"Is It Possible to Imagine a Different Politics"?

"At a time of national division some 57 years ago, Robert Kennedy attracted disparate groups of voters who were otherwise at each other's throats. Today, as we have just come through a set of elections in which many Americans expressed dissatisfaction with their choices, RFK's example points to something more inspiring: a politics that tamps down, rather than sows, racial division; that seeks to treat all Americans with dignity; that crosses political ideologies to seize on the best ideas; and that can instill a deep pride in country. It will be fascinating to watch in the years to come which set of political leaders, if any, will seek to take up his mantle."

At The Liberal Patriot, Richard Kahlenberg and Ruy Teixeira present a "deep dive into the political worldview of Robert F. Kennedy [Sr.]."

"The Once and Future King"

"It was Bobby's America, and Harrington couldn't keep from staring. 'Every time I did, I began to cry. The sorrowing faces along the way were a mirror of my own feelings,' said the author whose writings helped launch the War on Poverty and who saw Bobby as 'the man who actually could have changed the course of American history.' As for those with him inside the rail cars—politicians of the old school and new, intellectuals and trade unionists, Black, Irish, Chicano, and Jewish citizens—they were, said Harrington, 'the administration of Robert Kennedy that was never going to be.'"

Larry Tye at Politico asks if Robert F. Kennedy was in position to become President in 1968.

"Standing United—in Grief"

"The images each have a unique emotion, almost a personality, and the array of views of the American people and their landscapes feels both intimate and collective. Fusco shot for the entire eight hours it took for the train to make the usually four-hour journey. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the tracks of this train as it made its way, in huge crowds, small groups, and alone. The tracks pass through urban courtyards, suburban lawns, dirt roads, and old fence posts, along bridges and byways and secluded patches of nature, farms, and even boat docks. People gather with signs and cameras and American flags, they wave and stand at attention, they cry and hug one another, they stay stoic and solemn; they’ve walked and biked and driven; they’ve been waiting all day."

Shana Nys Dambrot at The Village Voice revisits Paul Fusco's photographs from Robert F. Kennedy's funeral train in 1968.

"The Most Appealing Message From a Candidate Was Neither an Authoritarian Crackdown nor Universal Tolerance for Protesters"

"He took some heat for this. The New York Times editorial board chastised him for moving to the right. Ronald Reagan and Nixon each noted that he was sounding more like them (although their speeches somehow left out the part where RFK talked about endemic poverty and a massive jobs program). But reporters began to notice an odd phenomenon: The same audiences who spoke about cracking down on demonstrators and who expressed admiration for Wallace also said they were considering voting for Kennedy.
"Why? Because, the answer came back, 'He’s tough. He put crooks in jail.'"

Jeff Greenfield at Politico writes about "Robert Kennedy's Lesson on Political Violence That Joe Biden Needs to Learn."

"A Number of Larger Trends and Lessons Seem Clear"

"The midterm results indicate the direction of that work: away from blue-bubble moralizing, away from centrist complicity; toward equal rights and remedial justice and toward a reborn focus on the economic problems shared by most Americans.
"It may not sound possible to do both, to stand fast for equal rights and also for economic relief for all those who are suffering, but it is. Fifty years ago, Robert Kennedy appealed strongly and successfully to both constituencies."

Ira Glasser at Huffington Post describes what Democrats need to do next.

"How We Got Here"

NPR runs a "special series" on 1968.

"The Crowds Who Came Out to Witness Kennedy's Body Being Carried to Its Grave"

"In 2018, looking back at those images, as the train approaches the terminal and the light begins to fade, you realize that you are watching the final hours of the great Democratic coalition that had dominated American politics since the election of Franklin Roosevelt, in 1932—the coalition that would fracture six months later with the election of Richard Nixon, and which is now as dead as Robert Kennedy."

Louis Menand at The New Yorker discusses the San Francisco Museum of Art's exhibit "The Train: RFK's Last Journey."

