Robert F. Kennedy, ass. 40 years ago today- 4/5

Democracy Now! Special: Robert F. Kennedy's Life and Legacy 40 Years After His Assassination

Forty years ago today, on June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary, a major boost in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Just after midnight, Kennedy addressed supporters at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, in what would be the last moments of his life.

Today, we spend the hour playing excerpts of rare Robert F. Kennedy speeches and the new documentary RFK Must Die: The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy. We also play a never-before broadcast address by Kennedy speaking to students at St. Lawrence University in Canton in 1966 and the man who recorded it. We also speak with journalist John Pilger who covered Kennedy's campaign and was with him when he was shot, and we speak with labor organizer Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America, whose cause Kennedy championed.
[includes rush transcript]

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• robert
• kennedy
• martin
• luther
• king
• 1968
• democracy
• now

[sidrahsiddiqui]

@jwlvs US strategists don't know how to handle situations sitting in their think-tanks. The US has a tendency to just enter wars, to drop weapons and sell weapons and keep the cogs of the military-industrial complex rolling, without caring one bit what face does America is left with morally, politically and for its soldiers.

[sidrahsiddiqui]

@jwlvs Sometimes wars are won on military grounds, sometimes on moral and sometimes on political. US failed in all of these grounds. Same is the case with the American military involvement in post-2001 wars. Its military fails to show the strength it claims to have. Morally, the American stand is always a failure, and then US fails politically too, not just by making a war unpopular at home, but internationally too.

[sidrahsiddiqui]

@jwlvs Entering into a zone and then not being able to fulfil what you claimed, and on top of that, damaging the situation for yourself and for the land you invaded, is double the burden to bear both morally and politically. He said the decision to enter in the beginning had been wrong and accepted his part of the responsibility. The reason is that military failed the foreign strategy of the US in Vietnam.

[sidrahsiddiqui]

@jwlvs I understand what RFK meant, me being a post-graduate in International Relations. His saying that the issue is very much complicated explains to the masses that how they morally view the situation is different from the political image US has to maintain abroad. RFK quoted the French example of 1954.

[sidrahsiddiqui]

@beuschman you are right. McCarthy did not win. There was 7% difference in favour of Johnson. But, this narrow margin showed the division people had on the issue of the war. This showed McCarthy's moral victory.

[beuschman]

McCarthy didn't win the New Hampshire primary in 1968! So many people make this mistake over and over and over. McCarthy came close to beating LBJ, but he still lost by 7 percentage points.

[aufer21]

sure must hate hope?

[jwlvs]

Kind of sad -- he mentions the growth of the North Vietnamese army. Unfortunately, it's probably the number of civilians killed and called enemies that account for the "recruitment" he talks about.