RFK’s assassination and 55 years of paranoia | Will Bunch Newsletter

It was 79 years ago Tuesday that thousands of U.S. troops and their allies found the cost of freedom ... buried in the sand. D-Day — June 6, 1944 — remains a pivotal point in American history. It reminds us both of the brutality of war (depicted unsparingly by Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan) but also that there are times when we must fight to defeat fascism. Few survivors are left, but the lessons should never fade.

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📮 As I expected, there was a lot of response to last week’s question about which Democrat should be the party’s next presidential candidate after Joe Biden, either in 2028 or as soon as next year if you believe the president should retire now. Among those mentioned were pundit favorites like Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Lisa McGuigan wrote that California Gov. Gavin Newsom “knows how to attack the right in a way that gets Democrats fired up,” while Bruce Tarkoff suggested Tom Hanks, an actor who “has the intelligence, chutzpah, and nerve to pull it off.” My favorite suggestion was Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren — “the U.S. is ready for a woman as president.” The emailer’s name: Bryan Bunch.

This week’s question: Studies have shown that today’s young people, especially teens, are experiencing an unprecedented mental-health crisis. What do you think is causing it? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

There was a lot of good reason to be cynical when Robert F. Kennedy Sr. announced belatedly in March 1968 that he was running for president. This RFK was the original nepo baby, a product of Kennedy family rivalries that made HBO’s Succession look tame, and just 35 years old when his brother John F. Kennedy shocked Washington by making him attorney general. Nothing he did as AG — from bugging the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to plotting against Fidel Castro — suggested he would become a progressive icon.

But his brother’s murder in November 1963 changed RFK for good. After he was elected U.S. senator from New York, Kennedy used his platform to tour rural Mississippi and eastern Kentucky to call for an end to poverty. After launching that ‘68 presidential campaign, he infuriated some advisers by taking a couple of days to spotlight deplorable conditions on the isolated Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, telling them in a handwritten note: “Those of you who think you’re running my campaign don’t love Indians the way I do.”

His campaign would only last 82 days, but it is remembered for RFK’s ability to forge a coalition of white, Black, and brown working-class voters during a year of intense political division. The unfulfilled promise of a second President Kennedy was shown on the night of April 4, 1968 when — just learning of MLK’s assassination — he climbed a flatbed truck in a Black section of Indianapolis and gave maybe the greatest off-the-cuff speech in America history. “For those of you who are Black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling,” he said. “I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”

Unlike scores of other U.S. cities, there were no riots in Indianapolis.

It ended on June 5, 1968 in the way that everyone feared it would in that crazed and relentlessly violent time in American history — with an assassin’s bullet, just seconds after Kennedy had claimed a major victory in the California primary. He clung to life for 26 hours before he was declared dead early in the morning of June 6 — exactly 55 years ago.

His death was the low point of a 10-year-run of assassinations — Black leaders like King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Fred Hampton, liberals like the Kennedy brothers and even far-right spoiler George Wallace, left paralyzed — that triggered a debate over whether “violence is as American as cherry pie,” as the Black radical H. Rap Brown claimed, or if perhaps something more sinister was at work. RFK’s murder — which crushed the hopefulness of his campaign and fantasies that he could restore his brother’s “Camelot” to the White House — hit hard for many.

“Tuesday night, I was in ecstasy with joy,” a young man — his name lost to history — who’d been at RFK’s Los Angeles victory party told an ABC TV special on June 6, 1968. “Wednesday morning, sorrow. And this morning, utter despair — because now I’m lost, I’m desperate, and I don’t know where we’re going from here.”

Public trust in the U.S. government went from its peak of nearly 80% when the assassinations began in 1963 to less than half of that by the mid-1970s, and it currently it hovers near its all-time low of about 20%. In the late 1960s or the ‘70s, the term “conspiracy theorist” didn’t have the negative connotations of today. Several of RFK’s close associates later claimed that he called the CIA after the gunshots in Dallas to ask: “Did you people do this?”

That story was absorbed by a baby boomer who was a 9-year-old student at Sidwell Friends School on the day John Kennedy was shot: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Not surprisingly, the junior Kennedy was traumatized by his dad’s murder less than five years later. As a young man, RFK Jr. struggled with heroin addiction, but he overcame it to become New York City’s top local environmental lawyer, taking on causes his dad would have surely applauded.

Like millions of Americans, the younger Kennedy found it hard to accept the official version of either assassination. In 2017, he even met behind bars with the man convicting of killing RFK Sr., Sirhan Sirhan, and said afterward he believed there was a second gunman and that the investigation should be reopened. But by then, RFK Jr.’s distrust of the government had grown much deeper. He was taking positions on other issues that contradicted well-established science, such as a disproven claim that vaccines cause autism.

