The Ideology of Robert F. Kennedy

During his four-year career as the junior Senator from New York, and particularly during his whirlwind three-month campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was assailed by parts of America’s liberal establishment for his supposed ideological heresies. His emphasis on stopping the wave of rioting which plagued American cities at the time, and on reforming the welfare system, led to attacks from the New York Times, who viewed this as pandering to racism. Many liberals agreed with Ronald Reagan, serving in his first term as Governor of California, when he compared Kennedy’s rhetoric to his own, and Theodore White, author of the Making of the President series of books, said that Kennedy’s policy positions were no different to those of Richard Nixon. It seemed that many were more comfortable with the professorial, Adlai Stevenson-esque tones of his opponent, Senator Eugene McCarthy.

The attempts to frame Bobby Kennedy as a centrist or conservative didn’t end with his assassination: Bill Clinton, in his autobiography My Life, called him “the first New Democrat”. A number of problems stand out with these attempts, however. Kennedy’s support in the 1968 campaign came from working-class white ethnics, African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americas; he and McCarthy split the student and anti-war activist vote. That isn’t a conservative coalition – it’s a patchwork of groups who felt ignored by the Democratic Party’s elite. It was McCarthy who got substantial Republican cross-over votes in the primaries, and it was Hubert Humphrey who received the support of Southern governors, big-city machine bosses, and the leadership of the AFL-CIO (which would go on to endorse Nixon four years later). Moreover, the supposed conservative Kennedy was endorsed by America’s most prominent socialist, author Michael Harrington, while reactionaries such as Clyde Tolson (J. Edgar Hoover’s deputy) and reporter Westbrook Pegler called for his death.

The source of this confusion lies in Kennedy’s use of ‘law and order’ rhetoric on the campaign trail in 1968, his belief in tax incentives to promote development in the ghettoes, and his opposition to the removal of people from the ghettoes to the suburbs. These ideas, however, were coupled with support for greater federal involvement in urban policy. When he helped set up a public-private partnership to promote urban renewal in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he did so because only one ghetto per city could receive federal aid (Harlem was chosen as New York’s), and he tried to involve federal agencies, but President Lyndon Johnson’s suspicions of Kennedy’s motives made this difficult. (Jack Newfield’s article ‘Robert Kennedy’s Bedford-Stuyvesant Legacy’ in the December 1968 edition of New York Magazine is online, and provides a good account of the establishment of the Bed-Stuy project.) The act of starting a quasi-private corporation to demonstrate the efficacy of one’s ideas has a parallel in American history – Alexander Hamilton’s involvement in setting up the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, and so predates the neoliberal idea of the public-private partnership.

Kennedy’s pragmatic yet visionary policy prescriptions seem alien to modern-day American politics. Partly because the large, urban states are no longer swing states in presidential elections, Washington now focuses more on suburban and rural areas, and has let its cities decay to the point where part of Detroit is set to be given over to agriculture. His ideas live on, however, in some of the initiatives of Brazilian Presidents Lula and Dilma Rousseff. As this 2006 Financial Times article shows, Lula reversed the policies of previous Brazilian governments, who sought to disperse slum-dwellers into soulless, suburban estates, and instead set about turning slums into proper city districts, with water, electricity, and street names, and with the inhabitants given legal title to their dwellings. This is very reminiscent of Bedford-Stuyvesant, as well as Kennedy’s remark in a debate with Gene McCarthy prior to the California primary, that you can’t “take ten thousand black people and move them into Orange County”.

While the Democratic Party may have been taken over in recent decades by the institutionally conservative, Wall Street-friendly triangulation of the Clintons and Obama, the ideas that Bobby Kennedy embraced are helping Brazil rise to its rightful place in the world order.