ON THE AVENUES: When love and hate collide – or, my father and the governor.

"A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him, that he can’t escape from."
-- William Faulkner, from Light in August

1.

This is a story about dead folks, or more accurately a dead era, although it might be said that anything this dead has no damn business being so very much alive, right now, in the year 2020. The retelling itself has proven difficult, and a definitive rendering eludes me.

I’ve read all about humankind’s past pandemics and those famous plagues of old, and assumed these lessons were clear to me, but the part they don’t teach you is the way seismic public health crises peel back the layers of your soul – or, in my case, what passes for one. Atheist with souls? Nah, surely not.

To begin this beguine, let’s go back to the beginning.

2.

These many years later, the way I remember it is that much of my father’s self-worth revolved around good, old-fashioned hard work.

In another place at another time, he might have been an enthusiastic Stakhanovite, a term originating in the Soviet Union to describe “workers who modeled themselves after (epic farm-near-me/">mining hero) Alexey Stakhanov. These workers took pride in their ability to produce more than was required, by working harder and more efficiently, thus strengthening the Communist state.”

We’re Americans, of course, or so we are told by the looters, and it’s all bound up into a different set of precepts. Unraveling these many motivations decades after the fact wouldn’t be easy in the best of times – and as you may have noticed, these aren’t.

It remains that my father was ideally suited to socialism. He just never realized it. A military veteran, working man, salt of the earth, the common folk, Joe Six Pack; my father was eternally suspicious of concentrated wealth and hoity-toity, over-educated elites.

By his own admission drawn to the underdog, he did not cheer for the New York Yankees or US Steel. My father died in 2001, and yet I can imagine him turning the air blue upon learning that Greg Fischer proposed to award Amazon half the city of Louisville (and a state park to boot) in order to lure the company’s headquarters to Louisville.

Conversely, and the hard part for me to accept, is that my father quite likely would have been enamored of Donald Trump’s bait ‘n’ switch brand of cynical populism. That’s because he always was drawn to charlatans, like a moth to the light fixture.

Ross Perot was great, at least until he proved to be an utter flake. Ronald Reagan? A godlike figure, except when those two presidential terms concluded, my father was disillusioned when he realized the rich had gotten far richer; trickle down, but treasure up.

Before them, there was another recipient of my father’s political affections, a passionate straight talker who spoke to the people, not the snobs, and understood what needed to be done to make the nation great again.

He was George Corley Wallace (1919-1998), seeker of the presidency from 1964 through 1976, although most convincingly in 1968 and 1972.

3.

My unanticipated journey through childhood days began innocently enough with a book, the title of which aptly conveys the essence of its content: Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (James Shapiro; 2020).

The second prompting came during a chat with a friend, who mentioned a 1968 television appearance by Wallace, soon to become a presidential candidate as an independent: "Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: The Wallace Crusade" (1968).

I watched the episode, and was strangely disquieted. Something began to stir. Concurrently, I started reading another book called Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America (George Yancy; 2018).

At this point, little things began nagging at me. Something was troubling, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Perhaps it was the culmination of six months spent largely at home, contemplating humanity, pandemics, racism and presidential politics – numerous strange disturbances coming together at the crossroads amid tumultuous news cycles.

Soon it became clear that the specific flash point came with the introduction of Wallace into the narrative; moreover, it flared after watching the Alabamian in peak crusading form on "Firing Line." Watching it made me physically uncomfortable, something uncharacteristic for a history buff with a customarily strong stomach.

It became apparent that I needed a more comprehensive refresher course on Wallace and his epoch, which came courtesy of a PBS "American Experience" documentary film titled "George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire" (2000).

It took far longer to absorb than the three-hour running time because at the start, I couldn’t endure more than five minutes at a sitting. I studied the bathroom mirror. Could someone please explain why I was having such a visceral reaction to this?

4.

George C. Wallace was a four-time Alabama governor whose failed presidential candidacies in 1968 and 1972 functioned as grandiose overtures to the ensuing civil rights flip-flop of America’s two main political parties.

Wallace, who began as a New Deal “liberal” in relative terms, became etched in the minds of Americans as a racist bogeyman; his presidential platforms were swallowed whole by Richard Nixon and co-opted into the emerging “Southern strategy.” Black America subsequently deserted the erstwhile Party of Lincoln for the Democrats, now the presumed defenders of social justice, while Republicans scooped up the South’s (shall we say “reactionary”) electoral votes.

