I, nine years old, was
inspired by a candidate;
Bobby Kennedy
Cori MacNaughton
I was raised by parents who were politically active and engaged, and regularly had political discussions around the dinner table, during which my sisters and I were expected to listen quietly, though we were encouraged to ask questions when we didn't understand something. Mostly we listened.
My first real memory that I can firmly place in time was my fourth birthday, which I remember as being quite tense; not a typical memory for a four year old. My mom had always told me that her marriage to my dad started going south when I was around two, so I put it down to tension between them, which seemed logical enough.
Years later, I was watching the video of the film "Thirteen Days" with my husband, and there it was, as they counted down the days: October 26, 1962. My fourth birthday. Smack in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Small wonder it was tense.
My next clear memory that I can place in time was the death of President John F. Kennedy. My first inkling was when I came into the living room from our back yard, and saw my mother crying, though she maintained from that day forward that she was not crying. All I can say is that she was stricken. I remember her crying.
She told me that the president had been shot and killed. That was one of the things I always loved about my parents; when it came to matters of importance, they didn't bullshit us because we were kids, they told us what was happening. I had just turned five, and certainly didn't understand the ramifications at that point, but we had had pets for years. I understood what dead meant.
And, like most of America, and much of the world, we were watching together as a family when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed on live television, blessedly in our case, in black and white. That incident I remember more from being told about it later, which I put down to seeing it on TV; even as a kid, I knew that most of what we saw on TV was pretend, and in that case, I didn't immediately register the import of the act. But the rest of my family sure did.
My next memories, along with the rest of America, were of JFK's funeral, which seemed to last a year, and I remember feeling so sorry for Jacqueline Kennedy and her kids.
I felt doubly sorry years later, when I realized that young Caroline Kennedy was suffering through her father's state funeral just two days before her own sixth birthday. What a terrible memory to have to carry forward.
And it seemed only natural that Johnson would not only serve out the remainder of the presidential term, and then run for reelection.
But I remember a conversation between my grandmother, Ouida, and her mother, Abbie one day. Abbie, my great-grandmother, was a second or third cousin or thereabouts of LBJ, and though they didn't know one another well, they saw one another at family reunions. And she did not like the man one bit.
The only time she said anything about him to me, after I asked her directly, was "He is not a good man," and then she clammed up and would say nothing further. But I always though it was an interesting thing to say about the then-president of the United States.
By the time of the 1968 presidential campaign, I was more aware and interested, particularly because I found myself at odds with the rest of the family. My parents were supporting Vice President Hubert Humphrey, after Lyndon Johnson pulled out of the campaign. My sister Clare was supporting Eugene McCarthy, who had a far more liberal and (for the time) radical approach, and she was convinced he would save the day.
Interestingly, although I know I discussed it with her, I don't recall who my sister Carol supported, which may mean that she was still undecided, or was keeping it to herself. Or it may be simply my faulty memory.
But I didn't have much faith in Johnson, and I wasn't convinced by McCarthy either. The man who inspired me, and made me wish that I was old enough to vote, was Robert F. Kennedy, who had been the principal speechwriter for his brother, President John F. Kennedy, and struck me as having the ideas, and the will to carry them out, that we needed as a country.
And while I certainly didn't have an adult perspective at the time, at nine years of age I was reading at a twelfth grade level, so I understood more than an average nine year old would have. And, for me, Kennedy was my guy. I wanted him to win.
Kennedy's earlier career was far more mainstream than he would later become. Aligned to large degree with Cold War liberals such as Humphrey, Kennedy came into his own as attorney general during his brother's presidency.
He and his brother, working together, found their voice and their cause, to bring America back to the people, to make the system work for all Americans, not just the wealthy and well-connected.
The speech above is still one of the finest speeches ever given by a presidential candidate, in seeking to change the direction of a country that had lost its moral way, to create a more equal footing allowing all Americans to prosper and move the country forward, and to foster peace and end the neverending tides of war and strife.
This, still today, fifty years later, is the kind of candidate I wish we had the opportunity to vote for; a candidate with the integrity to put the needs of the many ahead of the few.
On 4 June 1968, Bobby Kennedy won the important California primary, and attended a celebration in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel. After delivering his victory speech, he had planned to join another group celebrating in a different part of the hotel, but his campaign manager decided that he should forego it.
As he was led through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, shots rang out as Sirhan Sirhan fired eight shots from a .22 caliber pistol. Three shots hit Kennedy. Sirhan Sirhan was firing wildly, and five other people were injured.
