What JD Vance Gets Wrong About Bobby Kennedy
The answer is 'everything.'
JD Vance, who regularly promotes stochastic terrorism, is very upset about all the Donald Trump-specific political violence. During a rally this week, where he shamelessly blamed Democrats for the actions of unhinged white men with easy access to guns, he declared, “This country never healed from the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”
Although Robert Kennedy Jr. might’ve murdered his family’s legacy, he’s still very much alive. Vance presumably meant the former attorney general and New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy. (“Kennedy Jr.” isn’t the family name.) When RFK’s weirdo son abandoned his spoiler presidential campaign and endorsed Trump, Vance raved, “My grandmother loved two politicians in her entire life. FDR and RFK. I wish I could see her reaction to RFK’s son and namesake — and let’s be honest, the most authentic to his dad’s legacy — endorsing the people’s president, Donald J. Trump. Historic.” (The “people” have rejected Trump twice already.)
This was pretty revealing: Vance’s grandmother, Bonnie Blanton Vance, was born in the heart of Kentucky coal country and grew up in small-town Ohio. She personifies the ancestral white working class Democrats who embraced President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his New Deal policies, not just because he falsely imprisoned Japanese citizens.
Vance is MAGA’s own Jay Gatsby, who has pledged his allegiance to Orange Tom Buchanan, so it’s fitting that he’d swoon over Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s old money blood line. If RFK had lived and won the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, his Republican opponent would’ve been Richard Nixon — an honest-dealing statesman in comparison to Vance.
Senator, you’re not Bobby Kennedy
JD Vance claims that Robert Kennedy Jr. is “the most authentic to his dad’s legacy.” He prefaces this absurd statement with “let’s be honest,” which is a really bad con man’s tell that he’s lying. Vance isn’t the Ricky Roma of MAGA politics. He’s a desperate, flailing Shelley Levene.
However, unlike Vance, RFK actually believed in things. He wasn’t always on the right side of history, but he grew and changed, usually for the better — once again, unlike Vance.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon was actually considered stronger on civil rights than John F. Kennedy. A significant number of Black voters still supported the party of Lincoln, and they weren’t all tap-dancing for tips like Byron Donalds or Tim Scott. As Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon had worked with Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. Nixon even expressed regret that the final bill was weakened, but Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. thanked Nixon for his efforts: “Let me say before closing how deeply grateful all people of goodwill are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality.”
Dr. King’s father, Martin Luther King Sr., was a lifelong Republican who’d endorsed Nixon. He opposed JFK because he was Catholic (yes, that was a big deal at the time). This all changed when Dr. King was arrested in October 1960 for participating in a sit-in. He was ordered to serve five months hard labor for “violating his probation” on a past citation for driving in Georgia with an out-of-state license.
Sargent Shriver and Harris Wofford, both white, had convinced JFK to call Coretta Scott King, Dr. King’s wife. (She was six months pregnant.) This infuriated RFK, who managed his brother’s campaign. He didn’t want to antagonize white Southern voters.
Nonetheless, RFK made a call to Atlanta judge J. Oscar Mitchell, which led to Dr. King’s release on $2,000 bond (about $21,000 today). Martin Luther King Sr. publicly switched his support to JFK. “This man was willing to wipe the tears from my daughter[-in-law]'s eyes,” he said. “I’ve got a suitcase of votes, and I’m going to take them to Mr. Kennedy.”
Dr. King remembered Nixon’s silence at this key moment. Vance, who spreads Nazi-inspired lies about vulnerable communities, lacks the character to even remain silent. If he thought it could’ve improved his political standing, Vance would have eagerly denounced Dr. King as a criminal who got what he deserved.
The Kennedys and civil rights
The Black vote proved pivotal in electing JFK, who carried Illinois, Michigan and South Carolina (that’s not a typo). JFK’s popular vote margin was just 112,827 (or 0.17 percent). He also won other future GOP strongholds, including Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, and West Virginia.
Once in office, JFK treated civil rights as a political issue that he’d contain rather than personally champion. Activist Roger Wilkins said, “The Kennedys wanted [it] both ways. They wanted to appear to be our friends and they wanted to be the brake on our movement.” However, RFK directly intervened on behalf of the Freedom Riders when they met with white racist violence in Alabama. Vance is actively stirring up white racist violence in Ohio. That’s how RFK might’ve operated on the Bizarro World.
