A Time for American Heroes? Reflecting on the Legacy of the West Wing

Inauguration. White House.  Supreme Court.  Executive Orders.  Despite having studied the politics and modern history of the US, I can’t hear any of these terms without thinking of The West Wing, a show which has become far more divorced from reality in the past few months than it seemed two decades ago when I first encountered it.

September 2024 marked the 25^th anniversary of The West Wing first airing on US television.  It had been a couple of years since my last rewatch, so I decided to mark the occasion with another.  I was also lucky enough to have been given the book ‘What’s Next’ (written by West Wing actors Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack) for Christmas, which in turn led me to the West Wing Weekly Podcast, which has been the soundtrack to my commute for the past few weeks, and so I’m currently pretty thoroughly immersed in the world of President Bartlet’s White House and his improbably committed staffers.

It's interesting to look back now, a quarter of a century later, and wonder if the world really was a more hopeful place in 1999.  The series began in the final year of the Clinton Administration and it’s no secret that Aaron Sorkin modelled his dedicated band of staffers on those who worked in the Clinton White House, with some of them even serving as consultants on the show.  Unfortunately, at least on this side of the pond, Clinton’s legacy is somewhat dominated by his scandalous romp in the Oval Office, something it would be unimaginable for President Bartlet to have done.

It was partway through the second season that George W. Bush took office, and many have commented that the show served as wish-fulfilment during the Bush presidency.  However, it could be argued that this was just as much the case during the waning Clinton years.  Elected after 12 years of Republican rule, Clinton espoused a ‘Third Way’ of politics, pacifying the right wing of his own party and winning back the working classes who had been charmed by Reagan’s old-fashioned conservatism.  Clinton courted business, signed up to spending cuts and abandoned unions.  His record on LGBT rights might well have been called “legislative gay-bashing” by President Bartlet.  His foreign policy was more a doctrine of indecision than Bartlet’s “doctrine of intervention when only humanitarian interests [are] at stake.”  Clinton was a centrist – Bartlet was a liberal, and one who (mostly) put principles before politics to boot.  Is it any wonder that the show became so popular in its first season?

 

The West Wing ended in 2006 on a hopeful note, with the election of Democrat Matt Santos as the first Hispanic POTUS, which would be eerily prescient in predicting the election two years later of Barack Obama.  In many respects, The West Wing appeared more forward-thinking than much of US politics of today.  In Season 3, Bartlet easily defeats plain-speaking candidate Governor Ritchie (clearly a stand-in for Bush), and the idea that someone like Ritchie could be elected was laughable.  Fast-forward to November 2024, and the American public were busy electing someone far worse.

But America’s shift to the right is not in isolation – the far right is growing in influence all over the world.  The AfD in Germany and Reform here in the UK are making disturbing gains in elections.  This move towards the right stems, of course, from dissatisfaction.  GCSE history students across the country have written countless times how the Great Depression contributed to rise of Nazism in the 1930s.  For this generation, it is COVID-19 and its fallout that is the source of our discontent.  In any case, watching The West Wing now seems more of a fantasy than ever: a world where even Republican politicians are decent, principled people.

The West Wing is undoubtedly clever TV: in how many other shows would a main character deliver an un-subtitled diatribe in Latin?  (I will always argue that ‘Two Cathedrals’ is one of the best 45 minutes of TV ever produced.)  It sparked my own desire to become politically active; a desire which, I’m ashamed to say, has become increasingly jaded over the past decade.  It makes the potentially dull business of government incredibly compelling and honours public servants, painting them as heroes on a tireless crusade to make the world a better place.

 

Whilst it’s tempting to view The West Wing as a perfect liberal fantasy, it’s not without its flaws.  Season 3, airing post-9/11, was rife with anti-Arab sentiment that is hard to stomach now.  The level of reverence shown to the office of the President and the unironic declarations of the USA’s greatness – the idea that it can and should serve as saviour to the rest of the world – come across as somewhat hypocritical.  Coming from such a self-deprecating, buttoned-up little island, it’s a little nauseating to watch these extreme bursts of patriotism and arrogance.

