Robert F. Kennedy in the Stream of History

Terrence Edward Paupp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351492782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This assessment of the statesmanship, principles, and policies of Robert F. Kennedy places him "in the stream of history, " to assess what came before his time in political life, what happened during that time, and what happened to his legacy after his assassination. Terrence Edward Paupp evaluates the themes and issues RFK confronted, responded to, and for which he provided visionary solutions. Paupp first chronicles the influence of Franklin D. Roosevelt's legacy as a prologue to the New Frontier and Great Society. During Robert F. Kennedy's time in power-both in his brother's administration and on his own in the US Senate-he struggled with striking a balance between power and purpose. In the years after John F. Kennedy's assassination, RFK emphasized the need to unite power and purpose, national and international concerns, ideals and practice. Much of this has been ignored, Paupp argues, by what C. Wright Mills called "the power elite." In assessing RFK's statesmanship, Paupp examines his commitments to human and civil rights, which linked themes and ideals within the US to those struggles taking place outside the country. Robert F. Kennedy brought zeal and passion to these problems by discussing the moral necessity of honouring human dignity while articulating practical solutions, policies, and programs to structural injustice. His legacy remains a beacon of light, intelligence, and hope in today's world.

1
A Transformative Era

The Kennedy years constitute a transformative era in both American and world history. The choices that both JFK and RFK jointly made and the policies that they embraced during JFK’s thousand-day presidency were significant. Both John and Robert worked together to further advance the agenda and claims of the civil rights movement as well as those of the Alliance for Progress in Latin America. The diplomacy in which they engaged to avoid nuclear war with the Soviet Union over the presence of Russian missiles in Cuba came during the most threatening moment of the entire Cold War. Because they were able to resist the pressures to launch a military action against Cuba, John and Robert Kennedy saved the world from what could have become a global nuclear war in October 1962. Their success in resolving the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 led to the beginnings of détente and resulted in the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with Russia in the fall of 1963. In the tragic aftermath of the Dallas assassination of JFK in November 1963, Robert Kennedy struggled to move the United States toward a negotiated settlement of the Vietnam War in the hope that such an agreement would lead to a complete withdrawal.

In Latin American affairs, Robert sought to continue the legacy of land reform and social justice that was inaugurated in 1961 with the Alliance for Progress. In 1966, Robert made an historic journey to South Africa to speak out against the racial policies of a white-dominated apartheid government. Robert often spoke of the need to support and to pursue genuine land reform throughout the Third World, and to advance social progress in the fields of education, employment, and health care. In all of these efforts that Robert Kennedy undertook, the principles and ideals that he advanced can be seen as a thematically coherent effort to establish a “new politics,” both in the United States and throughout the world. Robert Kennedy’s various contributions in all of these fields of human endeavor can best be appreciated when viewed from the perspective that they all involved a call to action: a call to citizen involvement and participation in the life of one’s own community, and in the world community at large. Robert Kennedy’s legacy can be seen as embodying involvement in a host of struggles for justice that would ultimately combine to create a climate of change that would alter the course of world history at a pivotal historical moment.

In the ensuing pages of this book, I shall provide evidence and arguments to support the central thesis of this collection of interpretations and photos, which is this: Robert Kennedy rerouted the stream of history. In this sense, this book stands as a tribute to him as a man of conscience and action, as well as testimony to his success as a leader and visionary at a critical moment in both the life of his country and the life of his world. Therefore, this book seeks to bring a fresh perspective to his time and his personality, and to reflect on the broad nature and scope of his contributions to changing the course of human history and human thought about what is possible. His tenure in power was not merely a transitional moment. It was transformative time and, in so many ways, he was at the vital center of that transformation.

