Robert F. Kennedy

The New York Times reports that the Kennedy family is debating Robert F. Kennedy's presence at the John F. Kennedy Library, which may not in perpetuity possess the former Attorney General's papers without some careful maneuvering. Robert Kennedy's son, Joseph Kennedy II, gets some juicy lines in--he's quoted deriding family members' attempts to appease Robert F. Kennedy's descendents in a building devoted to John and Edward Kennedy: "They offered to put the name on a hallway."

Robert F. Kennedy's children are currently having their father's newly opened papers analyzed by Sotheby's, which the Times hastens to indicate is not a sign that they'll be sold; it may be so that the papers can be charitably donated. While the Robert F. branch of the Kennedys pondered donating the papers to George Washington University in the last decade, may we suggest something in the state  Kennedy represented in Congress--New York?

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Fusco spent the next eight hours (measured out in something like 60 rolls of film) photographing the crowds. A book of photos from that day, Paul Fusco: RFK, was recently republished by Aperture. On Friday, the Observer had a chance to speak to Mr. Fusco at a talk and book signing at the National Arts Club.

What was it like that day?

"I was on the train thinking about how I was going to photograph the funeral, ‘How can I maneuver a good shot?'" Mr. Fusco said. "The first thing I saw was the thousands of mourners out of the tunnel. My reaction was ‘Photograph it.' I jumped up and walked across to the window, opened it, stood there for eight hours and didn't move."

Forty-years later, it seems clear that Fusco caught a cross-section of America that day, in a kind of national vigil. Kids sit raised on their parents' shoulders, trying to catch a glimpse of the great man as he passes by. Whites and blacks stand peaceably together in a rare (that year) moment of calm. Some of the photographed are seen holding their hands over their hearts. Others salute. One woman holds up a homemade sign: ‘SO-LONG BOBBY."

Fusco had to work fast that day. Giving the speed of the train, the photographer had only one chance per photo, and no chance to adjust the camera's focus. He took over 2,000 shots, and it may be that the best image, according to Fusco, is one he nearly botched: a family of five, lined up by size along the tracks, that he could barely fit inside the frame. You can view a selection of Fusco's photos from that day in 1968 at his website.

That poem concludes ''Let America be America again''—and there was a powerful sense of that possibility in the remarks delivered by Kerry, her brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former President Bill Clinton, and M.T.A. chairman Lee Sander.

Especially moving were the comments of Gov. David Paterson, who spoke of Sen. Kennedy as his boyhood hero. Both he and Hizzoner evoked Jack Newfield, the late journalist who was a close Kennedy friend (and whose memoir of their friendship remains one of the best books about R.F.K.).

President Clinton received a warm welcome from the Kennedys, many of whom had supported Barack Obama in the primary against his wife. He asked that New Yorkers pause to think of R.F.K. and the meaning of his life ''whenever we cross this bridge, for the rest of our lives.''

The ceremony ended with the governor presenting the bill that renamed the bridge to Ethel Kennedy, and an antique car procession that inaugurated the R.F.K. Bridge.

As one of millions inspired by him, I was moved and honored to be present for this great moment. Robert Kennedy has deserved a monument for 40 years. The symbolism of this choice, at this moment—a bridge that put thousands to work during the worst years of the Great Depression—could not be more appropriate.

In discussing the fiscal crisis, Bloomberg said the city is obligated to balance its budget each year and cannot hold onto surpluses because it’s prohibited from creating a rainy-day fund.

Gambling said, “That doesn’t make much sense, does it?" Bloomberg said it does because funds like that usually lead to more spending by the government, not less.

Asked about legal challenged to his plan to rescind the $400 rebate for homeowners, Bloomberg said, “We’ll never get to that because we’ll come up with something,” indicating, as Lew Fidler said yesterday, that this whole thing may be a negotiating tactic. Bloomberg said he’d be “happy” to send out the checks if there were another source of revenue.

Towards the end of the interview, a caller asked the mayor why, during a fiscal crisis, officials spending $4 million to rename the Triborough Bridge after Robert F. Kennedy. Bloomberg said the city is only spending about $100,000--the rest is being paid for by the state.

“While $4 million is nothing to sneeze at,” if the state’s deficit is $12 billion, “saving $4 million is not going to make much of a difference, although every little bit helps.”