"Bobby's Apparently Disparate Political Stands Become Perfectly Sensible and Coherent"

"In keeping with this ethos, Kennedy was acutely skeptical about the remote, centralized, bureaucratic social programs of the New Deal and the Great Society—on the grounds that they minimized, if they didn't preclude, citizen participation. Kennedy’s intolerance of crime, even when committed by legitimately angry rioters in the streets of American cities, also had a civic-republican basis: Fear of crime, he thought, compromised citizen access to public spaces and so shrunk the sense of community for everyone. He was meanwhile cynical about what he saw as America's overweening faith in economic growth per se and its exaltation of gross national product as the measure of human happiness—noting that the country was afflicted not only by material poverty among the disadvantaged but also by a 'poverty of satisfaction ... that afflicts us all'—and idealistic about what we could call civic growth: 'We know our happiness comes not from the goods we have, but from the good we do together.'"

Win McCormack at The New Republic calls Robert F. Kennedy a "Civic Republican."

"Burning Conviction, Solidarity, Euphoria"

"Since 1968, America has gone off in a different direction than I had hoped: Reagan, Nixon, and Trump are not the kind of leaders we had in mind back then. In 1968, I would have settled for nothing less than socialism. Twenty-five years after that, something like a European welfare state would have made me happy. Today, just having a reliable subway system appears utopian. The French Revolution, however violent, uprooted the monarchy. The Russian Revolution, however perverse, produced an experiment, albeit a failed one, in economic planning. 1968 not only failed to achieve most of its goals, it set politics off in the wrong direction."

Alan Wolfe at The New Republic looks back fifty years.

A Ripple of Hope

"Some of those lofty plans had the most basic of beginnings. David Gergen—an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—once told NPR about an anecdote Goodwin recalled about that famous tagline.
"Gergen said that 'when he worked for Lyndon Johnson,' Goodwin recalled 'Johnson calling him to the swimming pool and instructing him to take his clothes off and get in the pool with Johnson.
"'And Johnson came over to him like a great whale, and looked at him and said, "I need a slogan."'"
"Noting the link between big ideas and branding, Gergen added, 'And that's how they came up with the Great Society.'"

Bill Chappell at NPR remembers Richard Goodwin, as the presidential speechwriter and advisor dies at age 86.

"The Biracial Appeal Was Strong"

"Kennedy's unusual coalition may have been related to his willingness to fight for the underdog, but also to avoid political correctness. He was a champion of civil rights but also an opponent of racial preferences. He was deeply concerned about the racial and economic injustices that sparked riots, but also was a sharp critic of lawlessness. 'Though a man of growing compassion,' Matthews writes, 'he believed in law and order and didn’t hesitate to employ the phrase.' Liberals appreciated his opposition to the Vietnam War, but hard hats knew that he didn't want to let wealthy college students off the hook with draft deferments. What made Robert Kennedy unique, wrote Jack Newfield, in words Matthews quotes, 'was that he felt the same empathy for white workingmen and women that he felt for blacks, Latinos and Native Americans.'"

Richard D. Kahlenberg at the New Republic reviews Chris Matthews's Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit.

"The Bobby Kennedy Coalition"

"'I think Bobby Kennedy would have had a much stronger appeal to the Trump kind of voter than even Barack Obama did,' Tye told The New Republic.
"He recalled that in the 1968 Democratic primary Kennedy won with conservative whites in Indiana and Nebraska, carrying county after county where George Wallace had prevailed four years earlier. At the same time, Kennedy cleaned up in the black districts of these states and won heavily in Washington, D.C.
"'At a time of huge racial strife in America, he went into black communities and white ones and said precisely the same tough message—our streets have to be safe, and the only way to get safe streets is to have racial justice,' Tye said. 'That was a message that, one could say, managed to offend white and black audiences equally.'
"And yet, that offensiveness—or, more precisely, Kennedy's willingness to tell the same hard truths to every audience—was key to his appeal."

Graham Vyse at The New Republic looks back to Robert Kennedy as a model for Democrats in the future.

