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The Redwood Coast Review
Summer 2008
editor’s note
Summer of 68: What I learned from Bobby Kennedy
Stephen Kessler
The Redwood Coast
Review
Stephen Kessler
Editor
Barbara L. Baer
Daniel Barth
Daniela Hurezanu
Jonah Raskin
Contributing Editors
Linda Bennett
Production Director
T he R edwood C oast R eview is published
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clyde Keller
T
ed Kennedy’s brain tumor is the
same kind that killed my father, and
the doctor who did the surgery on my
dad was one of the team of neurosurgeons
called in to try to save Robert Kennedy’s
life the night he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan
in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel.
That now-lost LA landmark had other
primal associations for me—taking a date
to see the Kingston Trio at the Cocoanut
Grove in my junior year of high school, or
being introduced to Willie Mays in one of
its cottages where a friend and I were taken
by someone who knew someone who knew
the great Mays and had arranged a brief
meeting when the Giants were in town to
play the Dodgers. This means, according to
a certain paranoid narcissistic logic, that I’m
related by five degrees of separation to all of
the above.
Ted Kennedy, my father (whose name
was Jack), Bobby Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan,
the Kingston Trio, Willie Mays—these are
just a few of the more emblematic dramatis
personae of my 1960s-addled imagination,
whose 40-year flashbacks have been set off
by this year’s many historic commemorations. My father left this world on July 19,
1983. Willie Mays is still with us at the
age of 77, but his greatest plays—the clutch
home runs, the amazing catches, the stolen
bases, the dead-on throws from center field,
the completely poetic grace of his moves,
the ebullience of his style—are long gone,
like the boy I was who witnessed them in
awe. Most difficult to accept, still, four
decades later, Robert Kennedy was taken in
his prime at a time when the United States,
and I personally, needed him most.
In mid-July of 1968 I had just graduated
from college, and had returned to California from the East Coast to go to graduate
school at UC Santa Cruz in the fall. I had
arranged with friends in Berkeley to rent
a house together for the summer, and got
there in time for the tear-gas police riots and
sexual chaos of that city in the vanguard of
antiwar and countercultural agitation. The
sense of dread, excitement and desperation
was an incoherent mix of emotions that I
Robert F. Kennedy, spring1968
don’t believe was mine exclusively. Amid
the festive protests and the militant fucking, the rock music and the revolutionary
rhetoric, the burning cities and the burning
joints—self-medication for those unable or
unwilling to deal with the darkest realities
descending on the nation, most gravely the
unending nightmare of the Vietnam War, an
unimaginable horror in the distance which
invaded the culture pervasively spreading
its poisons—amid all this, it was hell to be
young and about to enter what was supposed
to be the real world.
Staying as stoned as possible in a
Berkeley at its most berserk, at a time
when I might have been looking ahead to a
budding adulthood and a UC Regents fellowship welcoming me into the parentally
approved respectability of an academic
career, it’s hard to remember ever being
more distressed than I was that summer.
Just a couple of months earlier, for those of
us young and liberal enough to be hopeful
that Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run
for reelection meant that Robert Kennedy
would win the presidency, it was possible to
envision the realization of our ideals in the
body politic. A Kennedy restoration meant
that what Lincoln called “the better angels
of our nature” might be mobilized to end
the war, bring the races together in mutual
respect and understanding, eradicate poverty
and invigorate the collective imagination.
Despite Bob Dylan’s admonition not to follow leaders, Bobby Kennedy was one leader
who still might inspire multitudes with a
fresh sense of the possible.
Maybe I’m getting
soft in my old age,
bitterly clinging to
a sentimental secular humanism in the
naïve belief that humanity is not a total
loss, but what better
time than the summer of a national
election to be crazy
enough to hope for
the best.
not exactly countercultural but
experimental enough to dare to do
the right thing and do it creatively.
He and many less-Establishment figures, activists who challenged the
system itself, set an example and inspired
many of those currently trying to hold the
line against the most destructive forces of
Bushism. These idealistic pragmatists in
nongovernmental organizations, human
rights groups, environmental movements,
law firms still defending the Constitution,
etc., prove that some people, sparked early
on with the fire of ideas of justice, fairness
and humane evolution, are still in the game
and refuse to be defeated even when things
look bleakest.
