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RFK:
A Reflection on True American Leadership
July 27, 2002
By Dwayne Eutsey
"At stake is not simply the leadership
of our party and even our country. It is our right to moral
leadership of this planet."
— RFK announcing his presidential candidacy, 1968
Robert F. Kennedy is a personal hero of mine.
For me, RFK (or Bobby, which seems more appropriate to me)
embodied the best qualities of authentic American leadership.
Until his abrupt murder, Bobby’s pragmatic idealism inspired
a nation ripping itself apart to come Together - and it still
speaks to us now in a time when corrupted, illegitimate power
has such a stranglehold on our country.
Unlike what lamely passes for leadership today, Bobby was
the real thing. The inclusive vision of America he proclaimed
emerged from a conscience deepened by personal tragedy and
moved by the suffering of oppressed people he encountered
around the world. Instead of simply talking about compassion,
Bobby demonstrated it. He was a true uniter: he brought together
anti-war activists and veterans; Hispanics, inner city blacks,
and rural whites; young and old; the affluent and the poor.
And he was truly one of the most eloquent, impassioned political
orators America has ever heard.
It’s easy to canonize Bobby as some sort of liberal saint,
but I think to do so is to remove from him his most appealing
and enduring trait: his humanity. Bobby’s humanity, as flawed
and as noble as any character from the Greek tragedies he
loved so much, defined his kind of “anti-political politics,”
to borrow a phrase from Vaclav Havel, the former Czech dissident
(and current Czech president). He was driven by neither focus
groups nor ideology, but by a politics that grew from the
heart.
As Ted Kennedy said in eulogizing his fallen brother, Bobby
“need not be idolized or enlarged in death beyond what he
was in life. [He should] be remembered simply as a good and
decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering
and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”
It’s this Bobby, the “good and decent man” who wanted to
lead America back to its moral center, that I hope will shine
through in a promising new television
movie about him on FX later this summer. Perhaps, in stark
contrast to what we currently have in the White House and
on the Hill, “RFK” may help remind us that we should expect
(or even demand) more of our leaders than that they look like
someone we’d like to drink a beer with.
Perhaps it will remind us that our leaders should defend
the principles of liberty that are the very foundation of
our society. As Bobby said in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam
War, our leaders should acknowledge that “debate and dissent
are the very heart of the American process,” and that those
who attempt to repress these American values do not understand
what this country is all about.
Perhaps the movie will help us to recall that true leaders
do not run away when our country is in danger; instead they
stand with their fellow citizens as Bobby did on the night
Martin Luther King was assassinated. He was the only white
public official who stood in a black neighborhood as riots
erupted across America, and he helped to defuse the volatile
shock of the crowd with these extemporaneous words:
“What we need in the United States is not division; what
we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in
the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love
and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling
of justice toward those who will suffer within our country,
whether they be white or they be black.”
Maybe it will remind us that there are values underlying
authentic patriotism that run much deeper than flag-waving
nationalism and economic self-interest, as when Bobby said:
“The gross national product ... measures neither our wit
nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither
our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures
everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
And it can tell us everything about America except why we
are proud that we are Americans.”
I know that’s a lot to expect from a television movie, especially
one that will be broadcast on a cable network affiliated with
arch-conservative Rupert Murdoch. However, despite the current
darkness shrouding our political landscape, the spirit of
Bobby, the heart of what he hoped for and believed in about
America, still shines out like an eternal flame in this darkness.
And with that light to guide us, perhaps we can, to paraphrase
Bobby, stop looking at the way things are and ask in despair
“Why?” And instead we can start dreaming again of things that
never were and dare to ask, “Why not?”
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