Bobby: Fact, Fiction and In-Between
Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Emilio Estevez's film "Bobby" has gone nationwide, recalling a time nearly forty years ago when hope was crushed by another assassin's bullet.
Critics seem divided as to its merits, and one shortcoming seems to be that its characters see Bobby Kennedy only in heroic terms. This picture you see is done by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and originally debuted as the cover of Time magazine the week before Bobby's death which the film portrays. "They pronounce his boyish name with fear and derision or else with adoration and awe. To many enemies, he is more his father's son than his brother's brother." I suppose Estevez can be forgiven for not mentioning that other Bobby, but his film would have been even better if it had ackowledged him. Let's face it, during his lifetime, Robert Kennedy was widely seen as his brother's hatchet man, and the word "ruthless" followed him everywhere. By 1968, when he died, though, he had grown. Pat Moynihan said of him, "Much has been given him and taken from him in life, and somehow he has been enlarged by both experiences." Although Bobby (RFK) has won the California primary on the day of his death, he had also just concluded a slugfest with Senator Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic presidential nomination where the result had hardly been pre-ordained. Kennedy had had to fight McCarthy across the entire nation. That's what's so poignant about Estevez's film. When Kennedy triumphantly claimed victory here in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel, he had settled the issue of who would be the anti-war candidate at the upcoming Democratic convention. Then he was murdered. He was 42 years old, even younger than his brother when he was murdered five years earlier. Back then, I was living in Oregon where only the week before Kennedy had lost the Oregon primary to McCarthy. It was the first election any Kennedy had lost since their family got into politics. Kennedy desperately needed a win in California to get the momentum needed to take out Vice-President Hubert Humphrey at the Chicago convention that summer. Our family supported McCarthy, but we liked Kennedy a great deal, too. It was a tough choice. I remember seeing him speak in the auditorium at Hillsboro High School right before the election. He was three hours late but we waited because he was a rock star quality politician. Anyway, Oregon is in the same time zone as California, so it was just after midnight when my dad came and woke me up. "Kennedy's been shot in California," he said. We went downstairs and watched the TV for news and kept up the vigil until he succumbed to his wounds the next day. This issue, of course, is dominated by news of the murder. The lead article begins, "Once again, the flags slid down to half-staff." They also noted: "In the last few years, Bobby had emerged dramatically from the shade of his murdered brother. He became increasingly concerned with the quality of of U.S. life in general, and in particular with the plight of the poor and the downtrodden, black and white alike." That's probably why he lost Oregon. It was not a hugely diverse state population back then and the simple passion of McCarthy's anti-war crusade played better in a place where there were no huge urban cities. On the Table of Contents page, they usually would have a short piece of writing setting up the pieces to follow. In this issue, they broke with their form and printed a long excerpt from a speech ("Ripple of Hope") RFK had given on June 6, 1966 in South Africa. That was exactly two years to the day before he was murdered and now, in 2006, we celebrate that speech's 40th anniversary. Here it is, as they presented it: "Each time a man stands 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, these ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road that history has marked out for us. Like it or not, we live in times of danger and uncertainty. But they are more open to the creative energy of men than any other time in history. The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the ideas and great enterprises of American society." Maybe our politicians today should consider those words and take them to heart. There is an entire web-site devoted to this speech and you can even download it and listen to it. Check it out. Here is the full speech, by the way, that Robert Kennedy delivered only two months before his own death. It was given the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot. I loved the complexity that RFK brought to the scene. A decade ago, on the NBC series "Dark Skies", my partner Brent Friedman and I made Bobby a continuing character who had aided our main character John Loengard in getting proof of the Roswell UFO crash to his brother, shortly before his own assassination. In our twisted historical romp, Bobby was running for President in 1968 largely to finish the business of telling the American people about the alien invasion. He was played in four episodes by the wonderful actor James Kelly who had also played him in a TV movie. I know, I know. Putting Bobby into a sci-fi film is completely insane. The sad part of the story, though, is that we felt like it was okay to play this historical subversion because both JFK and RFK had been gone so long from the scene that they had slid into that zone where they were iconic characters who could be used in literature. Like Lincoln, gone so long that novelists are hardly afraid to use him in their literature. Which brings me back to Emilio Estevez's "Bobby." His RFK is no more or less a prop in his film than mine was in that TV series. It doesn't make it good or bad. Estevez is simply making a point about 1968 and the dulling of hope it represented and Bobby is his muse. Robert Kennedy might still be alive today had he not been shot. He would have been 81 years old. My own father lived that long. {To read more of these posts about journalism as the first draft of history, CLICK HERE to go the "Instant History" blog.}
Bobby Kennedy was a pop star as Lichtenstein portrayed him, but he was more complicated than that, too. As Time noted in that last article before his death -- "The Politics of Restoration" -- 
I've always loved this Newsweek cover about RFK's death ("Once Again...Once Again," June 17, 1968). The photo, taken by Phil MacMullan, captures not only Bobby Kennedy's more soulful, empathetic side but also how the ghost of his brother and that previous assassination hung over him. If you CLICK on this cover, you can see it in even better detail.
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