When I think of public figures at the
heart of the beast who’ve tried to make a
Black Swan
When I wade through
the pages of poems
poems you won’t see
those I can’t send
I learn how words subtend
so often too little too late
from one angle
in one font
I know why I can’t
delaminate my thinking
cerebral clouds
febrile flights
F
rom his early days as an attack-dog
anticommunist assistant to Joe McCarthy, Kennedy had evolved through his
brother’s assassination and subsequent
cultural upheavals of the mid-1960s into a
more humble, more moral, more visionary
politician—a man imbued with a certain
tragic wisdom—but a politician nonetheless, and that was part of his strength. He
was tough-minded about the workings of
Washington power and he seemed to think
the machinery could be put to the service of
higher purposes. The movie Bobby a couple
of years ago (not a great film but admirably
ambitious) made me cry because the news
clips of Kennedy’s speeches—especially after the murder of Martin Luther King—were
a heart-crushing reminder of the optimism
he engendered and the utter devastation of
his death.
It was too late to lose our innocence—
that had been lost less than five years before
in Dallas—but Bobby Kennedy’s murder
triggered, in me at least, a total hopelessness. It meant that there would be no political figurehead, no president with the intelligence and passion and compassion and
strategic shrewdness to lead us out of the
war and through the exciting yet also deeply
troubling confusion of a culture in turmoil.
Kennedy embodied an engaged pragmatism,
When I write to
fix stages of desire
cygnus musici
black swan
I don’t want to watch you
and see how words
feather feathers
mute music
I only want, yes,
to picture how
you you yes
glide glide glide
—David Robertson
David Robertson lives on The Sea Ranch.
This poem took first place in this year’s
Gualala Arts Creative Writing Contest.
positive difference, no one comes to mind
more readily than Robert Kennedy. I cried
in the movie about his assassination—and
afterward sat in my car in the parking lot
sobbing until I could regain composure
enough to drive—because of the sense of
tragic waste that came with his loss, and the
memory of the misery I felt that summer
when prospects for any improvement in the
public realm looked utterly grim, and the
increasing feeling in subsequent months that
there was nothing to be done to redeem this
country so we might as well just blow our
minds and kiss our asses goodbye.
F
orty years on, in the hopeful heat of another electoral season, many survivors
of 1968 are very cautious in their optimism,
knowing how suddenly the tectonic plates of
history can shift. Barack Obama’s candidacy, as some have noted, is reminiscent
of Robert Kennedy’s in its combination of
political skill, instinct, intelligence, daring,
eloquence, idealism, charisma and evident
sincerity. Obama has inspired millions of
citizens who weren’t even born in 1968 and
are perhaps more realistic than the I-havea-dreamy students and earnest hippies of
my generation. My 27-year-old daughter
and her boyfriend have told me that they
are for Obama but they don’t have illusions
about him—as some of us did about Bobby
Kennedy—as any kind of political messiah. Still, his realistic engagement with the
monumental problems of the moment, his
poise, his cool and can-do attitude suggest
the status quo may be improvable.
Oddly enough, Ted Kennedy’s illness
is also a reminder of what can be done
within and despite the system. His possible
disappearance from the Senate invokes
his near–half-century record of defending
progressive principles that makes him in
some ways a far more consequential political actor—in terms of actual accomplishment—than either of his older brothers. Ted
Kennedy, at first the least impressive of the
three, has proved himself a major mensch in
taking the best of his brothers’ legacies and
making a significant material contribution.
Whatever his character flaws, he emerges in
the end as a figure of near-heroic stature.
Robert Kennedy never had that chance.
His martyrdom makes him a noble historic
personage and someone who touched people
personally as the last, lost hope we had
of a moral recovery from a war at least as
horrific as the one now destroying Iraq and
ruining the lives of so many sent there to
fight. It is unfair to Barack Obama, even
should he be elected, to burden him with the
expectation that even an enlightened administration can effectively turn things around.
The government, the nation and the planet
are too far gone at this point to expect much
good news even in a best-case scenario.
And anyone who’s not an idiot fears the
worst—the most mentionable manifestations
of which might be, say, war with Iran or the
interminable tenure of a McCain Supreme
Court.
Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age,
bitterly clinging to a sentimental secular
humanism in the naïve belief that humanity is not a total loss, but what better time
than the summer of a national election to be
crazy enough to hope for the best, and work
to make it happen. Things are likely to get
much worse than they are before they get
better—if ever—and optimism may be the
opiate of “elitists,” but from the heights of
despair you can sometimes see in the distance something that moves you to keep on.
It’s never too late, as Kennedy suggested,
quoting Tennyson, to seek a newer world.
Stephen Kessler’s new and forthcoming
books include Burning Daylight (poems,
Littoral Press); Moving Targets: On Poets,
Poetry & Translation (essays, El León Literary Arts); and Les Ziaux/Eyeseas by Raymond Queneau (translation, with Daniela
Hurezanu, Black Widow Press). A slightly
different version of this essay appeared in
the June 4, 2008, issue of Metro Santa Cruz.