 

It’s also becoming more apparent to me on each rewatch just how much representation is lacking.  Though The West Wing boasts two of the strongest female characters I’ve ever seen on screen in Press Secretary CJ Cregg and Dr Abbey Bartlet (with an honourable mention to the criminally-underused Joey Lucas), the treatment of other women leaves a lot to be desired.  Feminism is often derided, and often by the women themselves.  With the exception of Dulé Hill as Charlie Young, personal aide to the president, the main cast is exclusively white (and mostly male).  And notwithstanding a passing Republican Congressman, no LGBTQ+ character shows up until the final season (and even then, it’s a minor character and not made explicit until very near the end).  There are jokes that land awkwardly and lines (“these women”?) that just don’t sit right throughout.  Part of this doubtless comes from the fact that Aaron Sorkin wrote virtually every episode of the first four seasons.  Reading ‘What’s Next’ has given me insight into just how involved – and how protective – he was with the scripts.  However gifted the writer, scripts written from the sole perspective of a straight white man must inevitably be lacking in representation.

 

Was The West Wing simply a product of its time?  In July 1999, the NAACP President Kweisi Mfume threatened to organise a viewer boycott of major networks when it became apparent that none of the new comedies or dramas being launched in the autumn schedules would feature any actors of colour.  Whilst Sorkin does try to address this in a meta way, with the hiring of Charlie as personal aide to the president, it’s not simply an issue of cosmetics, as Admiral Fitzwallace says.  Progress has been made, but even now, it’s as much about the voices behind the camera as it is about those in front of it.

 

It’s been said that we are in a slingshot era, much like the USA was in during the 1960s' Civil Rights Movement – that to make great progress, we sometimes need to pull back, in order to shoot forward.  Yet I can’t be alone in worrying that we are pulling so far back on the slingshot that the elastic may snap.  It seems more unlikely now than ever that we could see a president like President Bartlet in the White House.  Even Sorkin himself has admitted that writing such an idealistic and aspirational show would be challenging in the current political climate.  And yet, should we not also have hope?  If we could aspire to greatness then, can we not aspire again?  Hope is what’s going to get us through this.  Hope – and action.  It's certainly not perfect, but if the legacy of The West Wing is simply to inspire us to do better, then maybe that is enough.

They Can't Take That Away From Me

7 October, 1955.  Norman Granz’s all-star line-up, Jazz at the Philharmonic, plays Houston, Texas.  Amongst the performers on the bill are Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Buddy Rich and Illinois Jacquet.  The Houston Music Hall is packed out with an audience of all ages and ethnicities, all sitting in together, going wild for the jazz stars.

In Houston, in 1955, this was unprecedented.  Despite the historic Brown vs Board of Education ruling the previous year, which overturned the farcical ‘separate but equal’ Plessy vs Ferguson ruling of 1896, which the southern states of the US used as justification for segregating blacks and whites in all areas of public life, Houston was still a divided city.  The concert took place nine years before the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Johnson, effectively ending legal segregation, and fourteen years before the Texas State Legislature enacted its own desegregation laws, in 1969.

Mixed race audiences had been enjoying jazz concerts together for some time in a few cities in the North, where segregation, although not legally sanctioned was in de facto operation in most areas of society.  The 1955 JATP gig is widely recognised as the first desegregated concert in Houston.  Granz, who saw the potential of jazz to advance the cause of civil rights, had hired the venue and knew he had such an attractive line-up that he could dictate his terms.  He insisted that the “White” and “Negro” signs be removed from the toilets.  Tickets were sold on a first-come-first-served basis, regardless of colour, and there were no advance sales, preventing anyone from block-booking seats and allocating them to whites only.  Some white audience members objected to being seated next to blacks – Granz gave them their money back and asked them to leave.

L-R: Ella Fitzgerald, her assistant Georgiana Henry,
Illinois Jaquet and Dizzy Gillespie at Houston Police Station.

The concert was an undisputable success, but the spectre of Jim Crow was not completely absent from the auditorium that night.  Undercover Vice Squad members managed to get backstage and raided Ella Fitzgerald’s dressing room, arresting several of the stars for gambling as they were playing a private craps game.  Granz paid a $10 bond and they were released from prison in time for the second show, with audiences none the wiser.  There were a number of reporters at the police station that night, and although it was humiliating for the stars, the Houston Police Department didn’t come off too well in the press that followed.

