RFK
RFK (2004) This superb, two-hour American Experience documentary describes the life of Bobby Kennedy from being the ‘runt’ of the Joseph Kennedy family to the night of his winning the California primary election and of his assassination. For those who recall Bobby Kennedy as the right-hand man of President Kennedy, the younger Kennedy’s earlier lack of experience seems surprising.
Bobby Kennedy, after rescuing his brother’s disorganized senatorial campaign in 1952, worked for six months as a lawyer with Senator Joseph McCarthy. At the time, Bobby was a Cold War warrior who admired what McCarthy was doing. Then Bobby worked on a Senate committee in which he targeted ‘labor racketeers,’ especially Jimmy Hoffa. After his crucial role in Jack Kennedy’s presidential race, at age 35 Bobby, with no courtroom experience, was named Attorney General by his brother.
After a shaky start, the Attorney General became the president’s closest confidant. Bobby also recognized faster than did his brother that civil rights was an issue that could not await Jack Kennedy’s 1964 re-election. Despite a mutual President Johnson-Bobby Kennedy hatred, Johnson, less than a year after President Kennedy’s assassination, provided crucial support that enabled Bobby Kennedy to win a New York Senate seat.
The transition from being ‘the second most powerful man in the United States’ to being junior senator from New York was not easy. Over the next two years a more mature, minorities’ sensitive Bobby Kennedy commenced to find his own voice, though still under his dead brother’s shadow.
One senses that the Bobby Kennedy who belatedly launched his 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination was far different from the inexperienced person who moved into the Attorney General’s office in January, 1961. If Bobby hadn’t been assassinated, would he have won the presidency in 1968? As president, could he have ended the U. S. involvement in Vietnam and have calmed the social unrest that was so turbulent in America? The documentary appropriately ends on a note of ‘what if?.’
