November 21, 2017--Civil Wrongs and Rights

Though I know at least half the books about the Kennedys are hagiographies, about Camelot and all that, and half of the other half are about their dark side--their involvement with the Mafia, Cuba, and the women (Marilyn and dozens of others)--still when another Kennedy book comes along before I come up for air I'm halfway through it and the tears are already flowing about what was (Jack's presidency) and what might have been (Bobby and Teddy's thwarted White House aspirations).

So, I'm more than halfway through Chris Matthews's Bobby softball biography, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit. It's no more than halfway decent but, for the Kennedy junkie that I am, that's enough. More stitched together and racing along in jump cuts it lacks the flow and insight of his book about Kennedy and Nixon, Kennedy & Nixon, for me still the best explication of Nixon's turbulent inner world as exposed by his complicated feelings about the Kennedys, especially Jack.

This son of a grocer from dusty Yorba Linda, California, Nixon was no Kennedy. And, sadly, he was daily aware of that more than anyone.

The good Bobby, the one that emerged later in life a year or two after his brother was assassinated, devoted his last years to calling for equal treatment of all Americans, especially the forgotten ones in impoverished Appalachia, sharecroppers' hardscrabble farms in the Black Belt of the Mississippi Delta, the migrant worker camps in the steaming valleys of California, and the churning inner cities.

The tears flowed for me for the first time when Matthews wrote about the integration of the University of Alabama in June, 1963. It was Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General who mobilized the forces to implement the court order to allow two black students to register. The iconic scene etched in most American's memories was of the diminutive Alabama governor George Wallace, surrounded by state troopers, standing in the doorway to thwart their enrollment.

In the close background the millions who watched this confrontation on live TV, could see the fury, the hatred on the faces of local Alabamans who gathered to bring the threat of violence to the situation.

Also watching this on television were the Kennedy brothers. 

Jack soon had enough and told Bobby and his staff to arrange for a primetime half hour with the three networks for later that evening. He intended to make a speech about what he was witnessing and feeling.

That night, to the nation, he said--

I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents. . . . 

This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened. . . . 

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Five months later Jack was shot dead in Dallas and almost exactly five years after that Bobby was gunned down in Los Angeles on the night he won the California primary, which likely would have led to his nomination to face Nixon for the presidency, as his brother had in 1960.

With this era in mind and especially thinking about the Trump presidency and racial strife, which continues even after eight years of Barak Obama's presidency, Rona suggested we see the new movie a friend, Jonathan Sanger, produced, Marshall, about a case that Thurgood Marshall tried in 1940 some years before he became the first Negro to be appointed to the Supreme Court.

It is a very good movie which I urge you to see before it disappears into Netflix.

It is about an actual trial during which Marshall takes the lead in defending a black man accused of raping a white woman. On the surface, sadly familiar territory, but in this film, based on an actual case, the events and trial are not set in Mississippi or Alabama (as, for example, is To Kill A Mockingbird) but in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

The script is tight, the acting and direction generally flawless, the story upsetting and riveting, but, stepping back for a moment, most remarkable and important is to be reminded that this trial took place in the Northeast. 

For those of us who like to think of ourselves as a bit superior to those in the middle of the country, it is good to be reminded that less than an hour from New York City, not so many years ago, things were not so different when it came to what used to be called "race relations."

Both the Matthews' book and Marshall are vivid reminders of that.