RFK's life from 1964 to early 1968

Robert F. Kennedy left the Johnson cabinet to run a U.S. Senate seat in New York State. This was nine months after his brother’s assassination. He announced his candidacy on August 22, 1964. This was 2 days before that year’s Democratic National Convention. He thought of running during the early spring, but he also considered leaving politics altogether. This was after the plane crash and the injury of his brother Ted Kennedy in June 1964. RFK was praised during his concurrent trips to Germany and Poland, the denizens of the latter country’s greetings by Kennedy being interpreted by Learning as evaporating the agony he had sustained since his brother’s passing. Kennedy was given permission to run by the New York State Democratic Committee on September 1, amid mixed feelings in regards to his candidacy. Despite their notoriously difficult relationship, Johnson gave great support to RFK’s campaign. His opponent in the 1964 race was the Republican incumbent Kenneth Kealing, who attempted to portray Kennedy as an arrogant “carpetbagger.” RFK accused Keating of having “not done much of anything constructive” despite his presence in Congress during a September 8 press conference. Kennedy won the November election. This was helped in part by Johnson’s huge victory margin in New York State. Attention was on him when he was the U.S. Senator representing New York. He was in Congress and drew more than 50 senators as spectators when he delivered a speech in the Senate on nuclear proliferation in June 1965. Yet, he saw a decline in his political power from the President’s most trusted advisor with JFK to one of 100 Senators. He was impatient with the process as a Senator. He had to work in collaborative lawmaking. His fellow senator Fred R. Harris was his ally. They worked as best friends. Kennedy’s younger brother Ted had more seniority in the Senate than Robert F. Kennedy. Robert saw his brother as a guide on managing within the Senate. This arrangement made them closer as brothers. Senator Harris said that RFK was intense about matters and issues that concerned him. Kennedy had a reputation as ready to debate. Yet, his blunt style of talking to other senators caused him to be unpopular with many of his colleagues. As early as 1965, Robert F. Kennedy in the Senate advocated for gun control. In May of 1965, he co-sponsored S.1592. This was proposed by President Johnson and was sponsored by Senator Thomas J. Dodd that would put federal restrictions on mail-order gun sales. Speaking in support of the bill, Kennedy said, "For too long we dealt with these deadly weapons as if they were harmless toys. Yet their very presence, the ease of their acquisition and the familiarity of their appearance have led to thousands of deaths each year. With the passage of this bill we will begin to meet our responsibilities. It would save hundreds of thousands of lives in this country and spare thousands of families…grief and heartache….” In remarks during a May 1968 campaign stop in Roseburg, Oregon, Kennedy defended the bill as keeping firearms away from "people who have no business with guns or rifles": the bill forbade "mail order sale of guns to the very young, those with criminal records and the insane," according to The Oregonian's report.  S.1592 and subsequent bills, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, paved the way for the eventual passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968.

RFK and his staff had employed a cautionary “amendments-only” strategy for his first year in the Senate. In 1966 and 1967, they took more direct legislative action. Yet, they were met with more resistance from the Johnson administration. U.S. News reported Kennedy’s support of the Johnson administration’s “Great Society” program through his voting record. Kennedy supported both major and minor parts of the program and each year, over 60% of his roll call votes were consistently in favor of Johnson’s policies. On February 8, 1966, Robert F. Kennedy urged the United States to pledge that it would not be the first country to use nuclear weapons against countries that did not have them noting that China had made the pledge and the Soviet Union indicated it was also willing to do so.  In June 1966, he visited apartheid era South Africa accompanied by his wife, Ethel, and a few aides. The tour was greeted with international praise at a time when few politicians were involved in the politics of South Africa. He spoke out against the oppression of the black population in South Africa and was welcomed by the black population like he was visiting head of state. In an interview with Look magazine he said the following: “…At the University of Natal in Durban, I was told the church to which most of the white population belongs teaches apartheid as a moral necessity. A questioner declared that few churches allow black Africans to pray with the white because the Bible says that is the way it should be, because God created Negroes to serve. 'But suppose God is black', I replied. 'What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?' There was no answer. Only silence…” At the University of Cape Town, he delivered the annual Day of Affirmation Address. A quote from this address appeared on his memorial at Arlington National Cemetery: “...Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope." On January 28, 1967, Robert Kennedy started a 10 day stay in Europe. He met with Harold Wilson in London. He advised him to tell President Johnson about his belief that the ongoing Vietnam conflict was wrong. Upon returning to the U.S. in early February, he was confronted by the press who asked him if his conversations abroad had negatively impacted American foreign relations.

During his time as a Senator, Robert Kennedy helped to start a successful redevelopment project in poverty stricken Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn in New York City. Schlesinger wrote that Kennedy had hoped Bedford-Stuyvesant would become an example of self-imposed growth for other impoverished neighborhoods. Kennedy had difficultly securing support from LBJ, whose administration was charged by Kennedy as having opposed a “special impact” program meant to bring about federal progress that he had supported. Robert B. Semple Jr. repeated similar sentiments in September 1967, writing that the Johnson administration was preparing "a concentrated attack" on Robert F. Kennedy's proposal that Semple claimed would "build more and better low-cost housing in the slums through private enterprise." Kennedy confided to journalist Jack Newfield that while he tried collaborating with the administration through courting its members and compromising with the bill, "They didn't even try to work something out together. To them it's all just politics." RFK also visited the Mississippi Delta as a member of the Senate committee. He reviewed the effectiveness of the War on Poverty programs like of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. Marian Wright Edelman described Kennedy as “deeply moved and outraged” by the sight of the starving children living “in the economically abysmal climate.” It changed her impression of him from “tough, arrogant, and politically driven.” Edelman noted further that the senator requested she call on Martin Luther King Jr. to bring the impoverished to Washington, D.C., to make them more visible, leading to the creation of the Poor People's Campaign. Kennedy worked on the Senate Labor Committee at the time of the activism of Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) in support of workers' rights and flew out to Delano, California, to investigate the situation. Although the first two hearings in March 1966 for legislation to amend the National Labor Relations Act to include farm workers received little attention, Kennedy's attendance at the third hearing, at the request of Walter Reuther, brought media coverage. Biographer Thomas wrote that Kennedy was moved after seeing the conditions of the workers, who he deemed were being taken advantage of. Chavez stressed to Kennedy that migrant workers needed to be recognized as human beings. Kennedy later engaged in an exchange with Kern County sheriff Leroy Galyen where he criticized the sheriff's deputies for taking photographs of "people on picket lines."

