Tag: RFK

Fathers and Sons: Disease and Hubris

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Robert F. Kennedy Sr.

The late Robert F. Kennedy, who ran for President in 1968, could be considered a great man and even more commendably, a good man. It wasn’t always so. As a young ambitious lawyer he served under Joseph McCarthy during the hearings meant to weed out communists from American politics. Those hearings ruined many a life and are a stain on American history. He was an early supporter of the Vietnam War, perhaps our most ill-considered and violent venture overseas. In short, he was as misguided as a young man as his now seventy-one-year-old son RFK Jr is as an old man. The big difference is that the father evolved over the years from vast experience and from the terrible loss when his own brother was assassinated. He went from a cocky, overly ambitious lawyer to a compassionate man tempered by pain.

His son RFK Jr has traveled the opposite life arc. He began his career as a promising and effective environmental lawyer and in a story worthy of Greek tragedy, took on the arrogance of an Agamemnon or an Icarus. If you like the classics, you’ll recall that Agamemnon, the protagonist in a play written by Aeschylus, committed a great act of hubris. He sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia to get favorable winds for his warships on their way to Troy.

RFK’s act of hubris is assuming he has the background and ability to manage something as massive and complicated as Health and Human Services, by far the biggest budgeted department in the US government, weighing in at $1.6 trillion. Its budget dwarfs the Department of Defense. Health and Human Services has 80,000 employees and oversees some of our most important agencies including The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Medicare and Medicaid Services.

In many ways choosing that secretary should a be a president’s most important decision. The effectiveness of the CDC alone may well determine whether the next pandemic is stopped in its tracks or kills millions of people. The FDA works hand-in-hand with the CDC in determining which vaccines can and can’t be released, which medicines are ready for market, and how to keep our food supply safe. In other words, the person in charge of all this should be very good at managing money, tens of thousands of people from diverse professions, and have either a strong science background or at least the humility to defer to those who do. Read more »

Monday, October 9, 2023

1968 Part II: The Center Vaporizes

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

There was a sense everywhere, in 1968, that things were giving. That man had not merely lost control of his history, but might never regain it. —Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man

Robert F. Kennedy speaking to a crowd outside the Justice Department, 1963. U.S. News and World Report collection, Library of Congress.

Last month, I wrote about Eugene McCarthy’s Vietnam-based primary challenge to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s reelection campaign, the angst-ridden mid-March entry into the race by Robert F. Kennedy, and LBJ’s stunning withdrawal on March 31, 1968. I ended with April 4, when the “Dreamer,” Martin Luther King, was assassinated.

Some of the chaos that ensued is the subject of this piece. “Things were giving,” seemingly everywhere, and all at the same time. America’s ability to deflect the course of history as it accelerated toward the unknown was disappearing. The months that followed the King assassination were punctuated by more violence, more uncertainty, and the continued deterioration of social discourse.

None of this appeared out of thin air. Grassroots efforts on Vietnam and on civil rights had been intensifying for years, as had been the backlash to those movements. FDR’s New Deal coalition was fraying, most notably in the South, but also in the industrial Midwest. 1968 was also to be the last stand of the “Liberal” Republicans, people like Nelson Rockefeller, Charles Percy, and John Lindsay. We think about them and their ambitions with an amused raised eyebrow, but, at the time, they were men of reputation and influence.

There were so many crosscurrents, so many strange alliances, that it’s difficult to trace each causation, but if you want to pick up on an organizing thread other than Vietnam, look to George Wallace. History frames Wallace largely as the segregationist that he was (after losing his first run for office for being more moderate than his opponent, he vowed “never to be out-n…ed again”). It sometimes skips over how Wallace had a broader message, anchored by the emotional appeal of his racism, but also including perennial themes of law and order and economic and social grievances that resonated in people’s lives. Read more »