The Largest Loss

Of all the death that this society endured during the 60's, there were two sorts. The micro and the macro. On the macro side were the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam, with an average age of 19. 19. No voting. No beer. No fatherhood. Just high school and then death. Add to that 3,000,000 Vietnamese, and macro is macro indeed.

On micro side were the handful of political assassinations which greased the wheels of the larger slaughter. Medgar Evars. John Kennedy. Malcolm X. Martin King. Robert Kennedy. Fred Hampton.

And of all those losses, each one unbearable in and of itself, the loss of Robert Kennedy was the greatest.

By all accounts, Robert Kennedy was a spoiled brat who never had to hold down a square job, a petulant and moralizing son of a bitch, who paraded his ruthless ambition for his older brother as selfless public service, like the most cynical Roman general, seizing power "for the good of the republic".

None of these accusations are necessarily untrue. Bobby Kennedy was no angel. He played a part in pursuing the assassination of Castro and the wire-tapping of King, among other sordid acts. But Bobby changed.

There are certain things you can't fake, even if you are as cynical and hypocritical as Kennedy haters believed Bobby to be. And Bobby Kennedy did not fake his reaction to John Kennedy's murder.

For reasons which can only be adequately parsed in another blog, Bobby Kennedy lived his last 5 years believing that he was partly responsible for his brother's death. He changed. He learned, overnight and instinctively, to relate with those who have suffered unbearable loss.

And during his campaign in 1968, Bobby was saying things no American politician with a realistic chance of being elected president had said before or has said since.

He talked of moral failure in Vietnam, as opposed to simply bad judgment.

He talked about poverty as an act of criminal negligence by American society, as opposed to simply the unfortunate collateral damage of the nearly-perfect free market.

He talked about life, love, about intimate things, about what makes us human. He quoted Sophocles to all-black crowds in inner-city ghettos in the North. He visited dirt-floor shacks in the south, drawing news cameras into places where American children died of hunger, where many had ever seen a white man, never mind a television camera.

Was he riding his brother's corpse? Was he cynically changing his politics to accord with the polls? Was he destroying the Democratic party by running against the sitting Democratic president?

The answers to those questions only seem important because we are trained to see them as such. But if you think about it, those questions only matter to a few people. People with no floors in their houses didn't care about these things. Bobby Kennedy understood that.

There has been no man in American life who comes close to Bobby Kennedy in 1968. President Obama is the only man who has drawn the same frenzy from as many citizens, and as genuine as that frenzy was, and I must confess with pride to weeping with joy when Obama was elected, Barack is not a revolutionary. Bobby was.

And then he was murdered. Just like his brother, shot in the brain while with his wife, in front of dozens of onlookers.

When Teddy Kennedy eulogized his brother, he distilled what we had lost. Teddy had lost 4 of his 7 siblings to violent death. 2 in planes. 2 with bullets to the brain. And that shattered and flawed man was left to try to explain what Bobby's death meant.

Here is what he lived in those last 3 years: "Some men see things as they are and ask why; some men dream things that never were and ask 'why not'?"

Our largest loss.