Prior to the March on Washington in 1963, RFK privately warned JFK: “Negroes are now just antagonistic and mad and they’re going to be mad at everything. You can't talk to them. My friends all say [even] the Negro maids and servants are getting antagonistic.”
RFK later folded to pressure from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and authorized wiretapping Dr. King’s phone to determine if he was palling around with communists. This was a shameful act, but one that Robert Kennedy Jr. has defended.
“There was good reason for them doing that at the time,” Kennedy Jr. said in January, the weekend prior to MLK Day, “because J. Edgar Hoover was out to destroy Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and Hoover said to them that Martin Luther King’s chief was a communist. My father gave permission to Hoover to wiretap them so he could prove that his suspicions about King were either right or wrong. I think, politically, they had to do it.”
This is the savvy thinking you’d expect from someone who dumps bear carcasses in Central Park. Hoover wasn’t interested in proving Dr. King’s innocence. He wanted to dig up dirt that he could use to destroy him and his cause.
The FBI had engaged in a sustained campaign of unconstitutional surveillance and harassment during the civil rights movement. Donald Trump won’t stop whining about his own political “persecution,” and Kennedy Jr. has called Trump’s completely justified criminal conviction in New York “profoundly undemocratic.” RFK might’ve struggled with the racial politics of the time, but his useless son has no qualms about siding with the powerful and entitled. RFK ran for president in 1968 on a platform of racial equality and economic justice. That’s hardly the platform his son has endorsed.
Growing up in a Southern Black family, I often heard relatives speak fondly of RFK. The moment that resonates the most with them is RFK’s remarks after Dr. King was assassinated. Earlier that day, RFK had given a speech at Ball State University, where a young Black student had asked him how he justified his faith in the good intentions of white people toward their fellow Black citizens. RFK insisted that most Americans wanted to do “the decent and the right thing.” Hours later, when he heard the grim news, he was devastated: ”[I] just told that kid this and then walk out and find that some white man had just shot their … spiritual leader,” he said.
Dr. King was dead and no one could truly replace him. Politically, it might’ve made sense to abandon the entire movement. Instead, RFK empathized with a grieving community. He told the crowd gathered in a Black Indianapolis neighborhood:
“Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort.
“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are Black — considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization — Black people amongst Black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.
For those of you who are Black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.”
RFK was in the midst of a contentious Democratic primary. He’d dared challenge the sitting president from his own party, his brother’s vice president and successor. President Lyndon B. Johnson would announce he wasn’t seeking a second full term just two weeks after RFK entered the race. RFK could’ve sought to turn MLK’s death to his advantage, stoking a people’s despair into hatred. The key difference between Robert Kennedy and JD Vance is that RFK would’ve never considered such a cynical move. Vance wants to pave a road to the White House with hatred and division. RFK took a different path.
“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black. . . .
“We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times; we’ve had difficult times in the past; we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder. . . .
“But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.
“Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.
“Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”
These aren’t words that Vance would ever speak or sentiments that he could ever express because he fundamentally doesn’t understand them. He’s not a flawed man who can rise to the moment. He’s a damaged soul who can only make calculated grabs for power, with no regard for the dignity or even safety of others.
If America never recovered from RFK’s assassination, it’s because a wounded nation lost a true leader at a pivotal moment. RFK used the power he had to heal. Vance is so desperate for more power that he’ll use what he has now to destroy.
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Such an excellent, well-researched piece. Stephen, thank you especially for the history lesson re: Nixon, JFK and the Civil Rights Act. The Kennedy family of the 60s, taking a cue perhaps from FDR, embodied “noblesse oblige,” and the notion that the privileged are morally obliged to help the less fortunate (you know, sort of like what Jesus would do) was considered normal, not “communist.”
I not only remember where I was and what I was doing when the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK occurred; I can never forget. It’s part of the Boomers’ collective coming-of-age story. At the time, I was much more interested in the Beatles than politics. But all of it is embedded in my generation’s DNA, and always will be.
Vance is the polar opposite of RFK the Greater. RFKtG was willing and able to grow and learn, and use his power for good. Vance is incapable of growing or learning, and doesn't care who he hurts in his quest for power. I don't like trump at all, but if he wins, his life is in danger, more danger than if he were in prison right now, or in more danger than from the disturbed men trying to shoot him. Vance wants ultimate power, as do his backers, and they won't let trump get in their way.