The ambitious Wallace’s political career was like an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. He told his children only two things mattered in life, money and power – and he didn’t care about money; friends remarked that Wallace’s muse was the thrill of the campaign chase, and he became bored quickly when relegated to the day-to-day grind of governance.

And yet in 1958, when Wallace mounted his first Alabama gubernatorial campaign, he did so as a populist champion of all poor and working class residents, black or white, only to be badly beaten in the Democratic primary (the race that mattered; at the time, a Republican was lucky to get 35% of the vote in the fall).

A humiliated Wallace had an epiphany in 1958, and it brings us full circle, back to the opening exchange from the "Firing Line" of 1968.

Buckley … highlighted Wallace’s 1958 gubernatorial campaign against John Patterson, a race which Wallace lost and which led the young politician to claim that he would never again be outmaneuvered on the issue of segregation. Moderator C. Dickerson Williams had his hands full as Wallace attacked numerous peripheral details of Buckley’s comments, such as whether he really uttered terms like “out-segged” or whether he picked his teeth with a dirty toothpick, as the New York Times supposedly claimed.

“Out-segged.”

Hearing these words on a 52-year-old broadcast that I’m sure I didn’t watch as an 8-year old nonetheless struck me like a baseball bat to the cranium. On the face of it, they’re perfectly accurate words in the context of the discussion, but upon hearing them, I immediately guessed that something important was missing.

Wallace denied Buckley's attribution, openly sneering: “There’s no such expression as ‘segged’ in the vocabulary of southerners. I have never heard of the word ‘seg’ or ‘segged.’”

Duh. Of course he hadn’t.

Wallace was telling the whole truth; as you may already have guessed, and as the documentary film corrects the normally accurate Buckley, what the failed candidate actually said was this: “I was out-niggered, and I will never be out-niggered again.”

This may seem like a minor point given the slur. However, Wallace had already mastered the sort of coded language and dog whistles that have remained a valued component of the right wing’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge vocabulary to the present day. Buckley afforded Wallace a euphemism, but should he have done so?

Consequently, this had the effect of reminding me that the “N” word was explicitly forbidden in our household during the days of my habitation there.

As an ex-Marine, my father was a walking encyclopedia of creative profanity, but he doubled as family censor. THIS obscenity was okay to use in front of your mother, sparingly, but never THAT one. And the “N” word? Not at all; never. Soap, meet mouth.

Have I mentioned that my father was a strident, outspoken, sign-planting supporter of George C. Wallace in 1968 and 1972?

Ding, ding … ding.

Clearly this accounts for the dissonance in my Swiss cheese of a soul. Now, what’s to be done with it?

5.

I was born in a New Albany, Indiana hospital and spent the first 25 years of my life in or near the presumably anodyne settlement of Georgetown, less than ten miles away from the city, situated a few hundred feet above the Ohio River flood plain.

My guess is townies at the time would have denied Georgetown was a “sundown town,” just a law-abiding Mayberry clone utterly devoid of diversity even before white flight suddenly animated dozens of new subdivisions to sprout like noxious weeds, filling the former pastures of farms, all of it exploding into existence in the wake of Louisville’s 1975 desegregation order.

By then Wallace was in a wheelchair, crippled by the assassination attempt, with his national political career over and my father decamped to adoration of Reagan. After all, the GOP had cribbed all the disabled southern governor’s notes.

But this isn’t to say that my father was racist in any overt sense. He preached equality in matters like sports, although conveniently overlooking the realities of life off the basketball court or baseball diamond.

Dig deeper, and naturally it gets more complicated. My father was, in fact, an ordinary white guy in America. He was a muddled mixture of the admirable and indefensible, usually meaning well, sometimes revealing more than he’d intended, as when he would deny opposing biracial marriage – but shouldn’t they be thinking about the indignities those poor children will have to endure?

These indignities arose from my father’s and his coterie’s misplaced insistence that a biracial child was any of their business in the first place, all of which is to say that yes, my father was racist; he had to be a racist because I am, too, and this, to me, is an inescapable fact, part and parcel of hegemonic structural racism in America, hence the necessity of reading Yancy’s book.

"Racism, in short, is a way of being — exhibited by all white people, progressive and otherwise — that grants more freedom and benefits to whites at the expense of blacks and other people of color."

Am I deferring my own responsibility to listen and learn by somehow blaming my father for my upbringing? I don’t think so. I’m just trying to come to grips with it. Racism is society-wide. It’s endemic, shared and historical. On the surface, my father was better than some, and not as good as others. There’s not a lot to SEE here, such is the annoying and regrettable commonness of the topic.

