaders, and we descended to the reign of Nixon and Kissinger.
You are forgetting Johnson. He wanted his reputation to be the 'great war time president'. He wanted high numbers of VC deaths. He did not care if the people were women, children, old, unarmed. The death count was not just VC soldiers it was anyone who was Vietnamese.
KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES by Nick Turse goes into detail about the US soldiers. He names the generals and other who encouraged the slaughter of the innocent. He also names those who blew the whistle on those who were horrified to what was happening.
The news media knew but looked the other way.
Nope, didn't forget LBJ. But if JFK had lived, Johnson might not have been a wartime President. That was my point.
JFK got Vietnam going. He approved the Bay of Pigs. He was fully behind the big buildup of nuclear weapons. He never questioned American Empire. What made him different is that he had media (that means CBS, NBC and ABC) in his pocket with his winning smile and easy going press conferences. He was likeable, looked good on TV and couldn't have been smoother.
The only people to be trusted with power are those who do not wish to have it and are fearful of it if they do. JFK was born to power and wealth and was quite ready to walk into the White House with the beautiful Jacqueline (to whom he was unfaithful) on his arm. We the people lapped it up. Fabulously wealthy as he was, fully supportive of rule by the elite as he was, I see no reason to believe he would stand in the way of wealth which is the core problem of our times.
Clif, I recognize JFK's many faults.
He did approve the Bay of Pigs--and regretted it. Even turning against the CIA. He was comfortable with the media, who protected him, but he also spoke his mind. He didn't need every word to be approved and tested before he spoke.
And of course he gave the Peace Speech in 1963 that represented a major advance in diplomacy, a new foreign policy that could have paid dividends in 1964 and after. We'll never know, since he was killed a few months later.
Things were certainly different then in that diplomacy did exist and the Secretary of State had influence and did something other than be an errand boy for the President. There were honest voices in Congress, William Fulbright and William Proxmire come to mind. The challenge for JFK would have been, as it was for LBJ, Vietnam. It was with that war that the MIC asserted itself in the "guns vs butter" contest where LBJ funded both. As you say, we will never know. My point is that it is easy to proclaim a dead person as a savior if only.
A life unfinished I for one would have liked to have seen his accomplishments if he had lived. We always said up here in Ma. near Kennedy Compound that the best Kennedy's were killed Jos.P. in WW ll, Bobby & Jack...
TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER by C Hitchens explains how Kissinger betrayed the US, using the CIA other government agencies. Always under the table. He is responsible for many assassinations and interfering with legitimate elections in other countries.
Wow, thanks for the link to this great interview with Bobby Kennedy. I hardly knew anything about him. His honesty and concern, especially at the end of the interview, leave me speechless... There are few people of his caliber left in politics.
He gave his Life for this Country...:/ like Jack & Joe P., also will never forget the Funeral Train, or him climbing Mt. Kennedy, the 20 minute ovation at the 64 DNC, and lastly how he kept more cities from Burning in his impromptu/ improvised speech after MLK was murdered. The Sixties were rough.
You mention that he understood that war was sometimes necessary. How can this be so for the world's superpower? And with nuclear weapons, can the destruction of civilization ever have a justification?
A little note from history that I read. The Inquisition, notorious as the horror that it was, was responsible for about 13,000 deaths. GW Bush, with the Iraq war, was responsible for how many tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths, let alone the 5,000 or so Americans that died. And yet the Iraq war is now ho-hum history and there is no chance, and never was, of GWB being tried as a war criminal. With this in mind, pray tell me what remains of the American way that we would like to think RFK understood? Innocence, once lost, cannot be recovered.
You wrote that TV was more serious back then. I'd say that everything was more serious back then. Now everything is for fun, for laughs, every commercial is some silly gag with foolishness and eye rolling. Entertainment is everywhere, on your phone, in your car, on screens large and small. Laugh! Smile! Never be serious.
And yet now of all the times in history, we need to be serious because by being us in such huge numbers living lifestyles that admit of no limits we are striding boldly into disaster and perhaps that is why there is so much emphasis on taking everything light and easy...we don't want to face the fact that we are at the limit. Screw authority, bring on Trump!
As for RFK vs Harris/Walz, isn't the difference that RFK spoke his mind whereas Harris/Walz are carefully calculating what to say, thinking of how it will be received? I don't think I am wrong in drawing a parallel in advertising. At one time it consisted of plain speaking. Present the product and tell what it can do. Now, ads are little slices of vaudeville that say almost nothing about the product but make the viewer laugh. We must not be serious because if we thought about our consumption seriously we might become anxious, we might hold ourselves responsible, we might start to think about our lives in general instead of thinking about what to buy.