The audiences that major black jazz musicians attracted, from across the social spectrum, helped break down barriers between communities in the USA, from the 1920s onwards.  Music has often been ahead of its time when it comes to social change.  With its roots in the music of slaves brought from Africa to North America, jazz music was intrinsically entwined with the struggle for equality, but its popularity amongst a wide range of people brought integration to its audiences before many other areas of society.

American folk music also played a key role in the civil rights movement, as well as in anti-Vietnam War protests in the US.  In Eastern Europe, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania, traditional folk music was used as a form of defiance against the Soviet puppet governments.  It’s not always the obvious political songs and artists that spark the significant transformations.  Sometimes, the simple act of bringing a crowd together for a shared musical experience can be potent enough to push forward new social agendas.  Few jazz songs and pieces were explicitly about the civil rights movement.  It’s the grassroots music, the music in our souls, that moves us and lets us share a common bond with those around us, that is the most powerful.

So don’t despair about today’s pop musicians.  They may not appear to be singing protest songs, but their music is shaping the minds of a generation of young people.  With the advent of the internet and the availability of recording equipment, the music scene has changed radically in the last decade, but we should not doubt the power of music to unify, and to be ahead of its time.  The musicians who took to the stage in Houston, way back in 1955, came to play good music, not to change the world.  Yet good music is, whether it knows it or not, one of the first steps towards that goal.

Merry Christmas, folks!

Of Assassinations, Faith and Intrigue

“President Kennedy was shot by two CIA agents, one in the Texas School Book Depository and the other on the grassy knoll.  I believe that Jack Ruby was acting under the misinformation that the Mafia was behind the assassination and that he received help from Dallas police officers.  I believe that the CIA wanted Kennedy dead because they blamed him for not backing up the anti-Castro Cuban rebels.”

Thus concluded my ten page school project on the assassination of JFK.  For a while when I was fifteen I was more than a little obsessed with Kennedy’s death, reading and watching everything available and convincing myself that the whole thing was a massive conspiracy on the part of the US government.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s death, there has been a litany of articles, blogs and documentaries dissecting the unanswered questions about that fateful day in Dallas.  How many shots were fired?  Where were they fired from?  Who was the man on the grassy knoll?  Why was the open-topped presidential motorcade travelling below the prescribed speed?  Was Kennedy’s brain removed from his body before it was buried, and if so, where is it now?  Why were there frames removed from the Zapruder home movie?  What motivation would a nightclub owner with ties to the mob have to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald before he could stand trial?  Why did the 500-plus page Warren Commission report have no index?

As a historian, a lot of my research has, both willingly and grudgingly, involved debunking popular intrigue about historical events.  There is no evidence that Margaret Thatcher ordered the sinking of the retreating General Belgrano during the Falklands War.  The moon landing wasn’t faked.  And it would seem overwhelmingly likely that one troubled young man on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The confluence of circumstances on 22 November 1963 make a compelling case for conspiracy – a young Democratic president, who had defused the Cuban Missile Crisis but had blundered in the Bay of Pigs, who was pushing forward Civil Rights legislation and cracking down on organised crime, who had a beautiful wife and a young family, had been gunned down in his prime.  Though he had his enemies, Kennedy was a popular President, at home and abroad, emblematic of a new era of hope in global politics, and to many it was impossible to believe that one man acting alone could end his life so suddenly.  How could one ordinary citizen with a mail-order rifle be responsible for killing the most powerful politician in the world?  Rather than accept this sobering fact, it has become easier, more comforting even, to imagine that it was all the work of a web of shadowy characters behind the scenes of power.  To accept this theory is to refute the unpredictable nature of the assassin’s bullet.