To reiterate, my father doubtless would have explained his attraction to a populist demagogue like Wallace in non-racial language; obviously, they’re dog whistles precisely because they’re suggestive and implied, not overt.

He’d have said Wallace was a truth-teller who’d make American great again (half-century symmetry, anyone?) and would fight for the underdog. But my father and his buddies, well, they weren’t really underdogs, were they?

How could they be, given the eternal certainty, and those coded-language promises, that Blacks always would remain conveniently beneath them? To be blunt, that white Americans would always have a cushion between themselves and rock bottom: Black America, kept right where it belonged.

I’m angry with my father now, all these years later, not because he was a racist; as I’ve noted, it seems entirely reasonable to me that all whites are racist. Rather, it’s the one point of his that I always previously admired, and find now to be lamentably misplaced, this being his perception of the supposed underdog’s struggle.

Wallace wasn’t an underdog. He wasn’t really shielding the common white folks from mistreatment at the claws of evil central government, or the coming decades-long cancerous neoliberal pillage. Rather, Wallace was reassuring them they’d always stay a step ahead of Blacks, and so what if most of society’s wealth still somehow found its way straight to the 1%?

Maybe the poor would hit the lottery, and move up to the shining city on a hill where the accumulators of capital reside. But they wouldn’t move down THERE, below the (wink wink) invisible and therefore fully visible color line.

If the true underdogs are society’s most vulnerable, did the likes of Wallace really care for them at all? And while my father may have cared, he still supported Wallace and accepted the latter’s shell game. How do we explain this contradiction?

Later, when we both were older, I’d suggest to my father that he should take a closer look at the failure of exploitative robber baron capitalism as the root cause of certain of these maladies. Occasionally, it seemed that I was making headway against those headwinds, although in the end, he may have decided it was easier to humor me by listening, then enlisting with the next populist to appear.

6.

I can’t entirely account for the rise of this crushing angst, and it might well be the case that there’s nothing noteworthy about any of it, at least in the sense of these attitudes being common to a generation now passed.

And yet, as I’ve noted, a quick scroll of your social media feed will reveal the passing of the generational cohort, but not the diseased attitudes. They're very much still with us.

In 2016, dozens of commentators mentioned George Wallace’s racist and white nationalist legacies in the context of Donald Trump’s narcissistic theatrics, and as a well-read and informed individual, I shrugged and looked away. Of course, I recall thinking, but doesn’t everyone know it, and aren’t we past THAT?

Actually, no. Approaching the conclusion of Season Four of Aryan Nation: Trump Remixes the Racist Classics, we remain mired in it.

7.

My father's been dead for a while now. Our relationship was extremely complicated. We were very different people in many ways, and all too much alike in others. Most of the time it's nothing to dwell on, and I think we parted in 2001 with considerable mutual respect. We both gave ground. We both came around.

I'd use the word "love" if I could, but it isn't something he'd have said, so the notion seems superfluous. We were far tighter at the end than the beginning, and for this much I'm genuinely grateful.

Perhaps what I have learned the past few days while struggling to finish this demented jigsaw puzzle, all the while wearing a self-imposed blindfold, is that evidently I tried to bury quite a lot about those Wallace years as they pertained to my father – and to me. I buried it as deep as I could for as long as the memories would stay put, safely subterranean.

Maybe my boxing up of these memories and feelings, to be hidden in a dusty corner of the noggin, was a form of self-protection, with George Wallace merely a peripheral indicator. That’s because at the tender age of eight, I was an eager co-conspirator of my father's Wallace fetish, if for no other reason than the hope, so often forlorn, of this enthusiasm somehow making him happy.

My father was capable of a strange, unpredictable bad temper. He kept it inside the house, to our trepidation, and his contemporaries probably wouldn’t have known. When I was a kid, I'd try to figure out what was eating him, and couldn’t, so it became my habit to conclude that it was directed at me. My father erupted, then just as quickly erased the memory of his distemper.

It would seem that I didn’t.

Once enrolled in university, and intent on becoming the sort of intellectual calculated to irritate my father, it finally occurred to me that his anger likely stemmed from undiagnosed PTSD, a by-product of World War II; seeing as three years during your late teens on a leaky boat lobbing shells at people you couldn't see, until they came your way in kamikaze planes, is the sort of trauma calculated to stay with you.

