The curse of tragedy that for two generations had stalked the Kennedy family struck the late Robert F. Kennedy with particular vengeance.
His war hero brother Joe, beautiful sister Kathleen and presidential brother Jack were all luminous presences in his family and life — and each was lost in turn to a horrible, unfair and premature death.
Five years after Jack’s assassination, Bobby Kennedy was finally able to step clear of JFK’s shadow and emerge as a major political figure in his own right. He had a chance not only to become president of the United States but to wield power as a far more meaningful and effective chief executive than his brother had actually been.
Then he, too, was cut down, eventually fading into memory and facing perhaps the equally cruel fate of becoming little more than a long footnote to his brother’s career and chapter in history.
But not if veteran journalist and longtime friend and adviser Jack Newfield can help it.
Newfield and collaborator Charles Stuart have created a three-part, three-hour-long documentary called “Robert F. Kennedy: A Memoir” that debuts on the Discovery Channel at 7 p.m. Sunday, 30 years after Bobby was gunned down in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen just after winning the 1968 California presidential primary.
It’s tremendously fascinating stuff, riveting to those of us whose journalistic careers included both the Kennedy years and the Kennedys. But it’s an appreciation of RFK — as the title states, a memoir. It’s not an unflinching, stone-turning, hard examination of every aspect of the man, such as JFK and the Kennedys’ chief political nemesis, Lyndon Johnson, have recently been subjected to by television.
“It’s 90 percent positive,” said Newfield, now a columnist for the New York Post, “but there are negative points. We point out that as attorney general, he wiretapped Martin Luther King and that he waited too long before deciding to run for president. The first time I saw him I was picketing him.”
Narrated in turn by actress Glenn Close, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and actor Ving Rhames, the series employs the now standard mix of talking heads and historic footage.
The former include a lot of sycophants: actress and RFK supporter Shirley MacLaine, entertainer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, historian and Kennedy groupie Arthur Schlesinger.
But more objective voices are heard as well, among them those of historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Robert Caro and newspaper columnists Jimmy Breslin and Murray Kempton.
The pictorial passages are extraordinarily evocative and compelling in their sense of immediacy, though much of the film footage is in black and white and the dress of the subjects seems of a far distant era.
There is a great deal of revelation. After JFK’s assassination, Bobby took to going about in public in one of his brother’s old overcoats. He began to talk like Jack Kennedy, and in a sense became him.
An aide recalls that, while Bobby was still attorney general in what had become the Johnson administration, he used to go to Arlington National Cemetery at night and climb over the wall to sit at his brother’s grave. “His brother’s death was the defining event of Bobby Kennedy’s life,” Newfield said.
Small and slender, always the kid brother, Bobby suffered in a family tyrannized by a rich, powerful, politically ambitious and ruthless patriarch (Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy). This contributed to his aura of vulnerability that, according to Newfield, was part of Bobby’s personal charm and appeal.
But at the same time, he developed a singular toughness.
“He was very much like his father in many ways,” Newfield said, “but he rebelled against his father. He developed this puritanical streak, which you saw when he went after the Teamsters the way he did. His father was strongly opposed to that.”
Joseph Kennedy suffered an incapacitating stroke in 1962 and President John Kennedy was slain the following year. Finding emotional and philosophical solace in the works of such stoics and existentialists as Albert Camus, RFK reached his political manhood in the years thereafter.
Much of his conduct then smacked of the calculation and ruthlessness by which their critics readily characterize the Kennedys. Though a Massachusetts man in every respect, he elbowed his way into a New York Senate seat held by a much admired liberal Republican, Kenneth Keating.
Having belittled him for years, Bobby finally broke with LBJ, but not until after Johnson made Hubert Humphrey vice president instead of him. “You had a feud, really Shakespearean in its dimension,” author Caro says in the series.
“During the presidency of Jack Kennedy, Robert Kennedy had the power, and he used it to humiliate in many instances Lyndon Johnson. Then in one instance, with the crack of a rifle in Dallas, the positions were completely reversed. Johnson had the power, and he used it the same way Robert Kennedy had used it on him.”
Bobby challenged Johnson for the presidency, but not until the quixotic Sen. Eugene McCarthy had launched his anti-war “children’s crusade” that revealed the deep national divisions over the Vietnam War and LBJ’s huge vulnerability.
McCarthy, eventually bested by RFK in the race for the 1968 Democratic nomination, declined an interview for the series.
But it was Bobby who not only admitted his and his brother’s mistake in waging the Vietnam War (and turned against it at a time when it was supported by 80 percent of the public), he became the most vocal and powerful white champion of black concerns at that crucial point in American history.
African-Americans supported him not simply with numbers but with a passion, despite LBJ’s leaking the fact that Bobby had authorized wiretaps on King.
“As he began to unfold, and as he began to make utterances and take positions,” says Belafonte in the documentary, “I began to see him as a person that was in fact very redeemable.”
At the same time, as the Northwest Indiana returns in the 1968 Indiana primary attest, he had a tremendous appeal for working-class whites. “After he was killed, those white voters turned to George Wallace,” Newfield said. “Bobby Kennedy was the only one capable of putting together that extraordinary coalition.”
Newfield is convinced RFK would have won the presidency if he hadn’t been assassinated.
“Just before he was shot, he took calls from Mayor (Richard J.) Daley in Chicago and (anti-war activist) Tom Hayden,” Newfield said. “He would have gone to the convention with the support of both Mayor Daley and Tom Hayden.”
Subsequent history, Newfield said, would have been greatly different.
“Had he lived, America might well have had a president who would have united the black and white poor into a new majority for change, begun a second war on poverty and brought peace to Vietnam several years sooner. Instead, America experienced Nixon, Watergate, Agnew, Kent State and Cambodia.”
As it is, Newfield thinks RFK should be accorded a part of U.S. history as an important political figure, and fears that otherwise he will “become a blur with his brother.”
“He should be remembered as a historic figure,” Newfield said. “The tragedy is, he never got the chance.”