Bloomberg went on to say that some of the signs with the bridge’s old name had to be replaced anyway.

After Hillary Clinton's May 24 interview with the editorial board of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader in which she referenced Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, from Bloomberg News:

For a people whom Tocqueville described as living eternally in the future, we Americans do quite a lot of remembering. Eight weeks ago, it was Martin Luther King Jr., who has been gone longer than he was alive. Now we enter the season of remembrance for a former New York senator, Robert F. Kennedy, a season made all the more poignant by the depressing news that the Liberal Lion, Ted Kennedy, is suddenly and unexpectedly a lion in winter.

R.F.K.’s busy life ended on June 6, 1968; barely, it seemed, after eulogizing King with one of the most arresting (and spontaneous) speeches in American history. It feels safe to say that no one else in American public life would have quoted Aeschylus’ Agamemnon to an angry black crowd on the day that King was killed. It also seems, with the insight that time has brought, that Kennedy was trebly reflective that night in Indianapolis, thinking about his assassinated brother, about M.L.K. and perhaps even about his own demise, which many of his friends felt to be imminent. The verses he chose that evening still help as we try to make sense of the void left by this most unusual politician:

“Against our will” may be the key phrase, aptly summing up the awkwardness and ultimate valor of Robert Kennedy’s run for the presidency in 1968. The gambit faced enormous obstacles from the start, including R.F.K.’s early ambivalence and the challenge of running against several challengers, in different locales, with little advance warning. It lasted a mere 82 days—hardly any time at all measured by the Homeric contest joining Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—but it brought out such good qualities in the candidate and the country that it simply refuses to expire. As long as Americans feel unrepresented by their representatives—in other words, forever—the Kennedy campaign of 1968 will endure as example of how, in the candidate’s own words, we can do better.

A GOOD NEW book—along with a splashy cover story in Vanity Fair—brings it all back home. One could fairly question the assumption that a new book is needed, for we have no shortage of commentary about the campaign. Even before he ran, there were books predicting that he would; then there was the race itself and all the press coverage; and then a flood of retrospective books after it came to an abrupt end in a kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Many are excellent, including touching memoirs by reporters who covered the campaign (David Halberstam, Jules Witcover), and broader canvases painted by friends and aides closer to the man himself (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., William vanden Heuvel, Jean Stein and George Plimpton). A spate of recent biographies has added to the pile, and yet the need to understand persists, not only because of the candidate’s magnetism but because so many of the questions about America he dared to ask that spring remain unanswered.

Thurston Clarke has written about the Kennedys before (a good study of J.F.K.’s Inaugural Address), and brings familiarity and efficiency to the task. Unlike many R.F.K. books, The Last Campaign has comparatively little on his early life and his long service at the side of his older brother. That’s a shame, because the start of his career was so arrestingly different from his candidacy, but the advantage is that we move very quickly into the race itself, with its roller-coaster swerves and lurches. Mr. Clarke advances at a sprightly pace, has a keen eye for detail and captures not only the externals but the fascinating inner dynamics of the contest.

Paradoxes were not hard to find in 1968, beginning with a photogenic candidate who could be terribly shy, a man of courage who waited too long to enter the race, and a critic of violence who plunged into crowds again and again, seemingly courting disaster.

As Mr. Clarke reminds us, it was anything but a coronation. When he returned to Washington from his first campaign trip, he found no one at the airport to greet him, and joked “even my driver has deserted me.” Sometimes he had to remind his audiences to clap, and at the beginning, he struggled against verbal miscues (he asked the people of Kansas to work for him in their “villages and hamlets”) and serious shortages (his aides were forced to hand out leftover buttons from his Senate races).

Those were the good problems. The more serious ones included the vitriolic hatred he aroused, both within and without the Democratic party he was trying to lead. Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover did all they could to undermine him; establishment politicians and newspaper owners taunted him for his youth and his long hair (a headline in the Indianapolis Star: “Unfit, Unshorn, Unwanted”). Hate mail poured in from both the right (outraged by his criticism of the Vietnam War) and the left (furious that he was not moving faster). A major drama of the book lies in the growing dread—fanned by quotations from friends, rivals and the candidate himself—that a nameless assassin was lurking in the throngs. “I’m afraid there are guns between me and the White House,” he told an aide. Yet his indifference to danger, and his electric connection with the huge numbers of people who came out to see and touch him, was essential to his appeal.