Then, deciding the war was to blame, it compelled me to try to protect my father from his ghosts. It seemed terrible to me that one would go to war at 17, and be afflicted by the experience for decades afterward. Maybe he’d been shaped by these factors to be receptive to Wallace and his ilk.

52 years later, with the idiocy of racism and white privilege flaring all around us amid a deadly pandemic, tanking economy and global climate crisis, there remains sufficient depth of feeling – some level of feeling – about my father that out of nowhere exposed previously suppressed anger about the bill of goods my father peddled with regard to Wallace, as opposed to what Wallace really was about, and whatever part of all this involved me – or didn’t.

What’s the answer? I don’t know.

8.

It is well documented that during Wallace’s twilight years, in a dogged pursuit as vigorous as any of his campaigns for public office, he made an apparently sincere effort to atone for his mistakes. If his purported religious awakening was genuine, then the word “sins” might be more fitting.

According to Wallace’s friends, he finally understood that what he had done in order to possess political power caused great suffering to others, with his own accumulating illnesses and pain abetting this revelation. Wallace asked for forgiveness, and remarkably, Alabama’s Black voters supported his final runs for the governor’s office in the early 1980s.

A Black attorney who had figured in Wallace’s early period as judge during the 1950s responded to these entreaties by saying yes, he could forgive Wallace, but no, he could not FORGET what he'd done.

In another striking convergence, the late John Lewis – beaten by Wallace’s state troopers on Bloody Sunday in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a 19th-century Confederate general, politician and Klansman – also forgave the governor.

Forgiveness from Wallace’s victims in the play’s final act alone attests to the seemingly distant role of William Shakespeare in all this, although I think the Bard of Avon is twice applicable.

I’m not the first to see familiarly dramatic Shakespearean aspects of tragedy as pertaining to Wallace’s story: a lust for power, deals with the devil, the ironic cruelty of an assassination attempt leaving him crippled and in agony (but not killing him), and of course these later efforts to achieve forgiveness and redemption as intended to snatch his tattered soul back from Satan.

Also, like Oedipus in ancient Greece, Wallace’s ambition and arrogance carried both the seeds of success, and his own destruction.

My personal nod to Shakespeare comes with an early 1970s recollection that somehow has stayed fresh in my memory, perhaps as the perfect summary of how tense the relationship with my father was at the time.

I’d taken to checking out LPs of Shakespearean plays from the library, and trying to follow along, reading them while listening. My father came into my room one day, projected his finest facially contorted dismay, and ordered me to get ready for baseball practice by turning off “that shit.”

It’s very strange what you remember, and what you don’t.

At times, it can be downright debilitating.

The ghosts wobble, but they don’t fall down.

---

Recent columns:

August 13: ON THE AVENUES: In My Merry Oldsmobile.

August 6: ON THE AVENUES: Surrender.

July 30: ON THE AVENUES: Guys.

July 23: ON THE AVENUES: These overdue mask mandates should help us separate the bad actors from the good.

The 50th anniversary of the "White Album," or where the Beatles meet Gravity's Rainbow.

Hands down my favorite Beatles album, even though I didn't come to it until a few years later, when I was a junior in high school.

I haven't smoked pot for more than twenty years; alcohol does me just fine, thank you; however, if I ever go back for another bowl, let's hope the trip includes this album. It took a couple of Beefeater and tonics to take the edge off tonight's listening, conducted straight through with only a brief pause in the middle for the necessary refill.

Things like this make me emotional. As the author observes, 1967 may have been the Summer of Love, but 1968 was a year for the barricades.

The Accidental Perfection of the Beatles’ White Album, by Jordan Orlando (The New Yorker)

... The Beatles’ naïve and aggressively experimental musicianship propelled their most fractured and divisive project into a kind of accidental perfection. Fifty years later, the record is still good, still indelible, still as clean and pure as its sleeve, requiring no explanation or description beyond the band’s name. As the first century of electricity and world war recedes—the century of radio and movies and television and jazz, the final unconnected century, when teen-agers around the world flooded the seaport docks as new vinyl arrived—these ninety-four minutes endure, preserving the instant that rock joined the pantheon of the highest arts.

NICK VAUGHN: RFK’s Legacy and What It Can Mean for New Albany.

RFK’s Legacy and What It Can Mean for New Albany

By guest contributor Nick Vaughn -- thanks, Nick.

