Just a day-and-a-few (28-some) hours over 50 years ago (U.S. and N.Z.-time), a political star/'icon' of the day brightly exploded/thus met his untimely end...gunned down in his prime, like his famous brother, by an assassin's bullet: budding 1968 presidential prospect, the youthful New York Senator Robert Kennedy. And, as they say, the rest is - now rather ancient - history. To near-universal regret.
My own (with hindsight's sweet benefit) 'regret' is related: I oftentimes muse - if only my parents'd moved to NZ a decade(-and-a-half) later - I'd (alongside my four (immediate) siblings) have grown up in the U S of A during the exciting, tumultuous, idealistic era of the sixties (through mid-later seventies)...long before the rot (of cynicism and all the rest) truly set in to the Western body politic. But such was not to be...
Few figures in Westerndom have strode on and off history's stage quite like the American Kennedy brothers. In my mind at least, towering head and shoulders above either (President) 'JFK' or (long-serving U S Senator) 'Ted' Kennedy was (U S Senator) 'Bobby' Kennedy...John Fitzgerald Kennedy's erstwhile Attorney-General and one-time McCarthy Communist Senatorial Trials' committee member.
'As fate would have/so decree it', his assassination occurred just as he had handily won the Californian Democratic Primary and was about to proceed to Chicago for the party convention, a venue which - in his (unforeseen) absence - featured such notorious, strife-torn division, even pandemonium that it thereafter became synonymous with, a veritable byword for political hari-kari.
The supreme irony, of course, was that Robert Kennedy had pretty well wrapped up his party's presidential nomination, was virtually a shoo-in over the sitting, increasingly unpopular President Lyndon Baines Johnson - *provided, that was, that LBJ decided to put his name forward. And so, 'all things being equal', RFK would've unceremoniously scooped up the Democratic nomination, and, everything else being likewise equal, could and should well have, in all likelihood, gone on to score a crushing landslide victory over (the presumptive Republican Party nominee) Richard Milhaus Nixon in November, 1968.
But alas, as we all now know, it was not to be. And thus America, and indeed people worldwide, was/were to suffer a great disappointment - following on, thick and fast, from those already engendered by the assassinations of Civil Rights Leader Martin Luther King only two months earlier, and just over four-and-a-half years before that, of Bobby's own brother President John F Kennedy. (A) loss(es) that would reverberate, in its/their repercussions - however unbeknownst to them - literally for decades, at least forty-some years on into the future; until the election, in fact, of a man - Barack Hussein Obama - who, in his historic election in 2008, combined the essence of MLK('s once-marginalized blackness) and RFK('s message of hope and change).
So full marks to Stephen Sackur - he of BBC World Radio Hardtalk fame - for an excellent, extended (non-sound-bitten) programme (broadcast twice over the past week on New Zealand's RNZ National), a show which dealt intelligently and thoughtfully, even reflectively, with the sheer complexities and nuances of this natural leader. Yes, RFK was a person described (therein) - despite his infamous bucked-teeth (somewhat cheesy) grin - as having been probably America's most savvy (uncynical) political operator of his day (in all the best, pre-realpolitik traditions of that term).
Whose untimely death, therefore - by anyone's measure - was a political tragedy of the first order. For if one politician - other than JFK, that is - and Nelson Mandela, who strode across the global political stage in this past half-century, were seen as/to be the very embodiment of the triumph of idealism over cynicism and 'realpolitik'/political pragmatism, surely it'd have to (have) be(en) Robert F Kennedy.
So, whatever other (oft-cited) character flaws the Kennedy 'boys'/brothers' Dad undoubtedly possessed, 'Joe' Kennedy certainly knew what he was doing in successfully grooming three pre-eminent presidential prospects for America's #1 position of political leadership. One (JFK) was, however briefly; another (**'Ted') was a distinct 'wannabe'; and RFK no doubt would have been. All (potential) heirs of what's subsequently become known as America's own 'Camelot' dynasty.
Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy represented all that is good - with this caveat: in the sanctified human psyche/soul - and his assassination, only weeks after that of America's great spiritual mentor, even latter-day prophet, Martin Luther King, prematurely closed what had been an incredibly promising chapter in American and world history. Which, as I say, both the USA and our global village has never really recovered from, though the election of America's first black president, Barack Obama, did, for awhile, seem to - briefly, and ultimately deceptively - give real promise of (rebirthing). Yes, Obama's book title and campaign slogan, 'the audacity of hope', surely revived such dreams of 'Camelot', if selfsame hopes and dreams as quickly faded out in the mists of the realpolitik of our day.
Yes, Robert Kennedy, you lived what you believed - with every last fibre of your being - and ultimately died for that utopian vision. According to Mr Sackur's report, those who caught a glimpse of your dying face saw it as like that of a god dying. And indeed perhaps you were - notwithstanding your own brand of confused, mixed-up humanity and 'naive' idealism and 'polyanna'-ish optimism - next to Martin Luther King, as close to such as we will ever be privileged to encounter.
May it never be said, or rather asked (in)credulously, and rhetorically: 'Can any good thing ever come out of (modern-day) America?' Such most definitely did, but the land could not abide it, or them, and so it finished them off upon that/those fateful day/s in the 60s, especially upon April 4th and June 6th, 1968. They were men too good for their generation, or, as the beloved apostle John put matters about an altogether more Divine One millennia earlier:
And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.
Yes, God would have saved that generation, and fully intended to do just so - through His very own, divinely-appointed and anointed instruments - but they were men 'of whom the world was not worthy'. Indeed!
Rest in peace, RFK, we may/will no doubt never see your like again...and for that our world is immeasurably poorer...and may ultimately, and sooner rather than later, suffer irretrievable, utter ruin and catastrophe, even Armageddon... . Yes, America, 'your LORD' would've saved you, but you were not willing...Behold, your house is left to you desolate!
*Evidently LBJ had already decided not to put his name forward (just a couple months earlier).
**Long an admirer of Senator Ted Kennedy's distinguished, 40-some year, Senate record, following renewed reference (c/o a recently-released movie) as to the specifics of the infamous Chappaquiddick incident (in which Kennedy's girlfriend died), I'm finding it increasingly difficult to defend him - though (even just from personal experience, apart from anything else) I'm increasingly aware of how the truth is oftentimes entirely different from what it generally appears. Hence, second-guessing how we would have acted in a particular situation usually presents us in a much more favourable light than reality might have seen, and moreover judges another for stuff that may in fact not have been the way things truly panned out in the particular circumstances. Nevertheless, if said film presents stuff as it really transpired, then Ted K was apparently every bit the rogue persona in which many - such as my late Dad - thenceforth viewed him.
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