Robert F. Kennedy, who died 50 years ago this week, appears as a sort of “Mr. 1960s” in the new four-part Netflix documentary series bearing his name. There he is in a grainy recording working the floor of the 1960 Democratic National Convention, prospecting for votes for his brother. In crisp monochrome, he is sleeves furled and all-business at the Justice Department. Here, he spars with Alabama governor George Wallace, dispatches troops to integrate the state’s main public university, and schools Southern lawmakers denying blacks the vote on the Constitution. Later, he kibitzes with Cesar Chavez and migrant workers in California, travels the grim folkways of rural poverty in Mississippi and Appalachia, and bears witness to urban blight in New York City. The hair grows flouncier as the decade begins to swing (he’s forever fussing with that recalcitrant forelock) and the footage becomes saturated in color. In multiple frames, he’s borne through milling mob scenes. Politicians today would scarcely appear in such unruly moshes (let alone excite such adulation), but there he is advancing through the churning melee, an aide’s arm clamped about his midriff to prevent him being yanked bodily from the motorcade as he clasps outstretched arms. His single senatorial term looks like a one-man shadow presidency.
Bobby Kennedy for President chronicles its subject’s awakening to the issues—civil rights, peace in Vietnam, and an adequately-funded war on poverty—that defined his platform as a presidential candidate in 1968 and the events and experiences that acted like a refining fire on his beliefs. It’s narrated by aides and intimates, but it’s in the unmediated archive footage that it soars.
Many will have read or heard the remarkable speech Kennedy delivered in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968 but it bears revisiting. It fell to him to inform a restive crowd that Martin Luther King had been killed. Kennedy had blocked out notes, but that was the extent of its scripting; the stakes were high, with a possibility of violent disorder should his delivery of the news be poorly received. A more tremulous soul might have begged off—as some advised—or played it safe. Certainly, you’d insert yourself into a community’s grief at your peril. Yet he brought up his own feelings after his brother’s murder, and the disarming words and gentle delivery were a balm. Indianapolis was peaceful that night.
More obscure in the documentary are outtakes from ads he recorded for his 1964 New York senate race. He is unprepossessing, stumbling over his words.
There are reminders of that sense of noblesse oblige. “It was stressed in our family that because we had these tremendous advantages . . . other people did not have that . . . we had a responsibility to others,” he says in an interview. “I’d like to serve,” he tells students at Columbia. Servant leader or entitled princeling? Take your pick.
At moments, he seems keenly ahead of his time. Extolling public-private partnership he evokes a Blair-Clinton wonk from the 1990s. The British invasion mop-top anticipates the barbered manes of, say, John Edwards or Justin Trudeau. And could the thumbs-up fist he wielded during some speeches for effect—incisive without being scolding—be a progenitor of the “Clinton thumb”?
The soundtrack morphs through the narrative. The opening score suggests the suave man of action but also, in its guitar and sax squalls, uncontainable animal spirits. As the mayhem mounts and time ticks down to June 5, 1968, there’s a dissonant, portentous screech.
Perplexingly, the documentary’s terminal act occurs toward the end of Episode 3. Much of the final episode is devoted to whether Sirhan Sirhan acted alone. Some witnesses heard more shots than he could have fired, the mortal bullets’ trajectories don’t seem to fit with his position, a woman is reported fleeing the scene yelling, “We’ve shot him,” a Kennedy-begrudging guard had the means and opportunity, and there are allegations police discarded evidence. There’s a credible argument to be made that in its fixation on an insanity plea to spare Sirhan the death penalty, the defense let the prosecution off lightly, and that amid assassination-fatigue the police investigation was not as thorough as it might have been. Conversely, perhaps it would be more surprising if everyone’s stories concurred amid the chaos and panic. And it doesn’t seem a stretch to suppose the fleeing woman was referring to the collective “we.” Not that it assuages the doubters but a subsequent inquiry upheld Sirhan’s lone guilt. Either way, another Kennedy death trails off in ellipses rather than closure.
What Bobby Kennedy for President doesn’t get into is what-if. Counterfactuals seem especially fraught in this case. Commentators have noted the coveted bloc of minorities and working-class whites Kennedy stitched together in the primaries. This augured well for the general election. But could he have scaled it up? All we’re left with are the closing visuals: the moving passage of the train from New York to Washington bearing his body to Arlington. Blacks, whites, Hispanics, inner-city residents, suburbanites and country folk thronged the route. It was a remarkable pageant of unity in a factious year.