"Halfway Between the Old and New"

"By the time he jumped into the 1968 presidential race, civil rights had become a defining issue for Bobby, along with ending the war. But what was truly remarkable was his gift for connecting to the white working class as well as to blacks. He was building bridges—between blacks, browns, and blue-collar whites, as well as between hippies and hard hats—in stark contrast to the divisions sowed then by Richard Nixon and today by Donald Trump. Just how far Bobby had come was apparent in three magical moments during that short-lived campaign."

Larry Tye in The American Prospect discusses the last months of Robert Kennedy's life.

Lone Deep Nancy Transfer

The New York Times reports the deaths of actress Elizabeth Peña, singer Tim Hauser, clothing designer Oscar de la Renta, newspaper editor Ben Bradlee, RFK press aide Frank Mankiewicz, and Reagan astrologer Joan Quigley.


And the NME announces the deaths of singer Alvin Stardust and bassist Jack Bruce.

"They Essentially Uncovered an Alternative History of Women’s Rights"

"The E.R.A. was opposed by virtually every other women’s organization; they believed that it was reactionary. One of the great achievements of the Progressive Era had been the passage of laws that protected women in the workplace. In 1908, Louis Brandeis's brief on behalf of the state of Oregon had helped persuade the Supreme Court to abandon the constitutionally dubious theory of 'liberty of contract,' and uphold a law limiting the number of hours that women could work. An Equal Rights Amendment would make such laws unconstitutionally discriminatory.
"Who might be in favor of such an amendment? Businessmen might be. So the N.W.P.’s best customers on Capitol Hill tended to be anti-union conservatives—for example, Howard Smith. Virginia textile mills employed large numbers of women, and Smith was interested in any legislation that might benefit mill owners. Smith and Paul were also friends, and Smith had been a supporter of the E.R.A. since 1945."


Louis Menand in The New Yorker looks at the 1964 Civil Rights Act and sex discrimination.

The Hunt for the Ambassor Calvary Cook Book

The Los Angeles Times publishes obits for cookbook author Marcella Hazan, lawyer Leonard Kerpelman, writer Tom Clancy, photographer Bill Eppridge, Protestant pastor Chuck Smith, poet Jose Montoya, and Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap.

Thirteen Daze

Michael Dobbs in The New York Times and Jon Wiener in the Los Angeles Times discuss the legacy of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

As does Benjamin Schwartz in The Atlantic.

"Paradox, It Seems, Makes for a Very Long Afterlife"

"Nobody is one thing all the time. Yet Marilyn is steeped in paradoxes so profound that, even under the microscope, they stir and shift without ever settling into a singular picture. Such is the premise of Lois Banner’s new biography, 'Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox,' which behaves a little like its subject. Weaving together exclusive interviews, material from previous books and, most significantly, the contents of Monroe’s two long-lost personal filing cabinets (made available to the public only last year, when Banner published a selection from them in 'MM—Personal'), Banner presents a rich and often imaginative narrative of Marilyn’s life. By the end, Monroe feels at once like an earthly being—an almost-friend—and an enigma, still slightly out of focus and just beyond reach. That seems right."

Zoë Slutzky in The New York Times reviews Lois Banner's Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox.

Banner herself writes an appreciation in the Los Angeles Times.

And D. R. Haney in Salon describes Marilyn Monroe as the original California Girl and the ultimate photo model.

"Look Less at Yourself and More at Each Other"

"Mr. Shriver was never elected to any national office. To political insiders, his calls for public service in the 1960s seemed quixotic at a time when America was caught up in a war in Vietnam, a cold war with the Soviet Union and civil rights struggles and urban riots at home. But when the fogs of war and chaos cleared years later, he was remembered by many as a last vestige of Kennedy-era idealism."

Robert D. McFadden in The New York Times reports the death of R. Sargent Shriver.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

John M. Broder in The New York Times reports the death of Edward M. Kennedy.

Andrew Sullivan writes an appreciation in The Sunday Times.