Robert F. Kennedy visited New Albany three times in his political career. Once as a U.S. Senator, RFK visited New Albany High School in a lead-up to his Presidential Campaign. Twice RFK visited New Albany during the Indiana Primary Campaign, on April 24th, 1968 and May 5th, 1968.

Kennedy’s visit on April 24th is the most well-known and also has the most information regarding the visit. As I was researching and putting my thoughts together for this remembrance piece, I was able to get into contact with the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. The wonderful people there were able to supply me with photographs as well as a detailed schedule of RFK’s visit on April 24th, 1968.

The Schedule:

"RFK arrived in New Albany around 7:00 p.m. on April 24, 1968. According to that schedule, he drove in a motorcade with Judge Paul Tegart, Leo Fentress (Floyd County Democratic Chairman), and Mary Townsend (Floyd County Democratic Vice Chairman).

"At around 7:30 p.m. they were to arrive at corner of Pearl and Norfolk Streets via the route: ‘IS 65 to 31 W - 31 W to Vincennes St. - left on Vincennes to Spring St. - right on Spring to Pearl St. - left on Pearl St. to Market St.’

"The schedule goes on to say: ‘The Senator should recognize in addition to the above three: Art Caulfield -- Dem. Treasurer of Central Committee; and John Wilcox -- Floyd County Chairman of Citizens for RFK. Judge Tegart will introduce the Senator.’

"Another copy of schedule says: '7:00 p.m. RFK speaks under auspices of Kennedy for President Committee of New Albany, at corner of Pearl and Market Streets.'

"Around 7:45 pm they left New Albany for Jeffersonville.”

(News and Tribune, 2018)

May 5th:

Kennedy’s visit to New Albany on May 5th was much more brief, and the schedule of events has been lost. However, according to the RFK Human Rights Foundation Switzerland (which has been recounting RFK’s Presidential Campaign’s day-to-day activities) “It was an airport rally.” I am unsure of what airport that could have been at, however after the airport rally Kennedy embarked on a short car ride to Jeffersonville.

(“RFK’s Plane en route to New Albany.” Courtesy of
the RFK Human Rights Foundation Switzerland)

RFK’s Legacy and New Albany:

While the exact words Kennedy spoke in New Albany are not available in any format (yet!), we can make an educated guess about the kind of remarks he delivered in our Southern Indiana city.

Kennedy’s message was that of hope, togetherness, and peace. They're three things you’d be hard pressed to find in any campaign rhetoric today. In a speech delivered at Kansas University, Kennedy said, “And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year. But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.”

In this speech he underscores what is good in America as well as the issues that face America. I, like he, believe we must face these issues together. I think our community would do good to heed the words of Bobby Kennedy. At a time when we see immense discontent and unfathomable amounts of poverty across the wealthiest nation in the world, and at a time when politics divides and solutions are fickle even at the most local levels of government, we should be seeing great voter turnout and community based action.

But voter apathy in New Albany may be at an all-time high, allowing those taking us on our current trajectory to keep their status quo. Like Bobby Kennedy did in 1968, we need to run against and as far away from our current trajectory as possible. In his Presidential Campaign Announcement, Kennedy said “I do not run for the Presidency merely oppose any man, but to propose new policies.” This is what we must do.

While it may be easy to feel frustrated, disillusioned, and discontented with our current trajectory, I urge you, like Bobby Kennedy urged Americans 50 years ago, to begin coming together. The only way we can begin to heal the wounds of society are with peace, love, and togetherness.

Additionally, we should remember and find a bit of pride in the fact that Bobby Kennedy visited New Albany, because that means he believed his message would resonate with us, and I believe that message still resonates today.

Finally, in the spirit of Bobby Kennedy, and to better remember what he stood for, I ask you to not have a moment of silence today on the 50th anniversary of his death, but instead to have a moment of action. And then another. Then another. Whether we agree politically or not, we need to change the motivations in our community and beyond to the broader land we call home. Remember, celebrate, act.

I know what I will be fighting for. Do you?

Acknowledgements:

First off, I would like to thank the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library for their support via the detailed schedule and pictures (theirs unless otherwise marked).

Additionally, I would like to thank the News and Tribune for the article covering RFK’s visit to New Albany, published earlier this year. Finally, I would like to thank Roger Baylor for allowing me to continue to write (and more importantly publish) my ramblings.

For Your Further Interest:

● RFK’s Presidential Announcement
● RFK’s Remarks to Kansas University
● RFK Announcing the Death of Martin Luther King Jr.
● Columbia University Forum 1964
● The Road to Camelot, by Thomas Oliphant

From 1968 to 2007, and then 2018: "RFK -- in the context of New Albany today?"

