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Revisits the night Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968. With an incredible ensemble cast portraying fictionalized characters from a cross-section of America, the film follows 22 individuals who are all at the hotel for different purposes but share the common thread of anticipating Kennedy’s arrival at the primary election night party
Bobby' the Movie Doesn't Show Bobby the Man: Andrew Ferguson
By Andrew Ferguson
The historian Todd Gitlin once wrote that with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, "a promise of redemption not only passed out of American politics, it passed out of ourselves.''
If only!
Gitlin's overcooked sentiment perfectly expresses what another historian, Ronald Steel, calls "The Bobby Myth,'' the gauzy lens through which many -- too many -- Americans view President John F. Kennedy's brother who served as attorney general, New York senator, and, in the epochal year 1968, a pied- piper presidential candidate.
The new movie "Bobby'', directed by Emilio Estevez, proves that the dream will never die, just as Kennedy worshippers have always warned. Yet anyone who surveys Kennedy's career can't help but wonder why.
In fairness to the makers of "Bobby,'' the movie doesn't claim to be an assessment of Kennedy's life. Kennedy himself is seen only fleetingly in fuzzy old film clips.
Instead "Bobby'' tells the story of June 4, 1968, by tracing the humdrum doings of a couple of dozen people at Los Angeles's Ambassador Hotel, where Kennedy's campaign was celebrating its victory in the California presidential primary and where, after a triumphant speech, Kennedy was shot.
The truncation makes it easier for the moviemakers to feed off the myth since it passes over the unseemly facts that might subvert Kennedy's status as an icon for progressives, as liberals call themselves these days.
Not a Liberal
He was, for starters, never much of a liberal. His first public job, in the early 1950s, was as assistant to Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had already established himself as the country's premier anti-Communist and red-baiter.
When Kennedy, fresh from law school, failed to land a job as McCarthy's chief counsel, he happily took a lesser position on the same committee, so he could continue to serve the cause.
His respect for McCarthy was so abiding he asked the senator to be the godfather of his first child. Even after McCarthy's disgrace, Kennedy declined to criticize his old boss's strong-arm investigative tactics, some of which he later used himself as a Senate counsel charged with exposing corruption in labor unions.
Bobby's early career earned him a reputation for hard work, single-mindedness and unblinking ruthlessness. These qualities made him indispensable to his brother John, especially when John won the presidency. The two made an irresistible good-cop, bad- cop tag team.
"Whereas Jack tried to exert dominance through charm and seduction,'' Steel wrote, "Bobby did it through hostility and aggressiveness.''
He's No Ashcroft
What better qualifications for an attorney general? Yet watching audiences choke back tears during "Bobby,'' you might marvel that so many progressives are horrified by John Ashcroft.
All Ashcroft tried to do was toughen up the Patriot Act. As attorney general, Kennedy set himself bigger tasks.
He struggled to contain the damage from his brother's uncontrollable sexual athleticism, including an affair with the mistress of a Mafia don and another with a possible East German spy. He approved the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr., and oversaw the government's attempts to "eliminate'' Fidel Castro.
"The Kennedy brothers,'' Lyndon Johnson once said, "were running a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.''
Biographers agree that in his last years Bobby Kennedy developed a sensitivity to poverty and race that he earlier lacked. Yet even here his liberalism is pretty sketchy.
Conservative Values
In 1966, by now a senator from New York, Kennedy talked several friendly businessmen into funding a pilot anti-poverty program in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of New York.
The program drew much more from the conservative ideals of private enterprise and individual initiative than from the big- government liberalism of his rival Johnson. California Governor Ronald Reagan, for one, was delighted with Kennedy's approach. "He's talking more and more like me,'' Reagan said approvingly.
Kennedy called for "doing away as much as possible with the welfare system, the handouts and getting people jobs by giving the private sector tax incentives.''
That quote comes from a debate, held a few days before the California primary, with Senator Eugene McCarthy, one of Kennedy's rivals for the Democratic nomination (and no relation to Joe).
McCarthy was a genial man in his later years, but at the mention of Bobby's name he would grimace and say only, "an awful man.''
Last Debate
Part of the reason for McCarthy's distaste was that last debate. When the moderator asked about poverty and race, McCarthy said that the black ghettos should be broken up by dispersing subsidized housing around the country, beyond the inner cities.
Kennedy, on camera, looked horrified, and with his eye trained on the then-all-white suburbs of Los Angeles, he said: "We have 10 million Negroes who are in the ghettos at the present time. . . You say you are going to take 10,000 black people and move them into Orange County. It is just going to be catastrophic.''
McCarthy never quite recovered. Kennedy's distortion made his opponent look like a despoiler of white suburbia, a sentimentalist at best and a radical at worst.
But it worked. This bit of ruthless race-baiting -- "political thuggery,'' as the otherwise worshipful reporter Jules Witcover called it -- frightened enough white suburbanites into voting for Kennedy to hand him the California primary and to send him, in triumphant good humor, into the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel on the evening of June 4, 1968.
