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57 Years Ago Today... [1]
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Date: 2025-06-05
Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and American history changed forever. My life changed forever.
1968. First, the Tet Offensive shows that, after five years, 40,000 dead American soldiers, billions wasted, and a firehose of lies about the “Light at the End of the Tunnel, America wakes up to the fact that we’re losing the Vietnam War. Then Robert F. Kennedy announces he’s entering the race for President. Then LBJ shocks the nation by announcing he’s not running for re-election. Then Martin Luther King is assassinated.
On June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy wins the California Democratic primary, virtually ensuring that he would win the Democratic nomination. Richard Nixon, already beaten by one Kennedy knows that RFK is his worst nightmare. RFK is the only one who can put together the great Democratic coalition: African-Americans, blue-collar whites, Union members, and disaffected younger people.
I’m 17 years old. Since I was 13, I was told not to worry about getting drafted, because the war would be over soon, because (as we now know) LBJ and Robert McNamara were lying about what was really happening. In 1968, everyone knew. I saw Bobby Kennedy as the man who could end the war, and bring the country together to heal the wounds of the Johnson years.
And then Bobby was murdered. Then came the riots at the Democratic National Convention, where the worst possible candidate, LBJ’s ineffectual and feckless Vice President Hubert Humphrey, was nominated. Richard Nixon ran on his “Secret Plan to End the Vietnam War.”
In the last week of the campaign, Nixon committed treason. The Logan Act says that no private citizen can influence a negotiation between the United States and a foreign government. Nixon ordered Anna Chenault to whisper in the ear of Vietnamese President Thiệu, asking him to step away from the Paris Peace Talks because Nixon was going to win and Nixon could get the South Vietnamese a better deal. LBJ knew all this was going down because of illegal wiretaps, and was crazy with rage...but he couldn’t do anything without revealing the wiretaps.
Despite everything that happened, Nixon’s highly disciplined campaign (run by Roger Ailes) and Humphrey’s compromised, lackluster campaign. Humphrey came within half a percentage point of defeating Nixon.
We now know Nixon’s Secret Plan for ending the war: continue the war for SIX MORE YEARS, murder another 24,000 American troops for no good reason, extend the war into Laos and Cambodia, destabilize the Cambodian government so that the psychopath Pol Pot could rise to power and murder 2 million of his own people, and then make the same peace deal that LBJ was trying to make in 1968.
In “ll/22/63,” Stephen King said, “Life turns on a dime. Sometimes toward us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes.” I was devastated by RFK’s death. I some sense, I’ve never gotten over it. I think of it this way. Bobby becomes President, so no Nixon. No “Silent Majority,” Southern Strategy (claiming RFK’s blue collar whites), no Watergate. And so no Reagan, no “supply side economics” shifting billions upward to the top 1/10th of 1 percent, no deregulating broadcasting so no Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich….finally, no Trump. And no RFK Jr., because Bobby would have been around to save his son from the alienation and drug addiction that have destroyed his mind.
“What if...” I’m 73 now. I will never give up hope for a better America, but I know I’ll never see it in my lifetime. My idea of America may be gone forever because the American people decided that an incompetent, narcissistic psychopath was the perfect person to become President.
Next time you read a hate-filled screed by Trump about the “radical left-wing scum trying to destroy our country,” remember the man who might have been President, might have ended the war, and might have healed the nation. The man who said, "What we need in the United States is not division, not hatred, not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country."
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