Human beings love conspiracies.  They fill the pages of airport thrillers, pack the television schedules and make fantastic films.  JFK’s assassination was itself given the Hollywood makeover by Oliver Stone in 1991, which only fanned the conspiracist flames.  We have a particular predilection to deny the existence of random acts of madness or, even more so, tragic accidents.  It’s the reason why so many people cling to the idea that Princess Diana’s death was orchestrated by the British Royal family.  When coupled with the legends that develop around them, bound up with the mysterious draw of ‘what might have been’, the deaths of popular figures come to be seen as momentous events which can only have happened for a reason.

The majority of humans love to embrace faith – “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” - whether it be in religion, conspiracy theories or in the unshakeable dependability of our heroes.  The alternative is to accept that there is no more to life than that which we see in front of us.  For me, it’s the existence of extra-terrestrial life.  I’m fairly convinced that aliens haven’t made contact with Earth (though open to persuasion!), but like Fox Mulder, I want to believe they exist out there somewhere, and that we aren’t alone in the universe.

We feed on stories like Snowden’s NSA leaks because we like to think that our governments are hiding things from us.  They must be, because there has to be a reason why our lives aren’t quite as good as we’d like them to be.  There has to be someone to blame; someone pulling the strings, keeping us in the dark.  Hey, if we’re living in the Matrix, that would explain why we don’t feel as fulfilled or happy or earn as much money as we’d like.  Unfortunately, this theory discounts another significant human trait – our inability to keep secrets.  As we have daily evidence, secrets leak.  To quote The West Wing’s CJ Cregg, “there is no group of people this large in the world that can keep a secret.  I find it comforting.  It's how I know for sure that the government isn't covering up aliens in New Mexico.”  Disappointingly, what may appear to be mysterious anomalies that could only be the result of a complex plot just waiting to be exposed by a plucky maverick can almost always be attributed to miscalculations, misinterpretation and, sometimes, simple, foolish mistakes.  Never underestimate the ability of your government to bungle.

Even when the archives are opened and we have definitive answers about the Kennedy assassination, there are people who won’t believe them.  It’s harder than you’d think to shake a person’s faith.  And what about me?  Have I outgrown my teenage notions of CIA cover-ups and double agents?  The rational part of my brain would like to think so, but there’s a bit of my fifteen-year-old self inside who still clings onto the hope that the conspiracy will one day be revealed.

“Little did I dream you could be so reckless and cruel”: Surveillance and the Abuse of Power

McCarthy and assistant Roy Cohn during the hearings

On 9 June 1954, in a packed Senate Caucus Room in Washington, D.C., televised live to 80 million Americans, a historic subcommittee hearing was reaching its climax.  Senator Joseph McCarthy was taking his anti-communist crusade to the United States Army.  Beginning on 17 April, the hearings had been broadcast in their entirety, and, 30 days in, a now famous exchange took place between McCarthy and Army special counsel Joseph Welch.  McCarthy, who had been revealed as a crude bully, repeatedly shouting “point of order” to cut off people when he didn’t like what they had to say, irrelevantly revealed that a member Welch’s staff had been a member of the National Lawyers’ Guild, the only lawyers willing to defend those accused of being communists during the period.  Welch responded by calling McCarthy “reckless and cruel”, asking “have you no sense of decency, sir?” Welch’s response was met with cheers from the gallery.

Though they concluded no wrongdoing on his part, the Army-McCarthy hearings are widely perceived to mark the beginning of Joe McCarthy’s downfall.  The junior Senator from Wisconsin had first come to prominence in February 1950, when he made a speech in which he claimed to have the names of numerous individuals in the State Department “who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party.”[1]  McCarthy’s claim made headlines, and despite a Senate Committee concluding that none of the names on McCarthy’s list had links with the communist party, he became a household name in America.  Having assumed the chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953, McCarthy was able to widen the target of his attacks, holding 169 hearings throughout 1953 and 1954.  Taking on the US Army proved to be a step too far, however.  Following the Army hearings, McCarthy was censured by the Senate in December 1954 and in January 1955 lost his position as the Subcommittee chair.  His influence declined from this point onwards until his death in 1957.