Given these challenges, it’s understandable that he began to move in unconventional directions, ignoring the normal rules of politics to devise new sorts of events, a sort of “jazz politics” with improvised remarks, self-mocking jokes, long sessions with crowds, and extensive Q&A sessions everywhere he went. Ever the contrarian, he would articulate angry black concerns to angry white audiences, and vice versa. Amazingly, he appealed to both, drawing in George Wallace supporters as well as Black Panthers. He would go hundreds of miles away from where the votes were to court Native Americans on reservations; children and elderly in ghettos; and remote rural Americans who’ve barely seen a presidential candidate since. He flouted an essential rule in American politics (never quote a French philosopher under any circumstances), citing Camus and Sartre with reckless abandon, and then immersing himself again in the crowd. Has there ever been a greater existentialist?

Mr. Clarke captures this transformation with skill, showing R.F.K. emerging, page by page, into a brilliant and utterly iconoclastic politician over those short months on the trail. Though his anguish over Dallas never left him—and may have explained his desire to taunt danger—Mr. Clarke argues, persuasively, that R.F.K. was a completely different kind of Kennedy, willing to say things and go places that his more carefully scripted brother never would have.

Conservative Indiana turned out to be the crucible for these growing talents. Kennedy campaigned well and won 10 of its 11 districts. From that character test, he grew stronger, and despite a setback in Oregon, he seemed poised to win the nomination with a victory in the California primary. That he was killed at this supreme moment of vindication, for so little reason, still comes as a plot twist so outrageously unacceptable that Shakespeare wouldn’t have dared inflict it on his public.

Hauntingly, he had predicted, just before his victory, that “Los Angeles is my Resurrection City.”

The religious wording almost fits—for as he wandered deeply into the invisible parts of America that lay below the poverty line, he began to seem like someone out of a medieval pilgrim’s tale, part Christian mendicant, part Greek philosopher. Just as J.F.K. had loved Camelot, so R.F.K. loved Man of La Mancha, and throughout this book there’s a sense of the quixotic journey, and the beautiful world that might have come into existence if the pilgrimage had reached a better terminus. One witness cites the “phantom presidency” that all of R.F.K.’s staff identified with, like the memory of an amputated limb, long after his assassination.

R.F.K. WOULD SURELY have resisted the tendency to idealize him. As Aeschylus wrote, “know not to revere human things too much.” It remains unclear—despite several tantalizing crumbs that Mr. Clarke leaves in the reader’s path—that he would have won the nomination at Chicago without the support of the ultra-superdelegate, Mayor Richard Daley. Even if he’d won, it’s naïve to assume that any presidency would have been successful at the end of the 1960s, though it’s hard to imagine one that would have turned out worse than Richard Nixon’s.

The unfinished feeling behind this story of a work eternally in progress is what leaves so many readers and voters wanting to know more about Robert Kennedy. It was a feeling that profoundly animated the Clinton White House, especially near the end, as new initiatives were designed to support the same people Kennedy had reached out to. It still animates the supporters of both Democratic candidates (a rare point of convergence), for R.F.K. can be plausibly argued to be in the camp of either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, depending on whether one is talking about his appeal to black voters, rural voters, Appalachians—or the simple fact that he was a New York Senator running against two other Senators. Her remark was unfortunate, but a candidate with a famous last name, accused of ruthlessness, running against most of the party and the media establishment, with the support of blue collar voters and other outliers—that’s vintage R.F.K.

Of course, 2008 is not 1968 (thank God). But still, that revolutionary moment lives on in powerful ways, often when we least expect it. The same day that the news hit about Ted Kennedy, a small story ran in the Bloomberg News that the town of Greenwich, Conn., had been presented with an application to build a personal residence with a 12-car garage and 26 toilets. Sometimes it’s not so difficult to understand why Americans remain fascinated with Robert Kennedy.

Ted Widmer, director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, was a speechwriter for President Clinton from 1997 to 2001. His new book, Ark of the Liberties: America and the World (Hill and Wang), will be published in July. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Her comment: "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it."

The Boston Globe has a semi-sensational “appears to raise the specter” lead.

The Times plays it as something more routine, which Clinton almost certainly intended it to be.

