RFK's Collected Works Provide Powerful Lessons For Today

The inspirational words and actions of the murdered 1968 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy came alive once more during a book lecture on April 10 by his eldest daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and biographer Richard “Rick” Allen at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

The speakers, drawing from  RFK: His Words For Our Times, a 480-page book republished last year, provided a compelling and entertaining discussion of why the senator exemplified leadership qualities of enduring value to the public.

RFK, who launched his presidential campaign during the Vietnam War-torn year of 1968 in a challenge to the Democratic incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson, faced a stressed and angry electorate comparable to those of today, the speakers said. 

His memorable method included appeals to the public’s better nature along with a daring and at times courageous willingness to travel to opposition locales. “RFK had a predisposition to go into hostile crowds,” said Allen, a media executive and longtime political aide. “He constantly sought opportunities to wade into crowds that were not friendly.”

Townsend, a professor at Georgetown Law Center and a former lieutenant governor of Maryland, shared several examples of how such actions won over crowds. One such time was in 1966 when Kennedy accepted an invitation to speak at the University of Mississippi Law School. Kennedy, by then a U.S. senator representing New York, had been enormously unpopular three years previously as Attorney General under his brother John’s presidency by leading forced integration and voting rights efforts in compliance with court orders. 

Huge public opposition resulted in just a narrow 5-4 vote by the university’s regents to permit the speech to occur. The senator arrived with his wife, Ethel, holding hands, surprising some onlookers who had come to think of him as almost inhuman for trying to change the settled ways of segregation and voting restrictions.

The result by the end of the discussions, the daughter recalled, was a 10-minute standing ovation from the audience. “It was his view that if you talk honestly,” she recalled, “you can make a difference.”

The book, originally published in 1992 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the senator’s fatal shooting in 1968 just after he won California’s Democratic presidential primary, collects his major speeches, beginning with his years as a journalist and 1950s Senate committee counsel helping lead investigations of mobsters and corrupt union officials.

Most of RFK’s words are from his years as attorney general, senator and presidential candidate, with the goal of providing an intimate view of a wordsmith who achieved an enduring reputation for speaking persuasively to unify audiences even on such inherently divisive themes as war, peace, poverty and inequality.

“He was able to win over people,” Townsend said, “not by criticizing them but by asking what kind of nation they wanted to have.” 

She and Allen explained also RFK had a rare quality of holding seemingly contradictory ideas and acting on them in a positive way. One example was what they called “aggressive civility.”

Another was “substantive celebrity,” which Townsend described as using the Kennedy family’s undoubted celebrity during the 1960s to try to achieve solid results in public policy.

“It was not power for power’s sake,” Allen  said, “but to help those Americans who needed representation.”

Among Townsend’s introductions to this world of politics, she recalled, was her attendance at organized crime hearings in the 1950s at the age of three and four. One of her father’s targets was Frank Costello, whom Allen described as the head of the Genovese Mafia Family in New York and a known killer of at least five persons, while some said it was more than double that. 

Allen, who edited the book with Guthman, RFK’s former press secretary at the Justice Department, recalled that RFK remained undaunted even after hearing that his Senate’s work had prompted a threat via the grapevine that acid would be throw in the eyes of his children at some point to teach a lesson.

Townsend’s mother would take her to hearings instead of to a playground, said Allen (shown below at left).

“We learned early on,” Townsend added, ” that life was tough.”

As another lesson, she said, her father once returned from a trip to the Mississippi Delta to tell his children that he had seen some entire families living in homes only as big as their large kitchen in suburban Virginia, and that some of the children had bellies swollen from malnutrition.

“Do you know how lucky you are?” she recalled him saying after one such trip. “You have a responsibility. You have to do something for our country.”

A major theme of the book and lecture is that such words and lessons are applicable today. Thus, the book opens with introductory essays on that theme by former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, plus five Nobel Peace Prize laureates, two Pulitzer Prize winners (including conservative Peggy Noonan, the principle speech writer for President Ronald Reagan), and others.

The talk concluded with a question-and-answer segment, with highlights excerpted in a news account shown below.

One matter that arose in conversation at a reception before the lecture but not during it was that Townsend and her brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were two of the family members of four prominent assassination victims during the 1960s to announce earlier this year that they support new official investigations of the slain leaders — Robert Kennedy, his brother John Kennedy, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X — because of compelling evidence challenging official accounts of their deaths.

This editor and my guest, author Jefferson Morley, were two of the five dozen other signatories to the petition, which has led to formation of a Truth and Reconciliation Committee modeled on a similar movement created in South Africa. The purpose? To establish truths about that nation’s apartheid era without undertaking the necessarily controversial step of seeking prosecutions.

For the occasion of this book lecture, understandably enough, the focus was on RFK’s life and powerful legacy.

Our Justice Integrity Project (which took the accompanying photos) attends many book launches and other lectures. This one was exceptionally useful, thought-provoking and otherwise worthwhile.    

Contact the author Andrew Kreig

Related News Coverage

National Press Club, RFK’s civility, eloquence a lesson for today’s politicians, daughter says, Chris Teale, April 10, 2019. Robert F. Kennedy’s ability to win over hostile crowds and be civil during debates would serve politicians well in the present day, his daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said at the National Press Club Wednesday evening.

Townsend said Kennedy’s willingness to take on difficult opponents, like mob bosses or hostile crowds, calling for civil rights showed he wanted to engage with everyone and use civility while doing so.

Along with co-author and editor Rick Allen, she discussed their book, RFK: His Words For Our Times, which collates Robert Kennedy’s speeches and writings and puts them in the context of their time.

“He was able to win over people not by saying, ‘You’re selfish, you’re terrible,’ but by asking what kind of country you want to live in,” Townsend said of her father..

The book, re-released to mark the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s 1968 assassination, includes speeches he gave as attorney general, a U.S. Senator for New York and as a presidential candidate, as well as other writing. And given the current rancor surrounding the American political scene, Townsend and Allen said Kennedy’s words and actions are more important than ever.

Townsend recalled how he went to speak before pro-Communist crowds in places like Japan and Chile. In in the face of hostile crowds trying to drown out his speech, she said, he would welcome local leaders on-stage and debate issues with them. In Japan, Townsend said, his actions “rippled through Japanese society broadly and made him so popular it raised the level of respect for the United States immensely, enormously.”

As an elected official, Kennedy shed light on people in areas like Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta who lived in extreme poverty, using his high profile and the media to tell their stories.

Allen said that in Washington and elsewhere, it shocked people who were seeing “extraordinary poverty that most Americans couldn’t believe existed in our country.” Townsend said he used those trips as teaching moments for his children and younger generations.“He was always telling us how lucky we were, and how much we had to do for our country,” she said.

With campaigning for the 2020 election already underway, Townsend said the long campaign as candidates traverse the country stumping for votes will make candidates stronger and give voters a real choice. She also said it is important that they use language that doesn’t inflame divisions, which Kennedy was a master of.

Townsend recalled hearing him memorizing quotes from William Shakespeare in their bathroom, or referring to other great works of literature during his time in the car on the way to his office. It is rare, she said, to see politicians so obsessed with finding the right words.

“That doesn’t happen often for politicians, and it happened because he cared so much about language, about words and how it can lift us all up,” Townsend said.