Can Joe Biden Pick Up Bobby Kennedy’s Unfinished Work?
Photo by Yoichi R. Okamoto is in the public domain as it is a work of the U.S. federal government.
It was April 1968. Robert F. Kennedy was headed to a rally in the urban neighborhoods of Indianapolis for what would be the first important test of his presidential campaign. Kennedy’s brother, President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated five years ago. Now, it was up to Bobby Kennedy to inform the all-Black crowd that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Resisting concerns about his safety, the speech he spontaneously gave that night went down as one of the most powerful orations in American history. As someone who had also lost a loved one to an assassination, he bared his own experience with grief to the crowd, validating their anger but pleading with the crowd not to let themselves be driven to violent vengeance.
“For those of you who are Black and are tempted to fill with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling,” Kennedy said. “I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.” In the midst of their agony, his words washed over the crowd like a hypnotizing tonic.
“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.” As riots raged on across America in the aftermath of the assassination, Indianapolis was calm. When Kennedy spoke of unity, people stopped and listened. For they understood that Bobby Kennedy knew grief.
A LONG SHADOW
Robert F. Kennedy has been dead for almost 53 years. Throughout his life, he was never far from the levers of power, serving as President John F. Kennedy’s Attorney General after graduating from U.Va.’s law school only ten years previously. After JFK’s assasination, he was elected Senator from New York and was in the middle of running for the 1968 presidential campaign when he, too, was shot. In the span of only a few months, his fevered campaign and newly-attained status as a righteous crusader showed signs of knitting together an impossible coalition of working-class whites, Blacks, youths, and other left-behind Americans who were suffering through the turmoil of the Vietnam War, poverty, and racial discrimination.
But we will never know what could have become of Kennedy’s candidacy because, much like his elder brother, neither was given a chance to deliver on their promises. Yet for a “man who was never president,” Bobby Kennedy’s legacy has belied his rather short life by demonstrating immense lasting power even into 2021. The saliency of this legacy is certainly helped by the fact that the current occupant of the White House is a devout follower of his who cites Bobby Kennedy as his only political hero.
The promise of Jack and Bobby Kennedy looms large for any Democratic presidential nominee, but the one who has been most first-handedly affected by it is the current president. Keen eyes will notice that it is the bust of Bobby Kennedy presiding next to President Joe Biden’s fireplace in the Oval Office, not his presidential predecessor. As a Northeastern Irish Catholic, it is not hard to see why a young Biden would feel a natural kinship with President John F. Kennedy, and later on, be inspired to pursue public service by Bobby Kennedy’s message of hope and possibility. Indeed, his early political runs emulated the Kennedy model. What Biden could not have sensed, however, was just how much more personal a role model Bobby Kennedy would come to be to him.
“WISDOM, THROUGH THE AWFUL GRACE OF GOD”
Very few Americans are more associated with grief and resilience than Biden and Kennedy. Kennedy suffered the loss of two of his brothers in a very public, excruciating fashion. Biden, too, has suffered through unimaginable tragedies in burying a wife, a daughter, and a son. For both men, their grief became an awakening in something akin to the precept that “all existence is suffering”, and a solemn affirmation that power is best sought and wielded for the noble means of uplifting others.
Of frequent note is that Biden has and Kennedy had an uncommon ability to empathize with the suffering of others. Grief bestowed upon both the ability to burnish their images with spiritual weight, wherein the words each used to address the suffering came to matter less than the testimony of the man’s presence itself. They showed that weathering the deepest lows in public life would not prevent them from seeking the greatest highs. Both also reached the political zenith of their careers where this empathy seemed to make them uniquely equipped to address the moment. In both 1968 and 2020, death was having a public moment. In both years, the bereaved country needed a leader who could rise beyond simple platitudes of condolence and set a personal example for the masses of Americans reckoning with mortality.
