Speakers Call for a Revival of Robert Kennedy’s Ideals

Calls for a revival of the ideals of Robert F. Kennedy and expressions of hope that America may soon enter a more progressive political era marked a daylong conference in Los Angeles Saturday commemorating the 20th anniversary of Kennedy’s last campaign.

Three of Kennedy’s children, numerous political associates, farm labor leader Cesar Chavez and former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. joined hundreds of Kennedy faithful in attending the event at Loyola-Marymount University.

It was two decades ago that Kennedy, running for the Democratic presidential nomination in the California primary, campaigned against the Vietnam war and for racial justice. It was just moments after winning that contest, on June 5, 1968, that he was mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullets in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

The speakers Saturday seemed anxious to look to the future. Kennedy’s daughter, Kathleen Kennedy-Townsend, struck the predominant note when she declared:

‘Pass on the Spirit’

“The real job is to pass on the spirit that we share today to our children. The young will always reach for something better if it is there for them . . . If we do not do this, who will?”

But so far, Townsend lamented, “our leaders have not articulated these larger public goals. They don’t speak forthrightly about the real issues, and so we cannot have shared solutions.”

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., author of books about both John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, declared in a keynote speech that American politics runs in 30-year cycles, and it may be the liberal turn once again.

“Reaganland is finished, bankrupt, used up, played out,” Schlesinger said to loud applause. “And now at last, it is truly bedtime for Bonzo. . . .

“Kennedy is no longer irrelevant. The time is here for a great new effort to redeem the promise of American life.” In the audience, Brown, the former governor, said he hopes 1988 will see “a landmark election,” but, he observed, the Democratic candidates so far lack “the real conviction Robert Kennedy had.”

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), head of a leading civil rights group, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, when Kennedy was U.S. attorney general, said that in Kennedy’s assassination, America lost something it had up until now been unable to recover.

“But maybe we are on the verge of coming out of it,” he said.

References to Jackson, Dukakis

The speeches contained scattered favorable references to the presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, and Schlesinger said that “faintly if unmistakably” Gov. Michael Dukakis reflects the progressive tradition.

But Kennedy biographer Jack Newfield said he fears that “half of Jackson and half of Dukakis would only add up to half of Kennedy.”