More than a half-century after his father’s ill-fated campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has entered the 2024 Democratic presidential primaries in a paranoid style — placing disbelief not only of the federal government but also on the scientific establishment and the news media. “Conspiracies do happen,” Kennedy said in a Washington Post profile published Monday. “It’s not that everybody is involved in promoting what they know to be a lie. It is that there are orthodoxies that become institutionalized that have their own gravity that pull people in.”

Meanwhile, Kennedy is pulling in Democratic voters, winning roughly 20% against President Joe Biden in early polls. Some of that is name ID and the fact that he looks like the spitting image of his father, and some of it is just dissatisfaction with the 80-year-old incumbent. But he is also surfing that wave of skepticism that started with the assassinations of the 1960s — an irony that is painful for those who actually remember that era.

This is not your father’s Robert F. Kennedy. There are no plans, that I’m aware of, for RFK Jr. to campaign on native lands in the Dakotas or offer comfort to barefoot children in Appalachia. Instead, he marked the 55th anniversary of his dad’s assassination by going on Twitter Spaces with the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, a fellow conspiracy buff, and proclaiming that “COVID was clearly a bioweapons problem.” He even implied the coronavirus was not a real disease.

I think of that young man on TV in 1968 who said that “I don’t know where we are going from here,” and I wonder if he could have ever imagined this place. While it did feel like American hope died at 1:44 a.m. on June 6 of that fateful year, no one yet understood the extent that cynicism and distrust would metastasize in the national soul. Like his father before him, the odyssey of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an American tragedy.

Question: How can [D]emocrats break through to rural America who has largely been lost to right wing messaging? Note that rural America has been left behind by economic changes and businesses leaving for China in the 80s+ — Via YouGottaVote (@YouGottaVote) on Twitter

Answer: YGV, this question comes up a lot! It’s pretty clear that the Democrats’ longstanding idea that rural voters will respond to economic policies, like broadband access or infrastructure projects, was a tad naïve. It’s clear that culture — and the not-irrational belief that cosmopolitan elites are looking down on them — trumps economics for many voters, but not all. Democrats need to a) show up in rural America, because even in the reddest counties, there are progressive-minded folks who want to feel wanted b) keep pushing policies for the middle class, because it’s the right thing to do, and c) think about ways (free trade school and college opportunities, apprenticeships, etc.) to bridge the college/non-college divide. Democrats may never win rural America, but they can win a lot more votes than they’re getting now.

The bar for performance in the already overcrowded GOP primary field in the 2024 race for the White House has been set ridiculously low, given the utter buffoonery of indicted clubhouse leader Donald Trump and the socially awkward fascism of his closest challenger, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. On Sunday night, former South Carolina governor and Trump UN ambassador Nikki Haley held a 90-minute town hall on CNN that the New York Times described as “mild,” apparently because she was willing to say that Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine or praising North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-Un are actually bad things. This despite the fact that Haley dropped the most hateful disinformation of the campaign so far.

It happened during a Haley rant on the GOP’s current obsession with what they call a “woke” culture destroying America: the question of transgender athletes competing in girls’ high school sports. “I mean, the idea that we have biological boys playing in girls’ sports, it is the women’s issue of our time,” Haley told CNN host Jake Tapper, adding: “How are we supposed to get our girls used to the fact that biological boys are in their locker rooms? And then we wonder why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year?”

There’s a lot going on here, none of it good. Most experts believe there are maybe 100 transgender women athletes competing in the United States, meaning the number of folks actually affected by this controversy is minuscule. Calling this “the women’s issue of our time” is an insult to the millions who dealing with things like sexual harassment and assault, or unequal pay, or the Supreme Court taking away their reproductive rights. But even worse is the utter disinformation in claiming a false link to an increasingly serious problem in American society, the rising rates of depression and suicidal thoughts among teen girls. Experts are debating the role of factors like increased use of smartphones and social media, as well as grade pressure in a time of exorbitant college costs. In falsely blaming transgender youth, a would-be President Nikki Haley not only is failing to address the real problem — but such prejudice actually risks making teen suicide worse by increasing depression and despair among LGBTQ youth.

Haley’s dangerous disinformation is also a real problem for the media — for CNN, which has shown first with Trump and now with the South Carolinian an inability to challenge the flood of GOP falsehoods in real time, but also for outlets like the Times who failed to make a lie about teen suicide the lead of their next-day stories. There’s a lot of words I could use for ratcheting up hatred toward our LGBTQ youth, but “mild” is not one of them.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Consider school vouchers, or what conservatives have tried to brand as “school choice.” On this date 11 years ago, I looked at my bête noire of that era — Pennsylvania’s pro-fracking and anti-education governor, Tom Corbett — and how his brutal cuts in school funding hadn’t satisfied the far-right group FreedomWorks, which mounted a big money campaign criticizing Corbett for not subsidizing parents sending kids to private or religious schools. I noted that vouchers had already been a disaster in states like Louisiana that had tried them, yet here in 2023 this bad idea is still high on the Republican agenda. They should read: “Corbett not destroying Pennsylvania schools fast enough for the Koch brothers.”