Civil Warriors

As a historian and as a political observer/commentator, I have watched with no small sense of irony as Barack Obama laid claim to the title of the “presumptive” nominee of the Democratic party. Years ago, when the Abraham Lincoln Association was speculating about a banquet speaker in 2009, someone mentioned Obama, and I quickly replied that we should sign him up before he was elected president. It looks like I saw something there. Last year I arrived in Springfield the day after Obama formally declared for the presidency from the steps of the Old State Capital in Springfield (a place where I was to speak on Lincoln’s birthday), and I recalled the last time I spoke there … when I appeared with the late Lerone Bennett and Allan Guelzo on a panel about Lincoln and emancipation. Obama’s spoken fondly of Lincoln, and of course there are some interesting comparisons to be made between the campaign Obama waged to defeat the “expected” nominee, Hillary Clinton, senator from my home state of New York (and a wannabe Yankees fan) and the campaign Lincoln waged to defeat another frontrunning New York senator, William H. Seward.

But the coincidences don’t stop there. Obama claimed his victory on the 200^th anniversary of the birth of Jefferson Davis; the last senator from Illinois to win the Democratic nomination was Stephen A. Douglas. How delightful.

But for me it doesn’t end there. Several weeks ago, in what can be understood only as a stupid statement made out of a combination of exhaustion and desperation, Clinton asserted that the race was far from over, that, after all, her husband had not clinched until June 1992, and, after all, what about Bobby Kennedy?

To this day I still don’t know what Senator Clinton meant. However, I instantly concluded that someone who was stupid enough to say that was not someone I wanted answering the phone at 3 AM. That the person who made that comment actually occupied Kennedy’s seat made things worse, as if that was possible.

Forty years ago, on this very day, Bobby Kennedy was fighting and losing a battle for his life in a Los Angeles hospital. He had just claimed victory by a narrow margin in the California primary before he was gunned down in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel.

As a ten-year-old boy living in New York, I had gone to bed on the night of June 4, hours before the shooting. The next morning, my parents appeared at the foot of my bed to wake me up and tell me what happened. I remember their faces … sad, hurt, shocked, worried. I suspect this concern was as much for me as it was for Kennedy. They knew I was very interested in national politics, not the least because two New Yorkers, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Senator Kennedy, were contending for the nominations of their respective parties. It had been only two months since an assassin’s bullet had cut down another advocate for equality and justice.

Forty years later, the news still hurts. A lot.

Over the years, I have reflected on that day from so many perspectives. That my parents, rock-solid Republicans, were so moved as they were remains etched in my memory. That they cared so much about telling me reminds me that as parents, they “got it.” We’d all suffered five years before when John F. Kennedy was killed … it was the same week that my grandfather died … but, while I understood what was going on then (yes, even as a five-year-old I was interested in these sort of things), in 1968, a year when you knew you were witnessing history, it was different. I’d already seen riots on the streets of Paris, and riots in many American cities after King’s death. I had seen the roll call of honor every weekend to remind me that American soldiers were fighting and dying halfway around the world. I had watched television as a president decided not to seek reelection just days before King’s death. I had watched and read as a first term senator, with narrow tie, white shirt, and a growing shock of tousled brown hair, shook hands, smiled, and asked us to do better.

And now this. Another shooting. Another funeral. Bobby’s funeral procession would remind me more of King’s than it would of the days of mourning in November 1963, but in the end the brothers would be laid to rest near each other, on Arlington’s lawn. I had seen the original JFK grave site in 1966, long before the current memorial was erected. Bobby’s burial place remains comparatively simple, a cross and a marker.

Today, I harbor far fewer romantic illusions about Robert Kennedy. I’ve read the biographies and considered writing one, although I fear that wish will be destined for the same fate reserved for the book I want to write on Theodore Roosevelt. We’ll see. But I found most perceptive Ronald Steel’s treatment of Kennedy and why Americans still remember him as they imagine he was, not as he really was. “The best of Robert Kennedy was not in what he did, but in what he has inspired in others,” Steel reflects, adding later: “That is the part of the legend most worth remembering: not what he might have done, but what we can do.”

Yes, we can.