Robert Kennedy’s speeches reflect this transformative outlook; selections from them are quoted at length throughout the essays in this book. The policies that Robert Kennedy embraced continue to serve as a guiding beacon in our own time. His words and legacy remain significant in our own time because they constitute a visionary path that can serve as a way to chart a course out of our present darkness. In large measure, Robert Kennedy’s legacy has the capacity to chart a course out of the darkness of the early twenty-first century because he was a statesman and a champion of human rights in the preceding century. Many of the challenges that existed in his time have persisted into our own day and generation. We can see this reality in the traumas and tragedies of the wars of the early twenty-first century in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the US financial crisis of 2008, the evidence of America’s continuing economic and political corruption is evident in the crimes. conspiracies, and corruption that have become manifestly apparent in the linkages connecting Wall Street, Congress, and the White House. Now, more than forty years after his assassination, Robert Kennedy’s political enemies—from Wall Street to the CIA, from the military-industrial complex to various hidden, non-transparent, unaccountable, and anti-democratic centers of private power—remain in power as the political enemies of the majority of people in the world today.

It is for these reasons—and many others—that the legacy of Robert Kennedy remains as a seminal force for change and not merely a reposi tory of historical memory. As the nation’s top banks and investment firms continue a policy of massive home foreclosures on millions of Americans, under the motto of “Too Big To Fail,” it has become evident since 2008 that they are also apparently “Too Big To Jail.” Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama have refused to allow the US Department of Justice to prosecute the known individuals and parties responsible for the theft and corruption associated with the home mortgage crisis, illegal lending practices, and the catastrophic destruction of the financial lives of so many millions of innocent American citizens. In these circumstances, it is not hard to imagine how different the response would have been from Robert Kennedy—who took on organized crime, Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters Union, the abuses of the CIA, and the racist policies of the Jim Crow era in both the North and the South. Instead, the first decades of the twenty-first century have revealed an America adrift, in crisis, and virtually lacking moral leadership. Both political parties remain hostages to their Wall Street contributors; the Pentagon and CIA have continued to operate illegal wars in the Middle East; and all the while. the jobless rate and unemployment picture on the American home front continue to mirror a seemingly hopeless decline for the middle-class and those already trapped in poverty. Robert Kennedy was different. In his time, Kennedy played the role of protector of the vulnerable while prosecuting their predators. His approach to issues of war and peace, the challenges posed by political corruption and accountability, the needs and aspirations of the poor, the working class, and the excluded are all part of an enduring legacy of what a vibrant and progressive alternative to the status quo would look like in the twenty-first century.

2
The Past Is Prologue

While the Kennedy brothers emerged in the era of the late 1940s from one of the wealthiest families in America, they were still attuned to the suffering and needs of the poor, the disenfranchised, the elderly, and the young—all those vulnerable to the vagaries and injustices of life. In other words, they overcame the dichotomy between the experience of having enjoyed great personal privilege, on the one hand, and their political commitment to extend freedom, opportunity, and basic human rights to all people on the other. Their philosophy, core values, and beliefs were not premised on having achieved great wealth, nor on a desire to exclude others from achieving basic human rights and human security. Rather, we discover in the political statements and public service of both JFK and RFK a shared commitment to a more universal and ecumenical concept of “justice.”

In part, their Catholic faith supplied them with a moral grounding, for their conception of social justice differentiated them from many on Wall Street who inherited their social views from a wealthy Protestant establishment that was largely guided by a single-minded drive for profit, aptly described by what the German sociologist Max Weber identified as the “Protestant ethic and spirit of capitalism”(Diggins 1996). It also was—and is—an establishment deeply addicted to a particular version of the market economy and the centrality of corporate power that has depleted American democracy throughout the post-1945 decades, leaving in its wake a growing “democratic deficit,” greater wealth inequalities, and an erosion of America’s financial and moral foundations. During the 1940s and 1950s, and culminating in the 1960s, the United States was coming of age as an emerging global superpower. By 1961, the United States was on its way to becoming an empire that, by the late 1990s, would amass an armada of more than 750 military bases around the world. America’s establishment was increasingly becoming represented in the government by what C. Wright Mills would call “the power elite.” Yet John and Robert Kennedy did not share many of the assumptions and claims to privilege that this elite sought to exercise in the 1960s. As Attorney General of the United States, Robert found himself fighting the steel industry titans in 1962, who had violated an accord that had previously been worked out with labor and President Kennedy regarding the question of whether they could raise the price of steel by some six dollars a ton, thereby breaking a tripartite accord worked out by labor, the steel industry, and the executive branch.