Thanks to NV for mentioning a piece about Robert F. Kennedy that I had forgotten writing. It was published here on April 29, 2007. Earlier this year, the local chain newspaper ran a solid remembrance of the Kennedy visit in late April, 1968. 

I've left my 11-year-old blog post intact, below, apart from making two or three small corrections.

Its relevance to me now lies in the political context of Eugene McCarthy's 1968 primary challenge to Lyndon Johnson, the seemingly unassailable sitting president who won his full term in a landslide in 1964. Kennedy entered the race only after McCarthy's strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, and Johnson subsequently withdrew and accepted lame duck status. 

In short, applied locally, it means something far different to me now than in 2007. 

"But almost certainly the senator did see a clear and present danger emanating from the figure of the incumbent even if the sitting president was a member of the same party."

LBJ ... JMG? We'll see. The Green Mouse says there are rumblings, but now, back to April of 2007, and a time when local Democrats actually spoke to me.

---

RFK -- in the context of New Albany today?

At Friday’s Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, an annual Democratic Party rite of spring, keynote speaker Daniel Kalef of Louisville’s Muhammad Ali Center related an anecdote about a mid-1960’s automobile ride through Watts, with Muhammad Ali at the wheel of a convertible, and Robert F. Kennedy as the sole passenger.

In conversations with Kalef, Ali has noted that on this particular day it was not he who became the object of attention and adoration on the part of the crowds that inevitably gathered during the drive, a phenomenon to which Ali was well accustomed. 

Rather, it was RFK, the white, dynastic, complex and troubled politician, who the people in the predominately black neighborhood wanted to see up close.

----

Almost forty years on, there remains something profoundly moving – and utterly haunting -- about RFK’s impromptu speech in Indianapolis on the night of Martin Luther King's assassination. He discarded prepared comments in favor of heartfelt words, the audio of which was replayed to those attending Friday’s dinner.

Near the end, in a reference inconceivable in the present age of mass deconstruction, when candidates for office routinely clear brush and dumb themselves down to the level of public ignorance perceived by their survey-driven handlers, RFK reached with complete sincerity to the classics to find words to express his sadness:

My favorite poem, my favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote, 'Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'

As an atheist, I might quibble with the final line, except that the emotion on display these many years later is too real to be ignored.

The Ali Center’s Kalef candidly admits that having been born in 1965, he remembers nothing of RFK beyond what he learned later in school, but NA Confidential’s senior editor is five years older, and can vaguely recall Kennedy’s visit to New Albany in 1968, an event described in loving detail by William Lohmeyer on Friday evening. 

My recollection is that of Kennedy waving from an auto that passed our vantage point on Main Street, near the Knights of Columbus.

Knowing my father’s aversion to crowds, and populist instincts that sometimes veered uncomfortably toward the right, it must have taken some degree of interest and respect for him to agree to making the trip down from Georgetown.

Just a few weeks later, after RFK was killed, my father and I were standing by the rusted oil drum that we used weekly to burn the trash. He was looking at the front page of the Courier-Journal, which bore a large photo of the slain candidate, and after scanning the article through for a final time, he tossed it atop the fire. 

I can see the face consumed by flames, and to this day associate the expanding ashes with my own fears and uncertainties as an eight-year old who was aware of societal turbulence and accompanying change, but not quite far enough along to make sense of it.

It is well documented that when Robert F. Kennedy decided to enter the presidential race in 1968, President Lyndon Johnson’s leadership position was rapidly eroding as the escalating insanity of the Vietnam War actively subverted any hopes that LBJ’s “Great Society” might substantively emerge here at home in an America plagued by division and strife.

Kennedy said:

I do not run for the Presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I'm obliged to do all I can.

LBJ’s unexpected withdrawal from public life came soon after, and Kennedy’s disclaimer (not to “oppose,” but to “propose”) might be read as deferential according to the prevailing rules of the game, but almost certainly the senator did see a clear and present danger emanating from the figure of the incumbent even if the sitting president was a member of the same party.

Speaking locally, NAC consistently has proposed new policies for the city of New Albany. For proof, look back at our archive of three years running, but get a big cup of coffee first, because it’s going to take you a while.

During the same time, we have opposed the men with names like Price, Coffey, Schmidt and Kochert, whose mantra might as well be, “Penny wise, future foolish.”

