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Robert Kennedy may have been the last major white politician black people seriously heeded. He seemed to be a friend of life's victims, as rich men can afford to be but seldom are. He came naturally to the outsider's mentality. As the scrawniest of the four Kennedy boys, he was lost amid the the physical grace and athletic prowess of his brothers. Where Joe and John were debonair and cool, Bobby was intense and awkward, the little guy trying to catch up. Shy, with few friends, he did poorly in school and sports. His father hardly noticed him. He could easily have rebelled, become the embarrassing younger brother that besets many prominent families. Instead, he simply tried harder to win his father's approval. He became the scrappy family errand boy, which earned him his ruthless reputation but gave authenticity to his empathy with those left out.
There was not much time to put what he said into action. But his success in launching a community rehabilitation program in the Bedford-Stuyvesant part of Brooklyn showed that the poor, with the self-interested help of corporations and unions and banks, could bring a devastated slum back to life.
Kennedy had more potential than most politicians. Unlike others, he had his dual citizenship going for him: a tough pragmatist among working-class whites and a man of compassion among blacks, Hispanics and the poor. David Farber, author of Chicago '68, says Kennedy could have allowed the blue-collar people "to come through the '60s without falling prey to the fears that took over so many people." He was a politician who could talk about law-and-order without sounding racist and about gun control without sounding soft on crime; who could advocate government help without sounding radical and self-help without sounding reactionary.
Even with his California victory, acknowledged minutes before he was shot, Kennedy would have had trouble wresting the nomination from Hubert Humphrey, who was by then only a few dozen delegates away from a majority. But Schlesinger speculates that Kennedy would have triumphed in Chicago, then gone on to defeat Richard Nixon. That would probably have meant an earlier end to the Viet Nam War, an extension of civil rights reforms, no Watergate scandal, and a whole different perception of government and politics than the one that pervaded the 1970s. No one, of course, can say with certainty what would have happened had Bobby lived. But there are intriguing indications. Tom Hayden, who remained publicly neutral on R.F.K.'s 1968 candidacy, wept by his casket, Cuban hat at hand. In his new book, Reunion, Hayden argues that Kennedy would have won the nomination and election. "He would have retained Humphrey's basic vote, cut into Wallace, and turned out large numbers of disaffected voters that Humphrey never could rouse."