The affinity that John and Robert shared with regard to labor, workers, the poor, and America’s expanding middle-class, was a genuine reflection of their own family’s struggle as immigrants from Ireland in the nineteenth century. This sensitivity to the struggles of immigrants, workers, and the poor also influenced their approach to the conduct of US foreign policy. In this sense, both JFK and RFK benefited from the influence of the historical experience of their family as Irish immigrants, insofar as it served to make them more sensitive to and aware of the struggles of oppressed peoples, and wary of the demands and claims of the European empires, beginning in the eighteenth century, progressing throughout the course of the nineteenth century, and culminating in the mid-twentieth century. By refusing to adopt the Anglo-American establishment’s self-imposed and manufactured version of the “white man’s burden,” the Kennedy brothers refuted and rejected the geopolitical logic of colonialism, imperialism, and the claims of empire. Instead of embracing the idea of empire and all of the policies that would accompany the support of such an enterprise, they took an alternative course in the stream of history. To the chagrin of the traditional Anglo-American establishment, the Kennedy brothers’ more humane and inclusive vision of global governance became evident in the early 1960s, when they purposefully sought to join in common cause with the struggles and aspirations of Third World peoples and nations to end colonial rule and imperial domination. The more humane instincts, policies, and programs adopted by John and Robert Kennedy would place them at odds with powerful bankers on Wall Street and powerful leaders in the corporate-financial world of commerce, dominated by the Rockefeller interests, J. P. Morgan interests, oil companies, the military-industrial complex, and the CIA.

In the aftermath of European imperialism, the United States had to create a new geopolitical vision for itself and for the rest of the world that would allow it to more effectively navigate the waters of the Cold War era. A new type of international politics was emerging as John F. Kennedy entered the presidency, and he would be the first of a succession of presidents who would be forced to confront this challenge. From a purely economic perspective, the early 1960s would become an era remembered for the ways in which various theories of modernization would be proposed for the Third World, relative to Western powers and corporate-driven interests. Since that time, the discipline of an emergent developmental economics came into vogue, along with such terms as “nation-building,” “humanitarian relief,” and “foreign aid.” But this aspect of the 1960s and the decades to follow is usually remembered as a period in which the West engaged in an on-going intellectual effort and enterprise that comes under the more general and all-encompassing rubric of “development” (Cullather 2010, ix). According to historian Nick Cullather, this era is often remembered as one where:

The domestic consensus behind development had always rested on a jury-rigged alliance of self-interest, strategic anxiety, and faith in the unique capacity of the United States to engineer progress…. The US standard of living, whose rise once validated Washington’s mastery of the arts of growth, staggered and then fell back under the pressure of war-induced inflation and unemployment, while the annual festival of urban rioting offered a recurring disproof of America’s claim to social advancement…. Startling revelations of the severity of domestic poverty even discredited US claims to competence in the area of basic needs. Leading a delegation to Mississippi in early 1968 to investigate segregation, Senator Robert Kennedy found himself instead answering appeals for food. Witnesses, who had come to testify on rights violations, admitted they were living on a diet of turnips. A subsequent nationwide investigation uncovered the extent of “acute hunger and malnutrition” in the world’s best-fed country…. There was no need to go to Asia to find disturbing images of starvation, one report observed; “if you will go look you will find America is a shocking place.” (Cullather 2010, 253, italics added)

