RFK, the son of privilege, remade himself as America’s moral force

Fifty years ago today, when Robert F. Kennedy succumbed to an assassin’s bullets, he had become the moral crusader and liberal emblem who inspired Americans to reach beyond themselves during a time of deep cultural and political division. But the Bobby Kennedy we lost on June 6, 1968, at the age of 42, in the middle of one of the most turbulent years in American history, was not the Bobby Kennedy of earlier years. He was a work-in-progress, and his metamorphosis of conscience and evolution as a leader offers a lesson to us all.

Despite being born in 1925 into one of America’s wealthiest and most propitious families, the third son and the seventh of nine children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, his life did not begin auspiciously. Nicknamed “the runt” by his siblings, buck-toothed Bobby was easily outshined by older brothers Jack and Joe Jr. and other family standouts who radiated Kennedy promise and personality. Even his mother fretted that he was “girlish,” perhaps the worst insult in the testosterone-infused Kennedy household.

{mosads}For years he struggled to distinguish himself in the family, serving as an altar boy to please his pious mother, and taking boxing lessons and forcing himself to make the Harvard football team through sheer grit and determination to prove himself to his father.

When Joe Jr. died in World War II, it was Jack who naturally emerged as his father’s hope to achieve his political ambitions for the next generation of Kennedys. But when Joe Sr. suggested — dictated might be a better word — that Bobby be enlisted to help on his 1946 run for Congress, JFK bitingly told a friend and volunteer, “I can’t see that sober, silent face breathing new vigor” into the campaign. He referred to his dark, brooding brother as “Black Robert.”

For much of RFK’s early career the name fit. The toughness he had manifested on the college football field could turn to ruthlessness, prompting his father to remark, surely as a compliment, that he was “just as tough as a boot heel.” He proved himself to his brother, becoming campaign manager, chief protector and hatchet man as JFK ascended the political ranks from the House of Representatives to the Senate and, ultimately, to the White House.

In 1953, Bobby began work as a devoted aide to Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican whose demagogic anti-communist crusade played out perniciously in Washington, shaking the capital to its core as it threatened democratic ideals. McCarthy’s moral absolutism appealed to the sanctimonious Bobby, who was an unapologetic supporter of McCarthy even after the latter’s ignominious fall from grace. He despised homosexuals, saw Martin Luther King, Jr., whom he never trusted, as an agitator, and thought little about those afflicted by the bigotry and injustice that permeated mid-Century America. “I won’t say I lay awake at night worrying about civil rights,” he said of the years before he become his brother’s attorney general in 1961.

As attorney general, RFK’s view of the world expanded as he waded into the simmering civil rights movement even as he sanctioned the wiretapping of King. While his brother’s approach to civil rights was coolly detached and pragmatic, RFK was slowly moved by the struggle for equal rights, especially after the horrid events of racial injustice played out in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. As Evan Thomas explained in “Robert Kennedy, His Life,” his 2000 book: “What had been an episodic annoyance, accompanied by twinges of conscience, became a passion and a cause.”

But it was after JFK’s assassination in 1963 that Bobby Kennedy came into his own. Out of the pain of losing his brother, in an effort to find meaning — and his own redemptive voice — he emerged as a moral force in America. He won political office for the first time in 1964, as a senator for his adopted New York, and set himself on a path to become an agent of change.

The son of privilege marched into the country’s most forsaken places — the tenement slums of Harlem, the shantytowns of rural West Virginia, the grape fields of California — and got a firsthand sense of the plight of the American underclass. During a visit to the Mississippi Delta as part of a trip for the Senate Labor Committee in 1967, Kennedy toured the windowless, stench-filled shacks of the impoverished, talking with the destitute inhabitants, holding babies and playing with children on dirt floors.

The visit left him shaken. “In Mississippi, a whole family lives in a shack the size of this room,” he lectured his children when he returned home to Hickory Hill, his sprawling home in McLean, Virginia. “The children are covered with sores and their tummies stick out because they have no food. Do you know how lucky you are? Do something for your country.”

He asked the same of Americans. “If we can’t prevent our fellow citizens from starving, we must ask ourselves what kind of country we really are,” he said. “We must ask ourselves what we really stand for. We must act, and we must act now.”

Great leaders leave themselves open to change. They reach beyond their comfort zone and allow themselves to be moved. They learn from their vulnerabilities, using them for self-reflection and turning them into strengths. They grow, and they ask others to grow with them. That is the lesson of Bobby Kennedy, the rigid ideologue turned idealist who captured our greatest hope and potential. His 1968 presidential campaign became a movement, and his memory stirs us still, because he moved beyond himself and showed us what we are capable of.

“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been,’” wrote poet John Whittier Greenleaf, a 19th century abolitionist. What might have been for Bobby Kennedy in the 20th century and beyond is a question for the ages, but his courage to find the best in himself should inspire for just as long.

Mark K. Updegrove is  president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation and the author of “The Last Republicans: Inside the Extraordinary Relationship Between George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.”