Surveillance by official bodies is by no means a 21^st century phenomenon.  Whilst McCarthy leant his name to the age of McCarthyism, his activities constituted only a fraction of the anti-communist movement in the US, which had begun in the 1940s.  As World War II ended and the Cold War began, the communist threat posed by the Soviet Union, and subsequently China, to the American way of life became a major concern for the US government.  The prominent convictions of Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs on espionage charges served only to fuel the American people’s paranoia.  In the name of protecting the US from this threat, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the FBI, under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, conducted widespread surveillance of US citizens and thousands were added to blacklists which ended their careers.

There are no longer reds under the beds.  Nowadays the bogeyman is not the communist but the terrorist.  Contrary to the popular view of McCarthyism, many of those accused were, or had been, members of the Communist Party.  Many had links to the Soviet Union.  Whether or not they can be deemed to be ‘innocent’ victims depends on your view of communism.  In advocating the overthrow of the government, communists would doubtless argue that their actions are intended for the betterment of mankind.  Doubtless fundamentalist terrorists would argue this too.  The crucial difference for the average citizen is that terrorism directly threatens their lives and communism does not.  There are a large number of people in the UK who probably feel that not voting for the Tories was their contribution to the betterment of mankind.  Does that give the government the right to label them a subversive threat and monitor their communications?

The leaks about the NSA PRISM programme released over the last month have stirred up arguments about the right to privacy and the nature of surveillance carried out by the government.  On the surface it would seem reasonable to argue that openness can only be good for a society, if it prevents more expenses scandals, regulatory body cover-ups and police smear campaigns.  Openness is the key to combatting corruption.  As McCarthyism teaches us, we enter dubious moral territory when those in power are left to their own devices to decide who constitutes a threat to the government.

On the other hand, we understandably rely on our governments to keep us safe.  In his defence of PRISM, Obama argued that we “can’t have a hundred per cent security and also then have a hundred per cent privacy and zero inconvenience”, and maybe he’s right.  I want to be safe.  And I know that terrorists of all guises couldn't care less about me as an individual, and my views on privacy, when they take a bomb onto the London Underground or fly a plane into a skyscraper.  It would be fantastic if there was no requirement for security services, but the fact remains that there are people out there who want to kill, indiscriminately, as many others as possible.  Some level of surveillance is necessary and the intelligence services cannot protect us if our enemies know exactly how they are doing it.

I am undecided as to whether Edward Snowden is a champion of civil liberties or simply a nobody seeking notoriety.  Everybody likes a guy who knows a secret and despite our apparent outrage we have an insatiable appetite for government conspiracy theories.  But, traitor or not, Snowden’s actions have certainly highlighted the need for serious debate on this topic.

If there is a lesson to be taken away from all this it is that our privacy laws are outdated and desperately need reviewing in order to catch up with developments in electronic communication.  To say that we should not expect anything on the internet to be private ignores the fact that huge portions of our lives are lived online nowadays, from banking, to shopping, to passport applications.  We would not expect our post to be intercepted and read and our electronic communications should be treated with the same respect.  There is a difference between that which we choose to make public, our Twitter posts for example, and those communications (emails, text messages) which are intended for specific recipients.  The law has not caught up with technology and it badly needs to.  Unfettered, warrantless access to our emails, internet browsing history and mobile phone records is completely disproportionate.  Under existing legislation in the UK the police can demand communications data for terror and serious crime suspects, and these powers have been widely used already.  Judicial oversight can be given to accessing electronic communications without compromising our security, in the same way a search warrant can be obtained to enter a suspect’s house.

I am more than happy for my government to develop the tools to keep me safe from terrorists in the cyber age, but as the excesses of McCarthyism demonstrate, the abuse of power is not purely the purview of totalitarian states.  This is a universal truth that can be transposed from phone tapping in the 1950s to email hacking in the 2010s.  The solution is an urgent review of legislation accompanied by robust regulation; terrorists will not be defeated by the creation of a police state.  Sending back the McCarran Security Act in 1950 (a veto which would be overridden by Congress), President Truman wrote that “we will destroy all that we seek to preserve, if we sacrifice the liberties of our citizens in a misguided attempt to achieve national security.”[2]  The leaders of the ‘free world’ should take note.

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[1] Ellen Schrecker, The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, (Bedford, 2002), p.240.

[2] Ibid., p.220.