When he was a Senator, RFK was popular among African Americans and other minorities including Native Americans plus immigrant groups. He spoke forcefully in favor of what he called the disaffected, the impoverished and the excluded. He aligned himself with the leaders of the civil rights struggle and social justice campaigners. He caused the Democratic Party to pursue a more aggressive agenda to eliminate discrimination on all levels. He supported desegregation busing, integration of all public facilities, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and anti-poverty social programs to increase education, offer opportunities for employment, and provide health care for African Americans. Consistent with President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, he also placed increasing emphasis on human rights as a central focus of U.S. foreign policy. On Vietnam, the JFK administration had backed U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world as part of fighting the Cold War. Yet, RFK wasn't known to be involved in discussion on the Vietnam War when he was attorney general. According to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, before choosing to run for the Senate, Kennedy had sought an ambassadorship to South Vietnam. Entering the Senate, Kennedy initially kept private his disagreements with President Johnson on the war. While Kennedy vigorously supported his brother's earlier efforts, he never publicly advocated commitment of ground troops. He was bothered by the bombing of North Vietnam on February of 1965, but he didn’t want to wish antipathetic to LBJ’s agenda. By April of 1965, Robert Kennedy was advocating a halt to bombing to Johnson. LBJ acknowledged that Kennedy played a part in influencing his choice to temporarily cease bombing the following month. Kennedy cautioned Johnson against sending combat troops as early as 1965, but Johnson chose instead to follow the recommendation of the rest of his predecessor’s still intact staff of advisors. In July of 1965, Johnson made a large commitment of American ground forces to Vietnam. Kennedy made multiple calls for a settlement through negotiation. The next month, John Paul Vann, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, wrote that Kennedy "indicat[ed] comprehension of the problems we face", in a letter to the senator. In April 1966, Kennedy had a private meeting with Philip Heymann of the State Department's Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs to discuss efforts to secure the release of American prisoners of war in Vietnam. Kennedy wanted to press the Johnson administration to do more, but Heymann insisted that the administration believed the "consequences of sitting down with the Viet Cong" mattered more than the prisoners they were holding captive. On June 29 of that year, Kennedy released a statement disavowing President Johnson's choice to bomb Haiphong, but he avoided criticizing either the war or the president 's overall foreign policy, believing that it might harm Democratic candidates in the 1966 midterm elections. In August, the International Herald Tribune described Kennedy's popularity as outpacing President Johnson's, crediting Kennedy's attempts to end the Vietnam conflict which the public increasingly desired.

In early 1967, Robert Kennedy traveled into Europe. There, he had discussions about Vietnam with leaders and diplomats. One story was leaked to the State Department. It mentioned that RFK was seeking peace while President Johnson was pursuing the war. Johnson was convinced that Kennedy was undermining his authority. He voiced this during a meeting with Kennedy. Kennedy said that the interest of the European leaders was to pause the bombing while going forward with negotiations. Johnson declined to do so. On March 2, 1967, RFK outlined a three point plan to end the war which included suspending the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, and the eventual withdrawal of American and North Vietnamese soldiers from South Vietnam; this plan was rejected by Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who believed North Vietnam would never agree to it. On May 15, 1967, Kennedy debated Governor of California Ronald Reagan about the war. On November 26, 1967, during an appearance on Face the Nation, Kennedy asserted that the Johnson administration had deviated from his brother's policies in Vietnam, his first time contrasting the two administrations' policies on the war. He added that the view that Americans were fighting to end communism in Vietnam was "immoral.” On February 8, 1968, Kennedy delivered an address in Chicago, Illinois, where he critiqued Saigon "government corruption" and expressed his disagreement with the Johnson administration's stance that the war would determine the future of Asia. On March 14, Kennedy met with defense secretary Clark Clifford at the Pentagon regarding the war. Clifford's notes indicate that Kennedy was offering not to enter the ongoing Democratic presidential primary if President Johnson would admit publicly to having been wrong in his war policy and appoint "a group of persons to conduct a study in depth of the issues and come up with a recommended course of action.” Johnson rejected the proposal. On April 1, after President Johnson halted bombing of North Vietnam, RFK said the decision was a "step toward peace" and though offering to collaborate with Johnson for national unity, opted to continue his presidential bid. On May 1, while in Lafayette, Indiana, Kennedy said continued delays in beginning peace talks with North Vietnam meant both more lives lost and the postponing of the "domestic progress" hoped for by the US. Later that month, Kennedy called the war "the gravest kind of error" in a speech in Corvallis, Oregon. In an interview on June 4, hours before he was shot, Kennedy continued to advocate for a change in policy towards the war.


By Timothy