by Kent Sterling

There are moments in history that you just know meant something more than their face value.  When Bobby Kennedy was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan, it was more than a politician who died.  It marked the end of the dream that an individual could matter in the process of electing a president.

As political hacks like Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey strategized and patronized, Bobby Kennedy connected with those who had been disenfranchised by the Vietnam War and those who had benefitted from the virulent insipidity of the American political system.  A war that made no sense to anyone other than the Domino Theory faithful would end if Kennedy was elected.  Those without a voice would have one.  People trampled by the system would be given enough space to recover and stand on their own.

That’s the best case scenario and maybe a little more naïve than makes me comfortable, but what could have been, not necessarily what would have been, is what was ended on June 5, 1968.  There is every chance that the machinery that had been in place for decades would have rolled over the Kennedy presidency, but at the very least, ideas not generated in back rooms for the betterment of politicians would have been advanced and debated.  True equality would have been articulated by those who actually believed in it, and the killing of Americans in Southeast Asia would have stopped.

Nixon, and his ends justify the means pragmatism, would have been sent back to San Clemente where Nixon the excellent author would have started his literary career eight years earlier.

“The Last Campaign” by Thurston Clarke is a great book chronicling the three-month Kennedy Campaign.  It speaks of jaded politicos who signed on and felt the wonderment of doing something because they believe in it.  Many journalists got into the business because they saw “All the President’s Men” and thought that the newspaper business is all about investigation and telling the truth.  Unfortunately, that isn’t the truth very often.  Mostly, it’s about sitting in meetings and talking to people who lie so often they can’t tell the difference between honesty and deceit.

I got into radio thinking it was the coolest business in the world.  A lone person sits at a microphone and tells the truth to thousands of people one at a time.  What could be more powerful?  The truth was that I managed budgets, worked my ass off trying to make money for clients (which was fun and rewarding in its own way), and tried like hell to keep talent from getting fired.  I sat in endless meetings and listened to others opine about how the stations should operate.  Most were wrong, and I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince them otherwise.  The point is that the magic of a profession from the outside is generally nowhere near what happens on the inside.

For political warriors to suddenly feel empowered, and get that incredible feeling that change could actually happen is no small feat.  Kennedy’s genuine enthusiasm for a campaign that mattered stripped away the sinister veneer from these veterans of many elections, and turned loose the love of country that motivated their career choice in the first place.

In Indianapolis on the night Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed, Kennedy ignored the advice of Mayor Richard Lugar and many aides to give a speech to a mostly black audience on the northeast side.  People interviewed in “The Last Campaign” claim they came to the speech with the purpose of killing Kennedy.  One said, “They took one of ours, so I was going to take one of theirs.”  Kennedy’s speech was so heartfelt and personal that not only wasn’t he killed, Indy was the only major city in the country without rioting that night.

The speech (you can listen to it here by pressing the icon at the bottom)  was entirely extemporaneous, and is carved into stone across from the simplewhite cross marking Kennedy’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.  Whether Kennedy’s presidency would have been successful is debatable.  What isn’t debatable is that reasoned discourse and the notion that what is right and wrong can be considered important in the political landscape.

The murder of a man who thought differently, and evolved into a compassionate and generous leader, is so unconscionably wasteful and cynical that is in the pantheon of the saddest moments of our republic.  Today is a time for all Americans to wonder what might have been, and try to bring enough positive energy to others that it still can be.