In addressing the plight of American Indians on reservations, Mexican-American migrant workers in the fields of Delano and various other migrant worker camps around the nation, and African American ghetto residents trapped in chronic poverty within the various confines of America’s urban centers, Robert Kennedy found himself responding as an empathetic, compassionate national leader and global statesman who constantly sought avenues to use his leadership positions—as Attorney General of the US, US Senator from New York, and as a presidential candidate in 1968—to expose the sufferings of the excluded, the dispossessed, the marginalized. Robert Kennedy was the embodiment of a principled leader who acted out of his moral core, idealism, and a sense of commitment to the cause of human justice and humane governance at home and abroad. This is what makes his brand of statesmanship radically different from those definitions that confine the meaning of statesmanship to striking a compromise or a bargain between contending political parties and interest groups. Robert Kennedy was different. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the media and various biographical and historical accounts of the 1960s, the fact is that John and Robert Kennedy—not Lyndon Johnson—were responsible for setting a new direction for political and economic priorities and for hitting the reset button on the US national agenda. As historian Edward Schmitt has astutely noted of Robert Kennedy’s legacy: “Ultimately his most concerted antipoverty efforts in the Senate were his attempts to save or augment funding for Johnson’s existing poverty programs (most of which had their genesis in the Kennedy administration), to learn how those programs were or were not working, and to build public pressure to sustain the waning national will for the War on Poverty” (Schmitt 2010, 225, italics added). In this environment of national change, transition, and transformation, we discover that what RFK accomplished was singularly unique and remains so, right up to the present time. Again, according to historian Edward Schmitt: “By the time he ran for president, Kennedy had achieved a political rarity—an honest dialogue with racial minorities and the poor in America. What Robert Kennedy would have continued to offer, which few national politicians since have conveyed, was a sense of outrage at ‘poverty in the midst of plenty’ that would not have been easily branded a class warfare, radical, or left-wing vision” (Schmitt 2010, 228, italics added).

3
“No More Vietnams”

As students of history, JFK and RFK had formed their own opinions about British rule and abuses in Ireland, India, Africa, and Asia. They condemned French colonial policy in Algeria and the folly of France’s imperial designs on Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. When Robert Kennedy decided to give his first speech before a large audience following his brother’s assassination, it was to the Sons of St. Patrick in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on March 17, 1964. In his remarks, he directly connected Ireland’s painful history to the issue of US policy toward colonies and the struggles of the underdeveloped nations. He specifically made a linkage between an appreciation for Ireland’s historical difficulties to America’s obligation to foster economic and political independence. In doing so, he referenced the fact that everything had been changed by World War II, insofar as “the frontiers of our national security became the frontiers of the world. We found ourselves obliged to deal with the harsh facts of existence on a global basis.” He then proceeded to admit that “for the sake of our own security, we found our destiny to be closely linked with that of nations that maintained large colonial empires on which they felt their ultimate security depended. In some of the underdeveloped countries we have found our destiny linked with ruling powers or classes which hold the vast majority of their people in economic or military subjugation” (Gibson 1994, 39; Ross 1968, 430).

Having identified the Cold War fallacy of America choosing to be aligned with dictators while espousing its fidelity to human freedom and human rights, Robert proceeded to observe: “It is easy for us to believe that the imperialism of the West was infinitely preferable to the tyranny of communism. But the sullen hostility of the African and Asian colonial nations has shown us that not all hold the same view. The bloody struggles for liberty in the sands of Algeria to the steaming jungles of Indonesia and Vietnam proved that others would make the same sacrifices to throw off the yoke of imperialism today that the Irish did more than a half-century ago” (Gibson 1994, 39; Ross 1968, 430). In the speech, RFK also indicated his views on the British establishment by noting that Queen Victoria’s response to mass starvation in Ireland in 1847 had been to offer five pounds to the Society for Irish Relief. Robert also made it clear that his view had been his brother’s view as well.

In retrospect, it seems that John Kennedy’s opposition to colonialist policies may have originated in a strong identification with Ireland’s long subjugation to England. As a senator, John Kennedy was no more lenient on the French than on the English with respect to colonial policies in the Third World. One month before the fall of Dien Bien Phu, on April 6, 1954, Senator John Kennedy delivered a major address in the US Senate that condemned French actions in Vietnam—referred to in the 1950s as French Indochina—and specifically addressed the question of whether the US should act unilaterally. He said no. Kennedy indicated that he would ...