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Looking back at Robert F. Kennedy’s last campaign

THE LAST CAMPAIGN: ROBERT F. KENNEDY AND 82 DAYS THAT INSPIRED AMERICA. By Thurston Clarke. Henry Holt. 336 pages. $25.Twenty years ago, Jack Newfield, himself the author of a compelling book on Robert F. Kennedy, said that his assassination was “a wound that hurts more, not less, as time passes.”

Now, it’s been twice that long - 40 years - since a bullet in a hotel kitchen ended what may have been the most moving and inspirational presidential campaign in modern American history on June 5, 1968.

While the anniversary made it inevitable that someone would come out with a new book on what so many people somehow call “The Last Campaign,” I was not especially looking forward to it. There have already been many good books about RFK’s life and final campaign, from the accounts of Jules Witcover, David Halberstam, and others who covered him, to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s magisterial Robert F. Kennedy and His Times.

That last campaign was, by all accounts, like no other in modern American history. One famous reporter began by intensely disliking the man he saw as arrogant, spoiled, and ruthless, and then later asked to be transferred off the beat. He had become so much of a Kennedy supporter he felt he could no longer be objective.

Having read most of the previous books, and having listened to John Stewart’s beautiful song cycle, “The Last Campaign,” I wondered what there could possibly be left to say. Fortunately, however, the author of this book is Thurston Clarke, an excellent writer and super-diligent reporter, who four years ago wrote a compelling short book on President John F. Kennedy’s much-debated inaugural address.

In The Last Campaign, Clarke turns up a variety of interesting new stories from 1968 - but more importantly, raises in a compelling way the question that mesmerizes historians still:

“What did he have? What did he have that he could do this to people, inspire blacks and white rednecks to stand next to each other, sobbing, as his funeral train went by.”

The book allows the story of that campaign and those who remember to answer that. The author answers it this way:

The widely different groups who admired and voted for Kennedy “mourned him so fiercely because they sensed that he had tried to educate rather than manipulate them, reconcile rather than divide them, engage them in a dialogue rather than feed them the message of the day, appeal to their better angels instead of their wallets and demand sacrifice rather than promising comfort.”

Few politicians before or since have done any of those things, or run as the champion of the downtrodden and the poor. The author, who clearly finished this book just as the current campaign was beginning, noted sadly that “candidates from either party could run today on the same issues and champion the same causes Kennedy did in 1968, because little has been done since to address them.”

He mentions that the late Arthur Schleslinger, Jr., predicted in 1988 that “Sometime around the year 1990 … we can expect a breakthrough into a new and generous epoch in American life.”

When that happened, the historian predicted that what Kennedy stood for would seem relevant again. But that hadn’t seemed to have happened when Thurston Clarke finished this book, and one senses that he was not optimistic about this year. He mentions a gathering of modern Democratic politicians a few years ago, most of whom tried to twist RFK’s legacy into something they could use themselves.

He does mention that one freshman senator, a black man who was 6 years old when Kennedy died, said something different: “If he were here today, I think it would be hard to place Robert F. Kennedy into any of the categories that constrain us politically.”

The man who said that will be the Democratic nominee for President this year, 40 years after Robert Kennedy sought the job.

You can tell that author Clarke had no idea this would happen. His book’s final words read: “Perhaps the mortar of complacency, selfishness and cynicism holding it together is indestructible.”

And then he pauses. “But if it ever does, the [Robert] Kennedy ideals will no longer seem so exotic.” Perhaps, as Barack Obama prepares to accept his nomination, they seem a bit less exotic now.

Jack Lessenberry is The Blade’s ombudsman.

Contact him at: omblade@aol.com.

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