What rules is: stay cool, stay loose, be different not by character but by possessions, get that tattoo that is yours alone. It all started with don't be square. Can this be turned around? Yes, but only by hitting the wall and not before.
The funny thing is that I am saying something that I repudiated back when rock and roll was coming in. There were plenty who said it was mindlessly sensual and thoughtless. In the 1950's and 60's stiffness in all things, particularly sexual, needed some relaxation, but in the history of the US since, I think the critics have been proven correct in that there has been no stopping the collapse of seriousness to the point that it is now treated with contempt.
As a 7th Grader in Junior High School at that time we and my HR Home Room Teacher a Art Teacher Miss. Ellen Snyder loved Bobby. She cried and was visibly shaken the next morn. in class after the night he was shot. I remember to this day her passion for RFK in Class HR after he died. Our Generation missed out on having him as President..!
Twice you have mentioned conscience in this article. Conscience is critical. We have buried our collective consciences under the military industrial complex, nra, me first attitudes and on and on.
For 25+ years we have been working with the Golden Rule Project, which brings many formulations of the Golden Rule, from throughout all time, to schools in Utah. Wouldn't that be great if such things like this most common of principles were taught in schools.
Honor is no longer considered important in ones conduct.
There was German flight master who told his pilots if he ever found out they shot at a man in a parachute he would ground them permanently.
Compare that to the German pilots who shot, in the back, fleeing Belgium women, children trying to stay alive. Going south trying to stay ahead of the German blitzkrieg in 1940. Shooting in the back, using mothers and children for target practice.
Which pilot was honorable?
I was a 24 year old student when RFK was interviewed. What strikes me is the intelligence and eloquence of both the interviewee and the interviewers. This is has completely disappeared in the political environment. The dumbing down of intellectual discourse in politics and among the general public shows how “sick” our society has become. Regarding RFK’s specific points regarding U.S.’s Vietnam war shows how was still emotionally and intellectually chained to the ideology of American exceptionalism. He seems to disregard the fact that America in 1967 was functioning in the foreign policy arena in a matrix that began in the 19th century. Would another Kennedy administration have made a real difference in the trajectory of U.S. foreign policy? I am not even sure he would have won against Nixon. America did get the opportunity to initiate an alternative when George McGovern was Nixon’s opponent in 1972. The American electorate decided against it. It was then that the Democratic Party began its move towards a conservative political platform. Lastly, I disagree that war is sometimes necessary as RFK stated and too many “progressives” still argue. War is always pure evil, but unfortunately always glorified and celebrated while millions of people are sacrificed on the altar of Mars and especially of mammon.
Soul, there is no soul in the US Government!
Empire is antithetical to the values of the Declaration of Independence!
Maybe this is what Trump means: MAGA
Interesting that RFK leads off with a criticism of the press, that they reduce to a personality struggle his objections to LBJ's policies. Maybe the press wasn't so different back then. Maybe they were just as lazy as they are now, where everything reduces to an obsession with getting Trump. And what a different Democratic Party! The idea that they would have a meaningful primary even though they had a sitting president who at least seemed to have full mental capacity. Now they have a party which unquestioningly supported a president who did not such full capacity, to be replaced by a nominee who received no primary votes and had to be chaperoned to her first sitting interview. All without objection from any party leader! Quite a change.
Now he belongs to the Ages....
We will never see his like again.
Instead of such wisdom and appeals to human decency, our country has embraced endless war making and militarism. The word peace has been eliminated from political discourse. In place of it, there is an infatuation with "American Exceptionalism." Our political class peddles the ludicrous idea that the US is an "indispensable nation" that has a duty to remake the world in its own image and on its own terms with no regard to international law. If tens of thousands around the world must be killed and wounded, if countries must be destroyed in the process, so be it. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us.
If you are interested, there is quite a bit of scuttlebutt on RFK in the book "Gambling with Armageddon" by Martin Sherwin which chronicles the Cuban missile crisis in detail. Bobby doesn't come out sounding very good in the book as he was much more militaristic and belligerent than his older brother.
Arguably, Bobby grew and matured considerably between 1962 and when he was killed in 1968. We tend to forget how relatively young he was.