June brought the close of the Democratic Party Presidential
nomination primaries. I am reminded of events 40 years ago: the
assassination of RFK. And that in turn reminds one of the
assasination, just a few years earlier of JFK.
A tribute to JFK and RFK
I’ve only really felt strongly for one President: JFK.
Before him the mind-numbing 50's. After him, things went downhill
quickly as all the promise of US society was thrown into brutal and
self-defeating occupation of a gentle nation. I still want to
know who paid the assassin. I suspect it was Castro who
certainly had the motive – the CIA had tried to overthrow him and
assassinate him.
RFK. Back in '67, he was late in joining the movement to
de-throne LBJ. We must be grateful to Eugene McCarthy for
starting that effort. But McCarthy was less heroic than the
movement about him. He thought his nomination effort to be
Quixotic. Suddenly, with a strong showing in the early New
Hampshire primary, his challenge became for-real; and that was beyond
him. I had it from good sources that he had to be pulled out of
bed (with star-struck young women) to get to rallies.
RFK was for-real. He understood politics and he understood
governance. People wanted to believe in him and he wanted to be a
hero. He would have won the nomination; he would have won the
election against that nasty creep Nixon; and he would have ended the
Vietnam war quickly. Years of regression could have been
prevented.
Political assassinations are nothing new. One cannot avoid
comparison of the Kennedys and the Gracchi. Both were patrician
brothers who came to represent populist and democratic desires of their
time. The Gracchi lived and died in the unsettled period prior to
Rome’s degeneration from Republic to Empire. Had they
survived, perhaps Rome could have achieved a more democratic and humane
polity. So far, the US republic has continued despite the Kennedy
assassinations. But just barely. Nixon came close to using
executive-martial law against dissent. And Bush Jr. has harmed
much of the US constitutional bulwark against tyranny.
A tribute to JFK and RFK