The assassination of Robert Kennedy during the 1968 election campaign still haunts the US political memory, writes Richard Aldous.
THE New York Times described it as the worst day of Hillary Clinton's political career. With her campaign for the Democratic nomination in ruins, Clinton thrashed around wildly last May looking for reasons to stay in the race against Barack Obama. She vowed that her campaign would go on at least into the following month. After all, she told reporters, "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June". Outrage followed. "We have seen an X-ray of a very dark soul," wrote Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News. "One consumed by raw ambition to where the possible assassination of an opponent is something to ponder in a strategic way." The assassination of Senator Robert F Kennedy during the 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination still haunts the American political memory, not least in a year when the United States has its first genuine opportunity to choose an African-American as commander-in-chief.
Forty-five years after the assassination of President John F Kennedy and 40 years after that of RFK, the Kennedys remain the First Family of metropolitan America. Their triumphs and tragedies are news worldwide. When Senator Edward Kennedy - brother of JFK and RFK - put his support behind Obama, it signalled a shift by the Democratic establishment away from the Clintons. The affirmation by Caroline Kennedy - JFK's only remaining living child - that Obama would be "a president like my father" seemed to many like an anointing. She now is one of two vetters helping Obama choose his vice-presidential nominee.
Back in the late 1980s, the Kennedys' in-house historian, Arthur Schlesinger jnr, wrote in an introduction to Robert Kennedy: In His Own Words: "Soon the dam will break, as it broke . . . in the 1960s. Sometime we can expect a breakthrough into a new and generous epoch in American life. When that time comes, the Kennedy ideals will no longer seem so exotic." For Obama, the latest hopeful, that yearning to find the true heir to John F Kennedy provides a direct link to Bobby Kennedy, the first on whose shoulders that heavy mantle settled.
The assassination of his older brother in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963 devastated Robert Kennedy. He had idolised "Jack" as a boy and never really lost his sense of devotion. After Dallas, his main feeling aside from loss, and in spite of a natural disposition towards arrogance, was one of deep unworthiness. How could he possibly live up to his brother's legacy? These doubts would resurface during his stirring campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1968, a story told with great verve and dramatic skill by Thurston Clarke in his enthralling book, The Last Campaign.
Clarke - a prominent New York intellectual - is a clear admirer of RFK. "The hope that Robert Kennedy offered was specific: that Americans' belief in their integrity and decency could be restored," he writes in his introduction. "His assassination on June 5, eighty-two days after he had announced his candidacy, represented not just the death of another Kennedy or of a promising young leader, but the death of this hope."
Yet Robert Kennedy has always appeared a less engaging politician and personality than his presidential brother. There was a grace, warmth and intellectual fluidity about JFK that often seemed missing in his more remote brother. Clarke, for all his admiration, does not try to conceal a deeply flawed individual. Bobby emerges in these pages as a hysteric, frequently in tears or flying off into temper tantrums. He was physically and emotionally fragile, and pathologically fearful (with good reason as it turned out) of a violent death. On the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated, April 4th, 1968, Kennedy burst into the room of a startled aide, pulling her onto the bed, tearfully wailing "It could have been me".
Added to a brittle temperament were questions about Kennedy's political nerve. He despised his brother's successor, President Lyndon Johnson, not least for the way in which he was conducting the war in Vietnam. Yet in 1967 and early 1968 Kennedy had calculated that there was too much to be lost by challenging a sitting president. Instead, an anti-war senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, was left to take on Johnson, running him extremely close in New Hampshire's bell-weather Democratic primary. Four days later, on March 16th, 1968, Kennedy declared his candidacy. Even supporters were troubled by the naked opportunism in so brazenly denying McCarthy the rewards that should have flowed from his courage in striking the first blow.
In Clarke's assured hands, the campaign becomes the story of a personal and political coming of age. RFK in March 1968 was a slightly nerdy, unstable and delicate character, albeit with obvious talent and charisma. What the campaign process gave him was authority. As we've seen this year, one of the defining characteristics of American politics is the brutal attrition of the primary season - a punishing audition for the role as commander-in-chief of the world's number one power. Robert Kennedy was pushed to his limits and then exceeded them during 82 days of campaigning, most famously when announcing the death of Martin Luther King to a predominantly African-American crowd in Memphis. The result, Clarke persuasively argues, was the transformation of a candidate into a credible prospective president.
RFK was shot and killed in Los Angeles on June 5th, following victory in the crucial California primary. "The most shocking thing about Robert Kennedy's assassination was that no one was shocked, including Kennedy," writes Clarke.
BUT WHO KILLED RFK? That question is at the heart of a work on the "unsolved murder of Robert F Kennedy" by Shane O'Sullivan, an Irish-born documentary filmmaker. To anyone familiar with even the bare details of the assassination, that question might seem redundant. Bobby Kennedy was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a young Palestinian whose private notebooks were later found to contain entries such as "RFK must die. RFK must be killed. Robert F Kennedy must be assassinated". An open and shut case then. But there's no such thing with the Kennedys, whether it's John F Kennedy's "grassy knoll", or the thousand different theories that purport to explain the death of JFK jnr.
O'Sullivan's theory in Who Killed Bobby? is that the death of RFK was not the work of a lone, demented gunman. Instead it was the result of an assassination plot. His argument, in a nutshell, is that Sirhan was "programmed", probably by the CIA, to kill Kennedy, and that there was a second assassin whose presence was covered up by CIA agents at the scene.
Historians in general tend to subscribe to "cock up" rather than "conspiracy" theories. After all, "stuff happens". O'Sullivan recognises this attitude in readers and so takes a patient approach to his task. At 500-plus pages, this is a long book. But O'Sullivan has calculated that while a slick telling might entertain, it will not convince. Rather, like a mathematician showing his workings, he gives us all the painstaking detail. And, as in a "police procedural" crime novel, so the evidence begins to mount. For 40 years, Sirhan has consistently denied any memory whatsoever of killing Kennedy. New audio footage suggests the shots came too close together to have been fired from one gun. Archival releases about the CIA's MKULTRA programme make talk of "programming" seem less ridiculous. And so it goes on. O'Sullivan's understated tone adds plausibility to the argument. He may or may not be right, but this is a serious attempt to raise important questions about Kennedy's death.
Meanwhile, Sirhan Sirhan remains in the high-security wing of a California prison with little hope of parole. Whether or not he was part of a CIA conspiracy, one simple fact is incontestable: he delivered on his promise that "RFK must die". The assassination and that of President Kennedy remain deeply rooted in the American political psyche.
No wonder we all hold our breath whenever Barack Obama steps out on stage.
Richard Aldous is head of history and archives at UCD. His recent books include The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli and Great Irish Speeches
The Last Campaign: Robert F Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America, By Thurston Clarke, Henry Holt, 321pp, $25
Who Killed Bobby? The Unsolved Murder of Robert F Kennedy, By Shane O'Sullivan, Union Square Press, 551pp, $24.95