We will continue to propose what we believe to be the sensible new policies and trends, and to oppose the outmoded men who stand in their way, knowing that while progress may eventually bypass those bizarrely and often corrosively opposed to it, removal of the obstacles they embody can certainly assist the process of renewal and change that must come to the city if we are to survive.

Glancing around the room on Friday night, as Floyd County’s Democratic Party celebrated the life and legacy of RFK on the eve of an important primary election, I wondered how many seated at the Grand – many of whom are longtime friends and acquaintances – are willing to go further than pay temporary and polite lip service to the larger ideals being considered at the rostrum, and whether they genuinely can see that there are no practicing units of democracy, however small, that cannot benefit from the expansion of consciousness that accrues from absorbing bigger lessons like these and applying them to the everyday task of making the city a better place to live and work.

I’ve neither seen the movie “Bobby” nor read the consensus choice for best biography, whatever that is (with luck, both are on the agenda), and I understand that the final analysis of any human’s life and work is inordinately difficult and prone to differing interpretations.

Obviously, Robert F. Kennedy was not a perfect man, but just as obviously, none are. Perhaps because of these imperfections, we can learn about ourselves by reflecting on RFK’s life and the experiences of his time.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the mountaintop speech and an "inescapable web of mutuality.”

You're surely aware that Wednesday, April 4, marks 50 years since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although I wasn't yet 8 years of age, I remember it well. I especially remember the palpable sense of anxiety in Georgetown when urban rioting greeted the news of King's death.

We have not, in the past half century, had a year freighted with such emotional and historical heft, in part because we have not seen the convergence of so many defining issues—war, civil rights, populism, political realignment—in so short a timespan. Yet the singularity of 1968 does not diminish its pertinence to our present turmoil. This week, two events in particular are worth considering in tandem: one a cataclysm, the other a tragically predictive attempt to understand how such cataclysms occur.

King had gone to Memphis in support of a strike by sanitation workers. His last speech on April 3, 1968, came to be known as the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. In it, King made reference to a brush with death ten years earlier, when he'd been stabbed by a mentally ill woman named Izola Curry. She stabbed him with a letter opener, with the blade barely missing the aorta.

It came out in the New York Times the next morning, that if I had sneezed, I would have died. Well, about four days later, they allowed me, after the operation, after my chest had been opened, and the blade had been taken out, to move around in the wheel chair in the hospital. They allowed me to read some of the mail that came in, and from all over the states, and the world, kind letters came in. I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. I had received one from the President and the Vice-President. I've forgotten what those telegrams said. I'd received a visit and a letter from the Governor of New York, but I've forgotten what the letter said. But there was another letter that came from a little girl, a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. And I looked at that letter, and I'll never forget it. It said simply, "Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School." She said, "While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I'm simply writing you to say that I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze."

And I want to say tonight, I want to say that I am happy that I didn't sneeze. Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting-in at lunch counters. And I knew that as they were sitting in, they were really standing up for the best in the American dream. And taking the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been around in 1962, when Negroes in Albany, Georgia, decided to straighten their backs up. And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can't ride your back unless it is bent. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been here in 1963, when the black people of Birmingham, Alabama, aroused the conscience of this nation, and brought into being the Civil Rights Bill. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have had a chance later that year, in August, to try to tell America about a dream that I had had. If I had sneezed, I wouldn't have been down in Selma, Alabama, been in Memphis to see the community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I'm so happy that I didn't sneeze.

For fifty years, scholars and other interested parties have been trying to locate the "sneeze" letter to which King referred. Just last week, the Wall Street Journal claimed to have unraveled the story; it seems he got the quote correct, but misattributed it to a school girl rather than the letter's real author, an adult civil rights activist who died only three years after King.

You can follow the link to the story, which was suggested to me by an observant friend. It's worth considering when (or if) an otherwise harmless misstatement merits greater scrutiny. While it doesn't sound to me as if the WSJ is suggesting there is a major historical record in need of correction, perhaps the central point is that King didn't survive to correct his own memory lapse.

Found: The Long-Lost Link to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last Speech, by Cameron McWhirter

The night before his assassination 50 years ago, he built a theme of his “mountaintop” speech around a fan’s letter—which has never surfaced until now

... Several historians asked by the Journal to review Ms. Kepler’s 1958 letter said that they believe it is the one to which Dr. King refers in his 1968 speech. David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Dr. King, said that he is “quite convinced” that Ms. Kepler’s letter is the one. “He remembers the language exactly but just got the I.D. wrong,” he said. Mr. Bass, the Westchester historian, agrees: “He basically took that great line and kind of spiced it up.” Others said that it wasn’t the only time that Dr. King had tapped material from memory and misattributed its source.