News crews, who had just recorded his speech, captured audio of the shooting, and according to numerous forensic experts, thirteen shots were fired; not the eight rounds carried by the gun Sirhan Sirhan was using. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, L.A. County's Medical Examiner at the time, nicknamed by the press the "Coroner to the Stars," corroborated this possibility.
For myself, at nine years of age, having already remotely witnessed the assassination of our president, and the murder of his purported killer, this was a far more personal death to me, as I had had great hopes inspired by Bobby Kennedy, in whom I saw what I wished to see in all of our elected officials, and I took his murder in my hometown of Los Angeles as a personal affront.
This quote, fromWikipedia, sums it up quite well:
"Kennedy's assassination was a blow to the optimism for a brighter future that his campaign brought for many Americans who lived through the turbulent 1960s.[92][93] Juan Romero, the busboy who shook hands with Kennedy right before he was shot, later said, "It made me realize that no matter how much hope you have it can be taken away in a second."[94]
"Jack Newfield, a reporter that had been traveling with the campaign, expressed his feelings on the effect of the assassination, closing his memoir on Kennedy with:
"'Now I realized what makes our generation unique, what defines us apart from those who came before the hopeful winter of 1961, and those who came after the murderous spring of 1968. We are the first generation that learned from experience, in our innocent twenties, that things were not really getting better, that we shall not overcome. We felt, by the time we reached thirty, that we had already glimpsed the most compassionate leaders our nation could produce, and they had all been assassinated. And from this time forward, things would get worse: our best political leaders were part of memory now, not hope.
'The stone was at the bottom of the hill and we were all alone.[95]'"
I was in my teens when I was first made aware that the "official story" of John F. Kennedy's assassination was unlikely in the extreme, and borders on complete fantasy.
In 1979, when I was twenty, the first and only congressional investigation into the assassination agreed, calling it a probable conspiracy.
In the 1990s, my then-husband and I watched the BBC production, "The Men Who Killed Kennedy," and were struck in particular with a segment in which former president Gerald Ford, who I believe was at the time the last remaining member of the Warren Commission, that decided (against all available evidence) that Oswald acted alone.
When he was asked, on camera, whether the Warren Commission Report was accurate, he hemmed and hawed, and stammered that yes, it as accurate.
I looked at Michael, he looked at me, and we said, almost in unison, "He's lying." Which is why Ford's presidency couldn't manage a re-election. He sucked at lying. He was basically an honest guy. Can't have that in a president.
In 2001, following my father's death, at his request I had his ashes interred near his mother and father, in a cemetery in Honey Grove, Texas, "The Sweetest Town in Texas," where he was born.
Before we returned home to Florida, my then-husband Michael and I, accompanied by my mother, visited Dealey Plaza in Dallas. By the time we left there, we were firm in our shared opinions that the Warren Commission was a complete whitewash, and bore zero resemblance to the truth of what had really happened.
So who killed Bobby Kennedy? Sirhan Sirhan . . . and unnamed player(s). I don't pretend to know. But, as in JFK's assassination, too many bullets were caught on audiotape for it to have been a single gunman.
What I do know, with no hesitation or doubt, is that We the People, of American and the world, were robbed. Repeatedly. (In the order that they occur to me . . . )
John F.Kennedy
Martin Luther King
Robert F. Kennedy
Medgar Evans
Malcolm X
Four little girls
Countless others
I should note that, Tom Lehrer, in one of my favorite albums, which I believe was "That Was the Year That Was," noted that on the first day of National Brotherhood Week, Malcolm X was killed. The universe and God, as I have noted before, is not without a sense of twisted humor and irony.
Interesting that in the version that I learned, "Lena Horne and Sheriff Clarke are dancing cheek to cheek," so, as always, he adjusted his lyrics to his audience.
I love and miss you, Tom Lehrer, and you had more influence than you probably ever knew.
He is still alive, but, alas, retired. We need you now more than ever before, and having said that, please ignore me and enjoy your retirement to the fullest.
Unless of course you choose to comment. And many of us are listening. just in case.
And I would love to hear your take in the comments.
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All words are my own.
The videos are the property of the American people, who are those Robert F. Kennedy was speaking to at the time, and anyone aside from the Kennedy family members trying to usurp that right, are bogus. Completely.
RIP to John Fitzgerald Knnedy. Dr. Matin Luther King. Robert Francis Kennedy. You are all still missed.
The photo of our dog, Lolo, and our late cat, Miod, I took as they were cooperatively begging at the dinner table, despite our longstanding rule of not feeding them from the table. You can see how much that deterred them both.
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