Book Review: Remembering RFK
Three new tomes examine the legacy of RFK in pictures and words.
Reviewed by Kevin Phinney, Fri., June 13, 2008
R.F.K: A Photographer's Journal
by Harry BensonPowerHouse Books, 144 pp., $39.95
A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties
by Bill EppridgeHarry N. Abrams, 190 pp., $29.95
The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America
by Thurston ClarkeHenry Holt & Co., 336 pp., $25
This past week, media outlets around the globe noted the 40th anniversary of the assassination of New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who was gunned down moments after his greatest political victory in winning the 1968 California primary. Now there are three new books commemorating his life and death, all weighing in over the last month with ruminations on his legacy.
Doubtless many Gen Xers and Yers are wondering what all the fuss is about: At the time of his death, RFK had served less than one term in the U.S. Senate, was no safe bet for the presidency, and was in fact trailing Hubert Humphrey in his effort to become the Democratic nominee. All three books follow him from the days after his brother's death in Dallas and try to address why Robert Kennedy was a transitional figure then and why he just may be more relevant now than he was at the time of his murder.
Harry Benson's R.F.K: A Photographer's Journal is the least of these; it's a messy rush of images, concluding with the photographer's contact sheets from the pantry where the senator was shot. Countless negatives are inexplicably printed backward, and the text appears rough and perfunctory. Benson's access may have gotten him front and center at the shooting, but his pictures only skim the surface – the chaos of the frenetic campaign and its swift denouement.
A Time It Was: Bobby Kennedy in the Sixties visually documents Kennedy's slow emergence from the chrysalis of the first Kennedy assassination and dispassionately records RFK's ascent from grieving brother to pop icon and what Making of the President author Theodore White called the "tribune of the underclass." Author Pete Hamill, who wrote Kennedy a letter imploring him to run, provides a fly-on-the-wall account of the jubilation and strategizing upstairs in the senator's hotel suite just before the campaign ended in a hail of bullets in the pantry below. It's author/photographer Bill Eppridge who took the photo emblematic of the shooting – Kennedy, his face a mask of resignation, busboy Juan Romero leaning in to comfort him in a ghastly modern take on The Pieta. It's hard to look at, even now.
Eppridge's lens depicts the tumult of the campaign, and several of his images were paired with an excerpt from Thurston Clarke's new RFK book in last month's Vanity Fair. Both journalists help unlock this Kennedy's more visceral mystique, because he's so often captured in dynamic action. Once the observer experiences RFK in motion rather than as the doomed brother of a martyred president, he roars vividly back to life.
As Clarke's book The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America makes clear, Bobby Kennedy was also much more than his brother's torchbearer. Here's a man who never renounced his work in the Fifties for commie chaser Joe McCarthy, a man who as attorney general authorized assassination attempts on the life of Fidel Castro and wiretaps on Martin Luther King Jr. But when an assassin pulled the cosmic rug out from under his brother, Bobby Kennedy went overnight from second-most powerful man on the planet to a man in danger of becoming a walking historical footnote.
According to accounts presented here, Kennedy slowly remade himself into a moral crusader. He gravitated toward Chicanos, blacks, and Native Americans and nursed such an affinity for the dispossessed that his press entourage considered him reckless, considering he was running behind in a fight for his political life. When confronted by complacency, Kennedy would spar with his audience: He spoke about the immorality of deferments for college kids at universities and told medical students that taxes on their earnings would finance inner-city health clinics. He gave equal weight to law and order and racial equality, whether addressing conservatives or militants. Over the intervening four decades, his ideas have been massaged, focus-group tested, and watered down to become the platitudes and empty slogans we now see trotted out every election year.
As Clarke's book suggests, Robert Kennedy still blazes across the firmament of the national imagination, because by the end of the half-decade between Dallas and that pantry in Los Angeles, he'd nearly won it all: not the presidency or even the nomination, but reinvention and redemption on his own terms. And his real final victory came not as the heir apparent to Camelot but in giving voice to those who had the least.
