1968 - Mark Kurlansky [82]
Ginsberg explained that he had just finished a chant to Vishnu, the god of preservation in the Hindu religion, and had thus been offering a chant for the preservation of the planet.
“You ought to sing it to the guy up the street,” said Kennedy, pointing toward the White House.
While he had little chemistry with Martin Luther King and the two always seemed to struggle to speak to each other, he struck up an immediate and natural friendship with the California farmworker leader César Chávez. With the slogan “Viva la Huelga!”—“Long Live the Strike!”—Chávez had launched successful national campaigns for what he called la Causa, boycotting California grapes and other products to force better conditions for farmworkers. Most self-respecting college students in 1968 would not touch a grape for fear it was a brand being boycotted by Chávez. He had organized seventeen thousand farmworkers and forced their pay to be raised $1.10 an hour to a minimum $1.75. Chávez was a hero of the younger generation, and Kennedy and Chávez, the wealthy patrician and the immigrant spokesman, seemed oddly natural together even if Bobby was famous for ending a rally with “Viva la Huelga! Viva la Causa!” and then, his Spanish seemingly failing to match his enthusiasm, “Viva all of you.”
Bobby even developed a rapport and sense of humor with the press. His standard campaign speech ended with a quote from George Bernard Shaw, and after a time he noticed the press took this as their cue to go to the press bus. One day he ended a speech, “As George Bernard Shaw once said—Run for the bus.”
He had clearly evolved in profound ways since the death of his brother. He seemed to have discovered his own worth, found the things he cared about rather than the family’s issues, and was willing to champion them even if it meant going against his old allies from those heady and revered days of his still-mourned brother’s administration. To turn against the war had been a deep personal struggle. He had named one of his sons, born in 1965, after General Maxwell Taylor and another in 1967 after Averell Harriman and Douglas Dillon—three of the key figures in pursuing the war.
Even if he was not a great speaker, he said extraordinary things. Unlike politicians today, he told people not what they wanted to hear, but what he thought they should hear. He always emphasized personal responsibility in much the same terms, with a similar religious fervor, as did Martin Luther King, Jr. Championing the right causes was an obligation. While adopting a strong antiwar position, he criticized student draft dodgers, going onto campuses where he was met by cheering crowds and lecturing them on passing on their responsibilities to less privileged people by refusing the draft. But he also said that those who did not agree with what their government was doing in Vietnam were obligated to speak out because in a democracy the war was being carried on “in your name.”
McCarthy did some of this as well, telling his young supporters that they had to work hard and look better for the campaign. Supporters cut their hair, lowered hemlines, and shaved their faces to get “clean for Gene.”
But Kennedy went to extraordinary lengths to define what was wrong and what needed to be done. He attacked the national obsession with economic growth, a statement Hayden cited for its similarity to the Port Huron Statement:
We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. We cannot measure national spirit by the Dow Jones Average, nor national achievement by the Gross National Product. For the Gross National Product