Biden, just like Kennedy, refused to let crime become a wedge issue between white and Black people in a time of racial turmoil by fending off attacks that he did not stand for “law and order,” while also unequivocally asserting that justice would be administered. “I do not believe we have to choose between law and order and racial justice in America,” Biden said on the campaign trail. “We can have both.”
And through no fault of their own, both will be forever associated with political violence. Bobby Kennedy was scarred by the gunning down of his brother and Dr. King; insurrectionists fatally tried to prevent Biden from taking office. If the forces that stirred up violence were alive in 1968, they are certainly back today. A significant amount of the country and our elected officials refuse to accept that Biden is the duly elected President and support overturning the results of a legitimate democratic election. The pandemic, social justice, the environment, the economy, domestic terrorism: any one of the multiple crises plaquing the nation would be a massive challenge for an incoming administration. It may very well be that Biden is rowing a duct-taped canoe into a tsunami.
Further yet, the goodwill that might have been afforded to a President Robert Kennedy will not be available to Biden in this polarized time. But Biden is no stranger to adversity, and when division threatens promise itself, he will surely turn to the example set by the hero of his youth. The president can quote, by memory, the same line from Aeschylus that Bobby Kennedy recited to the crowd in Indianapolis and is now etched on his gravestone: "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
THE HEALER AND THE UNIFER
Bobby Kennedy was not a typical progressive (he disliked welfare, although never stooping as to demean welfare recipients), but some of his rhetoric would be completely at home in the left flank of today’s Democratic Party. “You know, I’ve come to the conclusion that poverty is closer to the root of the problem than color,” Kennedy observed. “I think there has to be a new kind of coalition to keep the Democratic party going, and to keep the country together...[Blacks], blue-collar whites, and the kids.”
And Kennedy did end up performing well in primaries with large numbers of majority African American, Mexican American and Native American districts. In a bit of political magic, he was also able to appeal to the white voters who later ended up voting for segregationist George Wallace, while losing the middle-class suburbs.
So, did Biden achieve the Bobby Kennedy coalition? Biden, much like Kennedy, owes his success in the primary to minority voters. His general election victory, too, has been widely credited to Black voters in states such as Georgia and South Carolina, to Native Americans in Arizona, and young voters in Pennsylvania. However, in an inversion of Kennedy’s white coalition, Biden ended up doing much better among educated voters rather than working class voters. This is attributable to many things, among which are Kennedy’s unique appeal to a multiracial working class coalition, former President Donald Trump’s ability to turn out his base, and Democratic gains in the suburbs.
Unity and healing are tall orders. Part of what caused the historic outpouring of grief after Kennedy’s assassination was the sense that only he could unite the country in those turbulent times. Biden, too, has vowed to unite the country. But what Biden can do that Kennedy could not is govern. More than anyone, Bobby Kennedy was driven to seek out and highlight human misery, driving others to action in doing so. That bottom-up, moralistic approach lives on in Biden. His child tax credit in the American Rescue Plan, which is projected to cut child poverty in nearly half, is exactly the kind of policy that Kennedy would have supported.
PRESIDENT BIDEN
Bobby Kennedy’s story still resonates today because it is one of growth and learning. Compared to his brother, who ascended to the presidency with a complete vision, Kennedy’s last campaign reflected his constant self-creation. Biden, too, has evolved on the issues as society changed. Because of him, the country will see the vision of Robert Kennedy embodied in the highest office of the land. A vision based on the idea that a society should be judged by the state of its poor, not by how exorbitantly the rich live. If not affection, a brotherly, “disinterested” love for those unlike us, as Dr. King would say. In disagreement, honoring the common humanity of others. A tough but principled America in the world.
The day after Dr. King died, Kennedy once again spoke with the fluency of a practiced mourner. Extending King’s famous aphorism that “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny,” Kennedy said, “Whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.” The idea that we are all so vulnerable as to be “painfully and clumsily” creating a life is a commonality that Bobby Kennedy tried to build unity around, as he saw it as begetting a harmonious coexistence. And if President Biden is to succeed at bringing about unity, it is one that Americans must comprehend, too.