Bobby and Barak

TOM HAYDEN

Bobby and Barak


For one who has experienced both eras, the current movement for Barack Obama has achieved a living remembrance of Bobby Kennedy's campaign in the week when RFK's murder is painfully remembered.

On June 4, 1968, I watched from a New York townhouse the murder of a second Kennedy in five years. Martin Luther King already was gone, Vietnam and our cities were burning. I was in the midst of chaotic planning for anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic Convention coming in August.

I drifted off with friends to St. Patrick's Cathedral where Kennedy staffers let us through the doors late at night. After sitting a while in silence, I found myself as a member of a makeshift honor guard standing next to his simple coffin. I was wearing a green Cuban hat and weeping. The last political hope of the Sixties vision -- a movement-driven progressive government -- was finished, whether by chance or plot, it mattered little. The violence I had resisted under white racism in the South was seeping into my veins. Like many who took their rage even farther, I was hardening, and never dared again to recover my young idealism.

"Dad, don't you recognize anything of yourself in this movement?", asked an angry email from my son Troy, nearly forty years later. He was working 24/7 with his [now] wife Simone, for Barack Obama, spreading the boundless energy of the young and an artist's flair for silk-screens. How could I share your giddy utopianism, I wanted to respond, after the murders of the Sixties icons -- John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, all of whom I had known as a young man? [MORE »]

hat tip to krinda