Ripples of Hope: The Legacy of Robert F. Kennedy

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

     -  Robert F. Kennedy, “Day of Affirmation”, University of

      Cape Town, South Africa, 6 June 1966.

The starkest depiction of unfulfilled potential can be found in the simple, unadorned results of the 1968 California Democratic Primary:

                Senator Robert F. Kennedy                         Senator Eugene J. McCarthy[1]

                                46.3%                                                                    41.8%

Just hours after the results were announced on 4 June, Bobby Kennedy’s path to the Democratic nomination and the White House was cut tragically short when he was shot in the head by a mentally disturbed young man in the kitchens of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.  After hours of surgery by top neurosurgeons, Kennedy succumbed to his wounds and passed away in the early hours of 6 June 1968; forty-five years ago last Thursday.

This November marks the fiftieth anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.  Doubtless much will be written about that fateful day in Dallas, which has captured the imagination of conspiracy theorists around the world.  A young liberal President cut down in his prime, with so much work left undone and so many questions unanswered – the man on the grassy knoll, the sixth floor of the Texas School Book depository; the assassin silenced before he could stand trial; who and why?  In contrast, Bobby’s assassination was a cut and dried affair.  The assassin was a 24-year-old Jordanian immigrant who was arrested, convicted and is still serving a life sentence today.  And yet, for its effect on the course of US politics and the disintegration of American society, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination is unquestionably the more significant of the two.

Born in 1925, Robert Francis Kennedy was the seventh of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children, eight years younger than John and born after four girls.  Bobby’s affluent and privileged upbringing was dominated by two currents - the sense of determination possessed and encouraged by his father and the strong moral character instilled by his mother.  Like his mother, Bobby was a more observant Catholic than his brothers, which shaped his sense of right and wrong throughout his political career.  He married young, to Ethel Skakel, and the couple had eleven children; Bobby was an affectionate father to them all, save his youngest daughter whose birth he did not live to see.  After graduating from Harvard and gaining a law degree from the University of Virginia, Bobby worked as an attorney in the Department of Justice, but advancement of his brother’s career was always his main concern.  Bobby ran both JFK’s successful senate campaign in 1952 and his presidential campaign 1960 and was appointed Attorney General shortly after President Kennedy took office.  He became his brother’s closest confidant in the White House, and his foremost advisor on both domestic and foreign policy.

The seeds had been sown during his time as Attorney General, but it was after the assassination of his brother that Bobby came into his own, as a politician and a man.  After a period of indecision and mourning, Bobby shunned a quiet life and, in 1964, took the opportunity to run for the vacant New York Senate seat, which he won.  As the decade progressed, RFK became the champion of the grassroots left wing, a passionate advocate of African American civil rights and the leading critic of President Lyndon Johnson’s escalating military campaign in Vietnam.  RFK was young and a charismatic orator, who was able to speak to and for the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised.  He used his unique position and reputation to exert influence far beyond that of the average junior Senator.  His speeches drew large audiences and his words inspired.  His entry into the 1968 presidential race galvanised minority groups and created an atmosphere of optimism across the United States.  His death, at the age of forty-two, was a crushing blow to those who saw in him a better future, at home and abroad.

RFK had not always been a champion of the causes he came to be associated with.  When JFK first took office, Bobby had hoped that the race relation issues in the US could be brushed under the carpet to allow his brother to concentrate on the Cold War and stopping the spread of communism.  As he became acquainted with the plight of African Americans, his views began to change.  In June 1963, RFK faced off against Alabama Governor George Wallace and called in the National Guard to escort the first black students to the State University.  Following the incident, RFK was the only member of the cabinet to recommend that President Kennedy send a civil rights bill to Congress, which would eventually become the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