Cultural education: Buckley, Vidal, and the essential documentary film Best of Enemies.

It took far too long for me to get around to watching this essential film. I highly recommend it. After you've seen it, please join me in lamenting the fact that Buckley and Vidal aside, their cultural perspectives remain locked in mortal combat, almost 50 years later.

Bilge Ebiri, writing at Vulture:

You might see a film about William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal’s ten televised debates during the 1968 presidential conventions as an opportunity to bask in eloquent, pointed repartee. You might also enjoy the spectacle of two of the foremost intellectuals of their time coming very close to physically beating the crap out of each other. You might not expect, however, to find yourself weeping — for the state of the republic and the poisoned media landscape, for the decay of the American social contract. Yet here we are. Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s masterful Best of Enemies leaves you with an overwhelming sense of despair. It’s not just a great documentary, it’s a vital one ...

 ... Best of Enemies’ true aim is to lament a bygone political discourse. Vidal and Buckley may have started off as representatives of an old-fashioned school of debate, learned and articulate and polite, but by the end of the conventions they wound up unwittingly inventing a new media landscape: one of constant conflict, sustained anger, and barely contained violence. Gordon and Neville find in these two men’s infamous clash a turning point, the moment in time when the networks, the press, the pundits, and even average Americans first realized their taste for political bloodsport. A terrible beauty had been born, as they say. This might be the saddest film of the year.

At The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw:

It is fascinating, not for any supposed lost standard of excellence in argument – the drawling debates look like a squabble between two snippy and indistinguishable twins – but for showing us two examples of that exquisite, extinct breed: the literate “political classes” willing to exchange high-flown badinage on television. The contest was always about who would lose their cool first and it was Buckley, furious at being called a “crypto-Nazi” and threatening to sock the “queer” Vidal in the face, live on camera. Buckley had, therefore, humiliatingly lost, but Vidal endured the ignominy of irrelevance as Buckley became the height of political fashion in the Reaganite years. They both then entered the wilderness as incorrect patrician wordsmiths who no one cared about any more.

A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times:

In 1968, as the summer political-convention season approached, ABC News decided to take a gamble. The network seemed permanently stuck in third place, and its news division in particular suffered from the lack of a brand-name on-air authority figure to compete with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley at NBC or Walter Cronkite at CBS. Back in those days, the two leading networks covered the conventions live from beginning to end. (Can you imagine?) Instead of comprehensiveness, ABC went for provocation and at least the illusion of intellectual heft, hiring Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. to conduct a series of debates during the Republican circus in Miami and the subsequent Democratic debacle in Chicago. “Best of Enemies,” Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s lively new documentary, an accessible assemblage of archival footage and talking-head analysis, mines the Buckley-Vidal skirmishes for nuggets of historical insight.

And also — not quite the same thing — for zingers and gotchas and other flashes of that mysterious, you-know-it-when-you-see-it phenomenon called “great television.” The most memorable such moment occurred late in the battle, as the Chicago Police Department rampaged in Grant Park. What looked like law and order to Mayor Richard J. Daley and like “Gestapo tactics” to Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff of Connecticut set off a series of especially nasty personal volleys between ABC’s designated intellectuals. Vidal needled Buckley, calling him a “crypto-Nazi” until Buckley lost his patrician cool and snapped back: “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” Ratings gold.

"Bobby Kennedy: Democratic apostate, political opportunist, liberal idealist."

Yesterday was the 45th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's assassination. At the website of The Guardian, Michael Cohen subjects the mythology to examination, with thought-provoking results.

Bobby Kennedy: Democratic apostate, political opportunist, liberal idealist … All of the above: the 45th anniversary of his death is a chance to peel away the myth of RFK and grasp his contradictory character

... Yet, it was precisely this type of apostasy that made Kennedy such a compelling and intriguing political figure: it was not his philosophical firmness, rather his ideological suppleness. He was a politician nearly impossible to pigeonhole with static labels like liberal, moderate or conservative. He was, at various times, all of the above.

Kennedy was the rare figure for whom, as his prospects for higher office grew, so, too, did his political personality evolve – and the two were in conflict until the day he died.

Big money, big truncheons: For those of you with short memories.