“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another” As Attorney General during JFK’s presidency, Bobby had often played second fiddle to his older brother. But by 1968, Robert F. Kennedy had become a distinct political leader dedicated to social justice. In March he declared he would run in the primaries to become the Democratic presidential candidate. He galvanised support amongst marginalised communities, young people, and anti-war voters, and in the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination, he gave an emotional impromptu speech to a predominantly Black crowd, mentioning his own brother’s assassination for the first time in public. On the evening of June 4th, it was announced that Bobby had won the California primary. With bleeding palms from shaking so many hands along the campaign trail, he gave a victory speech to a crowded room of supporters in the Ambassador Hotel. But the joy was to come crashing down as tragedy struck the Kennedy family once more… Listen as Dominic and Tom discuss another of 1968’s American assassinations, and the build up to the moment when Bobby Kennedy died in the arms of a seventeen-year-old kitchen busboy. _______ *The Rest Is History LIVE in the U.S.A.* If you live in the States, we've got some great news: Tom and Dominic will be performing throughout America in November, with shows in San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston and New York. Tickets on sale now at TheRestIsHistory.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What motivated Robert F. Kennedy to run for president in 1968?
But Robert Kennedy, he loves nothing better than going off to California and meeting kind of Mexican migrant workers and squatting in the dust with them and talking about their lives. You know, he absolutely loves all this. He goes to the Mississippi Delta, some of the poorest parts of the United States. And he's visibly shocked and moved by the poverty.
You know, he's photographed with all these sort of starving children. And he says to the cameras, you could, if you were being cynical, say a slightly teenage way, or you could just say a very admirable way. He says, what kind of country are we that we spend $75 billion a year on guns? And we don't do anything for children like these who literally have flies crawling over their face.
Well, and $3 billion a year on dogs. That's rich coming from him with his zoo. Yeah, with his menagerie and his cockatoos and things. But that is essentially the Martin Luther King lines about space rockets and submarines and things.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely it is.
Same idea.
It is the same idea. He has a scheme to pour money into a very depressed part of New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant. He wants to basically get all his rich friends to set up projects and things for housing and jobs and stuff. He goes off to South Africa, apartheid South Africa, to give a speech at the University of Cape Town.
And has any leading historian of 1960s America written about this?
Do you know what? At any point in their career. Thank you, Tom. Thank you. Very nice. Very nicely done. This was the subject of my master's thesis. And the tragedy now is that I don't know where I've lost it. Oh, God. Have the Kennedys not suffered enough tragedies? I know. It was kind of pre, slightly pre-internet. I wrote it on like a word processor, you know, one of those kind of machines.
And I think it may be in the attic in some way, in some form, but I don't know how it would be possible to retrieve it.
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Chapter 2: How did Robert F. Kennedy respond to Martin Luther King's assassination?
Paul Newman, Dustin Hoffman. Stravinsky, I read. Stravinsky. Is he still around? Stravinsky at the age of a thousand. A hundred thousand. The other thing is you cannot put into words how much he hates Robert Kennedy. He absolutely despises him. He says, first of all, he says, Robert Kennedy is a coward.
He says, the Kennedy people were, and I quote, this is a very good line, they were willing to stay up on the mountain and light signal fires and bonfires and dance in the light of the moon, but none of them came down. I tell you, I was a little lonely in New Hampshire. I walked alone. Now, when Robert Kennedy hears this, he's steam coming out of rage, coming out of his ears.
He also says Kennedy is a wimp. Quote, he plays touch football. I play football. He plays softball. I play baseball. He skates in Rockefeller Center. I play hockey. And then my favorite line, which leads me to believe that he would actually have been a very good presenter on the rest is history. This is very rest is history vibe. He says, Kennedy is thick.
I got an A in economics and Bobby only got a C. Imagine saying that. Imagine going around saying that. That's exactly what I would do, actually, if I ran for president. I'd go in with my GCSE results. So it's a shame that McCarthy ended up disliking you so much when you had so much in common. I think we had so much in common. I think there was only room really for one of us.
I think that was the thing. Well, like McCarthy and Kennedy. The interesting thing. So do you want to hear about my discovery?
Yes. So this is your archival discovery.
Yeah. My discovery. And what the tragic thing is, I made this discovery and I wrote about it and nobody cared or has ever acknowledged it. Well, this is your chance to make amends for that. I discovered in Hubert Humphrey's papers that Hubert Humphrey was secretly funding McCarthy's campaign. That is a bombshell. Bombshell.
Was channeling money to McCarthy's campaign because there's all these... I mean, that's a properly genuine revelation. There's messages from go-betweens saying McCarthy would need more money in Oregon. McCarthy says, hold off on the money. He can deal with Bobby for us. Because McCarthy and Humphrey had been pals in Minnesota.
And I also found a letter in George McGovern's papers from McCarthy's campaign manager. And he says, I was literally handed envelopes of cash by one of Humphrey's backers. So there you go. Isn't that interesting? That is interesting. Robert Kennedy faces this real uphill struggle. He's got Huber Humphrey, who's doing all these backroom deals to get delegates.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of Kennedy's victory speech?
It's a small town, farming state, very well-educated, very white, very progressive, perfect for Eugene McCarthy. And Kennedy, when he gets there, he doesn't like it. He says to his aides, this place is like one giant suburb. Let's face it, I appeal best to people who have problems. McCarthy's in his element. He's kind of going to all these little liberal arts colleges and whatnot.
They've got little bookshop, bookstores.
Yeah, he loves it. Poetry sections. Exactly. And he is, to use the vernacular much loved by our former producer, Dom Johnson... He rinses Kennedy about Vietnam and about the Cold War. And he says, look, he was part of the people who got us into this mess, right? He was a Cold War hawk. He's part of the military-industrial complex. That's a term that McCarthy's using a lot at this point.
He's absolutely part of the military-industrial complex. All his friends are in the military-industrial complex. Why would you vote for someone like this, who is clearly part of the problem, not part of the solution? The result? McCarthy wins, 45% to 39%. The first time a Kennedy has ever lost a public election. And that's the headline. The Kennedys are not invincible. They can be beaten.
And this kind of guy who everyone was saying was a joke six months ago... They're not laughing now. Yeah, the guy who was talking about the Punic Wars, he's just wiped the floor with Kennedy. So what you have now is a situation where... Hubert Humphrey is still accumulating on his delegates, by the way. But the left of centre of American politics is clearly being divided in two.
On the one hand, you have... the suburban middle class, the university people, well-heeled, the guardian readers of America. They are team Eugene McCarthy. And on the other hand, you have obviously the Camelot fan club, but you also have black voters, Hispanics, people who feel that they are, as it were, towards the bottom, the losers of society, if you like. They are Kennedy's people.
He keeps hoping that McCarthy will drop out or will reach a compromise. McCarthy despises him so much, and of course has all this Humphrey money, that there's no way he's ever going to do that. So it's all going to come down to California. California's primary is on the 4th of June and California is massively important. It's just overtaken New York as the biggest state in the union.
And also the eyes of the world are on it.
Exactly. The summer of love, the hippies and all that. Exactly.
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