Anti-war and otherwise mildly political youth though I was as the crucial American election of 1968 approached, I was still never a Bobby Kennedy man.
I mean, yes, I was also 12, and unable to cast a vote, but there are still some things the non-voters could do. I was all in for Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy for president as the best candidate to get us out of Vietnam. A towering intellect, a genuine poet, not just riding on the (tragic, soon to be more so) family coattails — Clean Gene was my man.
More on that in a minute.
I am also not a Bobby Kennedy Jr. man. Used to be — all of us should be impressed with his great work for the environment in his long quest to clean up the polluted Hudson River.
But for president, as he says he wants to be? An eccentric old rich kid who is absurdly, anti-scientifically an anti-vaxxer in the fight against deadly COVID-19? He’s apparently also against vaccinations for polio, diptheria and whooping cough. He is a will-o-the-wisp who got caught up in the nonsense about the “freedom” to get to catch and spread horrific disease.
On the foreign-policy front, RFK Jr. is also — again absurdly — a Russian appeaser in that dictatorship’s insane, world-endangering war on Ukraine.
How did the son of a great American — RFK Sr. was certainly that, and would have been an excellent, world-changing president if he hadn’t been assassinated; I just preferred McCarthy in the California primary — become such a Trumpian kook?
Don’t know. But something’s gone horribly wrong in his psyche and with his reasoning skills, and no sane American should vote for him. He makes Joe Biden look like a Mt. Rushmore candidate in comparison.
And more on that in a minute.
Because it is my childhood memory of working, in some small way, to help Gene McCarthy become president that is the best way to share what I believe was wrong with the arrogant part of the Kennedy mystique, then and now.
My family used to spend a lot of time up in Los Altos as my sister and I were growing up in the 1960s, bunking with the family of my mother’s dear friends Mary Jane and Jack Moffat, parents of my two oldest friends, Pete and Mike Moffat. They had moved away from our Southern California neighborhood when I was 6 when Caltech engineer Jack started a tech business in what would soon become Silicon Valley. Rather than simply promising to stay in touch, we actually did, and still do: Pete and Mike and I fish and surf together all around California every year, 60 years on.
One spring day before the 1968 California presidential primary — this seems unreal, but it’s true — the three of us boys trundled a red Radio Flyer wagon down to the Los Altos HQ of the Gene McCarthy for president campaign and said we wanted to help out. The volunteers loaded up the wagon with fliers and sent us out to hawk our wares. We set up shop on a median of the Foothill Expressway, the big street that went north up to the Stanford University campus, and passed out our propaganda to motorists stopped at the light. It went all right.
When we were almost done for the day — and this is an image I will never forget — a dapper young man who I assumed to be a Stanford undergrad, driving a red Alfa Romeo Spider convertible, passed by us and called out, “No! Bobby Kennedy for president!”
His taunt, however mild and all in good fun, or perhaps simply what his fancy sports car represented, seemed to me even as a child to distill in it all the casually moneyed privilege that was such a part of the Kennedy New England aristocratic brand. Bobby Kennedy had in fact been the original preferred choice of many anti-war Democrats hoping to take down what seemed the inevitable re-election of President Lyndon Johnson. He actually was Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s first choice, too. The Minnesota senator had been among the leaders of the peace wing of the Democratic Party who originally encouraged the enormously charismatic RFK to challenge Johnson in the 1968 primaries.
But Kennedy declined to get into the race. McCarthy himself did so instead as the peace candidate. And on March 12, 1968, the obscure Midwestern former economics professor startled the nation by getting 42% of the vote to Johnson’s 49% in the New Hampshire primary. It so shocked the sitting president, who saw that his nomination, tainted by Vietnam, was by no means inevitable, that Johnson soon announced he would not seek another term.
And four days later, Robert Kennedy declared his own candidacy.
McCarthy’s better-organized campaign actually went on to win against Kennedy in the Wisconsin and Oregon primaries. But on June 4, Kennedy won big here in California. And as we all know, he was shot to death that night at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
That alternative universe in which Bobby Kennedy was swept to victory in November, pulled us quickly out of Vietnam and continued Johnson’s work toward civil rights for Black Americans is a better world we never got to know.Bobby Jr. as president would work to make a world we don’t want to get to know. His anti-vaccine beliefs well pre-date COVID — for almost two decades, he has promoted the entirely discredited, non-existent “links” between childhood vaccinations and autism. He buys into the conspiracy theory that those of us who believe Vladimir Putin’s invasion of sovereign Ukraine needs to be countered are part of the “last gasp” of American neoconservatives’ hawkish foreign policy views.
These are dangerous eccentricities born of the vast privilege of his inherited wealth. Let him ponder such ludicrous notions on his own, sailing on the yawl off Hyannisport, and leave the rest of us who have to live in the real world alone.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com
