Last summer, during a vacation drive through New England, I convinced my family to make a stop at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. While browsing through the museum shop, I came across a pile of paperback copies of a fascinating book by JFK's brother Bobby. These were not newly published versions of the book, but leftover copies printed during his 1968 Presidential campaign (in fact, the library's website still has copies available for sale). I bought a copy, initially as a collector's item, but having now read it several times, I'm impressed by its high-minded vision as well as its continuing relevance today."To Seek A Newer World" was not intended to be a campaign book. When it was first published in November 1967, Bobby Kennedy was not a Presidential contender, only a United States Senator from New York, where I lived at the time. The book is essentially a series of essays and excerpts from speeches covering his Senate term, to which he had been elected in 1964. Although some of his positions, particularly on the U.S. war in Vietnam, put him at odds with President Lyndon Johnson, everyone expected Johnson to seek re-election in 1968, and Bobby was at first unwilling to challenge his fellow Democrat in the primaries. It took another Democratic Senator, Gene McCarthy of Minnesota, to mount a campaign and demonstrate Johnson's vulnerability in the early primaries. By March of 1968, Bobby changed his mind and declared his own candidacy for the Presidency. On March 31, President Johnson announced on TV that he was dropping out of the election, suddenly making it a very real possibility that Senator Kennedy might be the Democratic candidate in the November general election. "To Seek A Newer World" was quickly updated with some more recent Kennedy statements on Vietnam, as well as the text of his campaign announcement, and rushed out as a "Special Campaign Edition" discount paperback. Sadly, that campaign was cut short less than three months after it began. On June 4, 1968 (43 years ago today), Kennedy won the California and South Dakota Democratic primaries. Moments after finishing his victory speech in Los Angeles, he was hit by gunfire, fell into a coma, and died on June 6. Vice President Hubert Humphrey became the Democratic candidate at the party's August convention, but his earlier reputation as a champion of civil rights and desegregation had by then been irreparably tarnished by his unquestioning support of Johnson's Vietnam War policies, and he was defeated in November by Republican Richard Nixon.
Reading "To Seek A Newer World" today provides some insight into how the course of history, and of the world, might have been different had Bobby lived to contest the election with Nixon.
The chapter on America's cities contains some frank discussion of past mistakes in the areas of public housing and urban renewal. "We rarely asked", wrote Kennedy, "those whose homes we leveled whether they liked the plan, and we thought too little about what would become of them after their homes were gone." Kennedy pointed to his own efforts in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, NYC as an alternative approach, where residents of the community held seats on the boards of the organizations making development decisions.
Bobby also devoted a chapter to the Alliance for Progress, the comprehensive program for Latin America that was a high point of his brother John's Presidency. After JFK's 1963 assassination, his successor Johnson did not give the Alliance a high priority, and Johnson's covert support of the Brazilian military's overthrow of the democratically elected Goulart administration in 1964, as well as the overt invasion by the U.S. Marines of the Dominican Republic in 1965, seemed to run counter to the Alliance's aims. RFK, however, displayed admirable insight into the root causes of the region's situation. Kennedy wrote empathetically of Latin Americans' "feeling with regard to foreign owners in the extractive industries - oil, minerals, metals - which are also criticized as depleting resources essential to their future. Few Latin Americans can fail to be sensitive to their history, to the centuries in which their mineral wealth was taken by a small privileged minority, to be sent abroad to the coffers of Spanish kings and then to the banks of Europe." This is precisely the theme of Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, the book which Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave to U.S. President Barack Obama in April 2009 in order to help Obama understand the region. Galeano first published his book in 1971, yet here was a U.S. Senator making some of the same points three years earlier.
Kennedy also stressed that the Alliance for Progress had always been underfunded. In a footnote, he pointed out that even if the current annual Alliance spending for all of Latin America were to be doubled, that total amount of money would be equal to the cost of what the U.S. was then spending for only two weeks' worth of the Vietnam war. Think about that - an amount of money that could have been spent for constructive purposes for all of Latin America for a year was instead being squandered in only two weeks for bombing, burning, and strafing a single country in Southeast Asia. Even when writing about Latin America, Bobby couldn't help bringing the subject back to the disastrous war being waged in Vietnam.
At several points in this book, Bobby complained about stubbornness and a lack of leadership: "there is no courage or discipline involved in following failure down the road to disaster"; "the courage to admit a mistake and retreat is not a universal characteristic of national leaders". He probably had then-President Johnson in mind when he wrote these words, but they could equally be applied to many of our Presidents since then.
Kennedy even reached back to a Shakespeare play to point out that governments frequently use wars to distract the people from problems at home. He quotes a line from Henry IV in which the king advises his son to "busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels". Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya seem to be doing a great job of "busying giddy minds" these days, leaving less time for serious debate about our domestic economy.
The book ends with a more hopeful and upbeat Postscript, containing perhaps one of Bobby's most quoted lines: "Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
Bullets may have stopped Senator Kennedy's quest for the Presidency, as well as his too-short life, but they could not stop the "ripples of hope" he set into motion. Go back, as I did, and revisit Robert F. Kennedy's remarkable writings; you'll find yourself inspired by his vision of hope for the future, and moved by his ripples.
