Robert F. Kennedy's Wasted Potential

Description: Robert Kennedy was poised to redefine American liberalism.

Question: Who was your greatest influence?

Transcript: Well I think as a child, it was mainly family. And in terms of political figures, the person I admired most was Robert Kennedy, who I think was poised when he was running . . . seeking the Democratic nomination for President in 1968. I think he was poised to put American politics on. . . really on a different footing to redefine American liberalism. And he was tragically assassinated. And so much of the creativity and hope that was associated with Robert Kennedy, in that moment, was shattered and lost. So in terms of political figures, I think he’s the person in my lifetime whom I most admire. And then there were intellectual figures later when I became interested in political philosophy.

Question: A Fallen Hero

Well I was 15 years old and living in Los Angeles when he was shot. And he was there just having won the California primary. So I heard about it, I think, on the radio when I woke up that morning to go to school. And I still remember that very vividly. At the time I was . . . I think at the time I was rooting for Hubert Humphrey. He, after all, held from Minnesota, from where I also came. And my parents were traditional Democrats. And it was only in retrospect, really, that I came to regard Robert Kennedy as a kind of hero. I didn’t fully appreciate the time he ran, or the time he was assassinated. The way in which his take on American politics, and his dissatisfaction with the prevailing terms of political discourse, and liberal political discourse actually held out a kind of promise. So I didn’t really fully appreciate that at the time. And it was only in retrospect, looking at the way American politics unfolded, and reading more about American political history that I really came to admire him as fully as I do now.

Question: RFK’s Legacy

Transcript: Well I think that by the late 1960s, liberalism – which had the great moral energy in the 1950s with the Civil Rights Movement, and then with the protest against the Vietnam War – it was liberalism that made the deepest contact with . . . with moral values and with spiritual questions, really. And after the 1960s, liberalism lost the moral energy, it seems to me. And by 1980 with Ronald Reagan, there was a kind of moral void that was filled by conservatives. And so we saw the rise of Jerry Falwell and the moral majority. And Reagan tapped into this, and he claimed for conservatives a kind of monopoly on the moral and spiritual resources of American public life. And so through the 1980s – beginning in the ‘70s and through the ‘80s – liberals became very wary of moral and spiritual questions in politics. They came to think of morality and politics as the province of the religious right and right-wing conservatives. And they worried – liberals did – that to bring moral arguments and spiritual questions into politics risked the coercion ________, and so it should be kept at a distance. I think that was a great mistake, and I think it ceded to conservatives – beginning with Ronald Reagan – a kind of monopoly on the moral and spiritual sources of American politics. And so in retrospect, I saw Robert Kennedy as someone who really did see the need to reinvigorate the spiritual dimension of American liberalism.

Recorded on: 6/12/07