RFK came to be most prominently associated with the anti-war movement during the sixties, which gathered momentum as the decade went on.  His acrimonious relationship with President Johnson had originated in their clashes during the 1960 presidential campaign and had worsened during JFK’s time in office.  The press made much of the feud, which was only heightened by Kennedy’s criticism of Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War.  Although uneasy about the direction the war was taking, Kennedy was inspired in his opposition to the conflict by correspondence with pacifists, academics, veterans and even officers serving in Saigon.  In linking the war in Vietnam with the US-backed action in the Dominican Republic, Kennedy was among the first to question US foreign policy and the country’s right to impose its will upon other nations.  “Can we ordain to ourselves the awful majesty of God,” he asked, in a speech at Kansas State University in March 1968, “to decide what cities and villages are to be destroyed, who will live and who will die, who will join refugees wandering in a desert of our own creation?”[2]

Bobby Kennedy’s strength lay in allowing others to shape the causes he fought for.  He saw suffering and used his privileged position to do all he could to right it, combining political acumen with a strong sense of morality.  Speaking in South Africa in 1966, where apartheid would not be ended for another twenty-five years, Kennedy told his audience: “We must recognise the full human equality of all of our people – before God, before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this, not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not because of the laws of God command it, although they do; not because people in other lands wish it so.  We must do it for the single and fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.”[3]

Words are easy to manipulate and speeches are easy to give.  Many on the left of American politics in the 1960s felt that RFK was exploiting minorities to use as foot soldiers in his campaign; that he would abandon them and head for the middle ground if he took office.  But Robert Kennedy had substance as well as style.  He embodied both traditional values of integrity and steadfastness as well as the progressive thinking required to address the growing social divisions in 1960s America.  He promoted women’s rights and was among the first politicians to emphasise the need to conserve the environment.  He advocated for the poor – working-class whites, African Americans, Latinos and young people – uniting them in a vibrant grassroots coalition; impressive in a decade characterised by its divisiveness.[4]  Kennedy gave them a figurehead - a politician they could trust, who understood their problems and had a plan to fix them.  He was not afraid to go and meet the people he was representing; to speak to them and find out what they needed and wanted for their communities.  He made himself accessible to the voters; his hands were bloodied and scratched from people’s desire to get close to him during his presidential campaign.

Historians cannot deal in hypotheticals.  We are also supposed to avoid romanticising historical figures.  But there are some so truly significant that we can allow ourselves this indulgence.  It is impossible to say for certain what a Robert F. Kennedy presidency would have looked like.  Perhaps, despite his forward momentum in winning the California primary, he would not have secured the Democratic nomination.  If he had gained the nomination, perhaps he would not have won the election.  What is certain is that the Democratic National Convention descended into chaos in Kennedy’s absence, with rioting in the streets, and that Richard Nixon won the general election, comfortably beating Vice President Hubert Humphrey.  With the solitary exception of Jimmy Carter’s single term, the Democrats would not be back in the White House for over two decades.  The war in Vietnam continued to escalate, until the US pulled out and left South Vietnam to the communists in 1975.  Fifteen years and hundreds of thousands of senseless deaths had not, as RFK had predicted, prevented what the US had been seeking to deter.  Race relations deteriorated further in the 1970s, fuelled by Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” of exploiting white racism to reinstate the South as a Republican stronghold.

Had Robert F. Kennedy lived, whether or not he had been elected President, the United States would have been taken in a very different direction.  There is no doubt that Kennedy and the alliance of progressive social movements he embodied would have been challenging the Republicans every step of the way.  He was a politician who recognised that reaching down to help others up was not merely a political expedience but a moral imperative, fighting for justice with a perfect balance of humility and tenacity.  “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago,” Kennedy proposed, speaking after Martin Luther King’s assassination, just months before his own death; “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”[5]  We should take the time on this sobering anniversary, in an age of sleaze and scandal, to be inspired by his words to lend a voice to those who do not have one and to remember a man who used the privileges he was born with to try and leave a better world than the one he entered.

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[1] http://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=36010 – Accessed 29.05.2013

[2] Robert F. Kennedy, “Ending the War in Vietnam”, Kansas State University, 18 March 1968.

[3] Robert F. Kennedy, “Day of Affirmation”, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 6 June 1966.

[4] Joseph A. Palermo, “In His Own Right: the Political Odyssey of Robert F. Kennedy” (New York, 2003), p.257.

[5] Robert F. Kennedy, “On the Death of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”, Indianapolis, Indiana, 4 April 1968.