What would Robert Kennedy think? It’s a question that has occurred to me this campaign season, and not just because it was his eldest daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who announced on Facebook that George H.W. Bush told her he was voting for Hillary Clinton. Townsend, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland who was defeated by Republican Bob Ehrlich for governor, is a partisan Democrat and also, at least in my limited observations, a very nice person (even if members of the Bush family are cross with her over her Facebook disclosure). That she is a Clinton supporter is hardly a surprise.
What I find more interesting is the approaches to this year’s presidential campaign taken by Robert Kennedy’s two chief speechwriters in his 1968 presidential campaign, Adam Walinsky and Jeff Greenfield. These very young speechwriters — Walinsky was 31 and Greenfield 24 when Kennedy was assassinated by a Palestinian terrorist in June 1968 — have had interesting and successful careers in the nearly half-century since.
Walinsky, who has become seriously involved in policing issues in the 1980s and 1990s, is strong for Donald Trump this year, as he explains in an article in Politico. Trump’s stand on policing is important for him, as is Hillary Clinton’s 2002 support of the Iraq war and the 2011 Libyan intervention.
Greenfield, who has worked for CBS, ABC, CNN and PBS and has written multiple books, continues in an analytic mode, writing most recently about the “myth” of the Democratic lock on the Electoral College, and how Hillary Clinton’s “bad September” could aid her campaign (by spurring fence-sitters or third-party supporters to be fearful that Trump could actually win). I’m assuming he’s a Clinton voter, but he’s been critical of her and of Trump as well.
Walinsky and Greenfield are examples of how two talented people working for the same politician can take different paths in politics and public life over the years. The Robert Kennedy they worked for (and whom I supported in 1968) was to be sure an unusual poilitician, with ties to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (the godfather of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend) as well as the liberal left.
In an article in the Daily Beast last fall, Greenfield made the case that Kennedy was “a tough-minded, passionate advocate not just for the dispossessed, but for policies that might actually do something to make those lives better.” He notes that in 1965, his first year in the Senate and the high water mark of Great Society liberalism, “Kennedy was asking: Is this really the way to fight poverty? He attacked the welfare system, arguing that it robbed recipients of the pride that comes with work; that it demonstrated a cynical refusal of those in power to empower the poor with jobs and self-sufficiency. Instead of simply celebrating the great label Triumph of Federal Aid to Education, he would ask, ‘What’s happening with the money?'”
That’s an approach we don’t get much from those who style themselves progressives these days, including Hillary Clinton, nor from Donald Trump, though it is echoed by Speaker Paul Ryan as it was by his mentor Jack Kemp. Something to keep in mind 48 years after what was an even more terrible campaign year than this one.