(Andrew Ferguson is a Bloomberg News columnist. In 1992, he wrote speeches for President George H.W. Bush. The opinions expressed are his own.)
By Andrew Ferguson
The historian Todd Gitlin once wrote that with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, "a promise of redemption not only passed out of American politics, it passed out of ourselves.''
If only!
Gitlin's overcooked sentiment perfectly expresses what another historian, Ronald Steel, calls "The Bobby Myth,'' the gauzy lens through which many -- too many -- Americans view President John F. Kennedy's brother who served as attorney general, New York senator, and, in the epochal year 1968, a pied- piper presidential candidate.
The new movie "Bobby'', directed by Emilio Estevez, proves that the dream will never die, just as Kennedy worshippers have always warned. Yet anyone who surveys Kennedy's career can't help but wonder why.
In fairness to the makers of "Bobby,'' the movie doesn't claim to be an assessment of Kennedy's life. Kennedy himself is seen only fleetingly in fuzzy old film clips.
Instead "Bobby'' tells the story of June 4, 1968, by tracing the humdrum doings of a couple of dozen people at Los Angeles's Ambassador Hotel, where Kennedy's campaign was celebrating its victory in the California presidential primary and where, after a triumphant speech, Kennedy was shot.
The truncation makes it easier for the moviemakers to feed off the myth since it passes over the unseemly facts that might subvert Kennedy's status as an icon for progressives, as liberals call themselves these days.
Not a Liberal
He was, for starters, never much of a liberal. His first public job, in the early 1950s, was as assistant to Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had already established himself as the country's premier anti-Communist and red-baiter.
When Kennedy, fresh from law school, failed to land a job as McCarthy's chief counsel, he happily took a lesser position on the same committee, so he could continue to serve the cause.
His respect for McCarthy was so abiding he asked the senator to be the godfather of his first child. Even after McCarthy's disgrace, Kennedy declined to criticize his old boss's strong-arm investigative tactics, some of which he later used himself as a Senate counsel charged with exposing corruption in labor unions.
Bobby's early career earned him a reputation for hard work, single-mindedness and unblinking ruthlessness. These qualities made him indispensable to his brother John, especially when John won the presidency. The two made an irresistible good-cop, bad- cop tag team.
"Whereas Jack tried to exert dominance through charm and seduction,'' Steel wrote, "Bobby did it through hostility and aggressiveness.''
He's No Ashcroft
What better qualifications for an attorney general? Yet watching audiences choke back tears during "Bobby,'' you might marvel that so many progressives are horrified by John Ashcroft.
All Ashcroft tried to do was toughen up the Patriot Act. As attorney general, Kennedy set himself bigger tasks.
He struggled to contain the damage from his brother's uncontrollable sexual athleticism, including an affair with the mistress of a Mafia don and another with a possible East German spy. He approved the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr., and oversaw the government's attempts to "eliminate'' Fidel Castro.
"The Kennedy brothers,'' Lyndon Johnson once said, "were running a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.''
Biographers agree that in his last years Bobby Kennedy developed a sensitivity to poverty and race that he earlier lacked. Yet even here his liberalism is pretty sketchy.
Conservative Values
In 1966, by now a senator from New York, Kennedy talked several friendly businessmen into funding a pilot anti-poverty program in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of New York.
The program drew much more from the conservative ideals of private enterprise and individual initiative than from the big- government liberalism of his rival Johnson. California Governor Ronald Reagan, for one, was delighted with Kennedy's approach. "He's talking more and more like me,'' Reagan said approvingly.
Kennedy called for "doing away as much as possible with the welfare system, the handouts and getting people jobs by giving the private sector tax incentives.''
That quote comes from a debate, held a few days before the California primary, with Senator Eugene McCarthy, one of Kennedy's rivals for the Democratic nomination (and no relation to Joe).
McCarthy was a genial man in his later years, but at the mention of Bobby's name he would grimace and say only, "an awful man.''
Last Debate
Part of the reason for McCarthy's distaste was that last debate. When the moderator asked about poverty and race, McCarthy said that the black ghettos should be broken up by dispersing subsidized housing around the country, beyond the inner cities.
Kennedy, on camera, looked horrified, and with his eye trained on the then-all-white suburbs of Los Angeles, he said: "We have 10 million Negroes who are in the ghettos at the present time. . . You say you are going to take 10,000 black people and move them into Orange County. It is just going to be catastrophic.''
McCarthy never quite recovered. Kennedy's distortion made his opponent look like a despoiler of white suburbia, a sentimentalist at best and a radical at worst.
But it worked. This bit of ruthless race-baiting -- "political thuggery,'' as the otherwise worshipful reporter Jules Witcover called it -- frightened enough white suburbanites into voting for Kennedy to hand him the California primary and to send him, in triumphant good humor, into the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel on the evening of June 4, 1968.
(Andrew Ferguson is a Bloomberg News columnist. In 1992, he wrote speeches for President George H.W. Bush. The opinions expressed are his own.)
(29/12/2006)
posted by jah.maytreya at Saturday, December 30, 2006
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