The Obama campaign is not going with the charitable interpretation, apparently. Spokesman Bill Burton issued a statement saying that Clinton’s comments were “unfortunate” and have “no place in this campaign.”

Before Pamela Anderson, Rob Lowe, and Paris Hilton paved the way for sex tapes, apparently, there was a black and white video of Marilyn Monroe performing oral sex, which just sold to "a New York businessman" for $1.5 million, The New York Post reports.

The silent, 15-minute reel of 16 mm footage "appears" to have been shot in the 50's and shows Ms. Monroe performing the act on an unidentified man, who for a long time the F.B.I. tried to prove was John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy.

In the tape, Ms. Monroe is on her knees and never looks at the lens, while the man’s face is out of the shot, according to the Post.

A “confidential informant” supplied the original tape to the F.B.I. in the 60's, which to this day remains classified.

The tape that was sold was a copy inherited by the informant’s son.

If everyone involved in this tale is telling the truth, you'll never see the footage: the businessman who bought it, according to the broker on the deal, said "I'm not going to make a Paris Hilton out of her. I'm not going to sell it, out of respect."

Then there’s Barack Obama.

His keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention instantly earned him a reputation as one of the Democratic Party’s great contemporary orators. And that reputation has only been further hyped since the beginning of the presidential campaign, most recently because of the wildly popular music video, “Yes We Can,” which set to music Obama’s primary night speech in New Hampshire. The video, created by Black Eyed Peas front man will.i.am, was released on Feb. 2 and has been viewed almost 10 million times on YouTube and yeswecansong.com.

Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, thinks the most distinctive thing about Obama’s speeches isn’t the delivery, but the lyricism in the writing.

“You can take a short phrase like that, spoken any kind of way as long as it’s not dragged out, and sing over it,” he said. “There’s also a certain amount of repetition — the ‘Yes We Can’ theme — that allows this kind of weaving of vocal lines. But if that’s right, then what’s really musical about that speech was not so much its delivery, but its composition. It was written like a song, but not performed like a song.”

Linguist Geoff Nunberg, too, sees elements of Obama’s speeches that he says lend themselves to song.

“He does these parallel constructions,” said Nunberg, a researcher at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information. “For example, he says, ‘It’s not because of this, it’s not because of that.’”

In a Jan. 20 New York Times story, Obama’s head speechwriter, 26-year-old Jon Favreau, said when writing speeches for Obama, he draws inspiration from John Kennedy, King and Robert F. Kennedy, suggesting, again, that Obama’s reputation as a master speechmaker owes a large debt to the simple act of borrowing devices from great public speakers of the past.

But Nunberg said there’s more to it than the writing.

“He’s mastered a certain cadence that’s very effective,” said Nunberg. “He turns to the right to make his first point with a rise, then he turns to his left with a fall to close.”

Nunberg said these engaging cadences are similar to those of Dr. King.

Though the movement helps hold the audience’s attention, too much movement, Nunberg said, can convey a lack of control. Obama, he said, has been able to balance the extremes like Kennedy.

When Obama is speaking, Nunberg said, his arms move, but his body orientation does not change. Also, he doesn’t let his arms get too far away from his body and he keeps his hands closed, instead of open. “He’s very cool in a sense that Kennedy was cool,” Nunberg said. “His gesture and his posture are controlled.”

Another similarity Obama has with Kennedy is his limited pitch range, which enables him to “convey passion without exhibiting it,” Nunberg said.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, raises her pitch noticeably when trying to draw a response from her crowd. Also, she bobs her head and she “has a way with her eyeballs to signal a kind of exclamation point,” Nunberg explained.

But, he added, Clinton is much better in smaller settings, like debates, where the candidates are improvising. She goes straight to the answer, while Obama often starts his sentences one way, and restarts them with different structure.

Nunberg suggested that much of the excitement Obama has been able to generate in large gatherings has had to do with voters attending his events with the idea that he will deliver excitement.

“If you come with the idea or hope of being engaged, or sufficient numbers of people come with the hope of being engaged, it is engaging,” he said.

Liberman said, “There’s no silver bullet. I don’t think the answer is something so superficial as sentence structure, intonation, that kind of stuff. You couldn’t say if you adapted his style then you would be successful.

“I wish I could say otherwise, because then I could go into business as a political consultant.”