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promise the Kennedys made to the nation.
The irony is that the Kerry narrative is one of the great narratives in the history of American politics -- a personal tale that links his life story to the history of our times, to his vision for the renewal of America.
For starters, there is the fact that -- unlike so many of those hawkish deferment junkies in the Bush administration -- Kerry actually volunteered to serve his country, inspired in no small part by President Kennedy's call to national duty and his heroic service in WW II aboard PT-109.
Kerry's life shows the courage it takes to get America back on track, and to end our national detour into fear. The courage to stand up for what's right, and speak unpopular truth about what's wrong.
Kerry's political narrative starts on June 5, 1968 -- the night Bobby Kennedy was assassinated: John Kerry is on board the USS Gridley, returning home from Vietnam. He carries with him a dog-eared copy of RFK's political manifesto "To Seek a Newer World." During the last month, Kerry has been using the ship's radio to follow Kennedy's remarkable campaign run. But when he tunes in to hear the results of the California primary, the crackling radio delivers the horrifying news that Bobby has been gunned down -- news that rocks Kerry to his core. "It was strange," he says, "coming home from a place of violence to a place of violence. a violence that shook our very sense of the order of things."
This was the beginning of his coming of age as a leader, which culminated three years later with his 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. With the help of former RFK speechwriter Adam Walinsky, Kerry crafted a compelling, unflinching speech filled with all the moral clarity, fearlessness, and boldness our current times demand. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" memorably asked Lt. Kerry -- wrenching words just as applicable to today's Iraq as they were to Vietnam in '71.
RFK's influence can also be seen in Kerry's willingness to dream big. His campaign speeches often consciously evoke Bobby's famous challenge to dream of things that never were and ask, "Why not?": "Why not give every working American access to high-quality, affordable health care? Why not have public schools where children set out on a lifetime of learning and possibility? Why not preserve our environment so our great-grandchildren can breathe clean air and drink clean water? Why not have a leadership committed to civil rights, equal rights, and affirmative action? And why not have a foreign policy that strengthens our nation and our interests by advancing our values?"
The hallmark of Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign was the urgency he brought to the problems of race and poverty. And as Douglas Brinkley wrote in "Tour of Duty": "Like Robert F. Kennedy, for a young white man of privileged background, Kerry always displayed an uncommonly incongruous instinct for siding with the underdog."
Speaking this week in Topeka, Kansas on the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Brown school desegregation ruling, John Kerry echoed Kennedy's concerns:
"We have not met the promise of Brown when one-third of all African-American children are living in poverty. We have not met the promise of Brown when only fifty percent of African-American men in New York City have a job. We have not met the promise of Brown when nearly twenty million black and Hispanic
Americans don't have basic health insurance. And we certainly have not met the promise of Brown when, in too many parts of our country, our school systems are not separate but equal - but they are separate and unequal. For America to be America for any of us, America must be America for all of us."
There is a memorable moment in the PBS documentary when Bobby Kennedy makes one of his first campaign appearances in the Midwest, at the University of Kansas, in front of a jam-packed audience that responds to his call for abandoning "the bankrupt policies we're following at the present" with thunderous cheers.
A photographer for Life magazine traveling with Kennedy can't believe what he's seeing. Walinsky recounts how the man turned to him and yelled: "This is Kansas, fucking Kansas. He's going all the fucking way!"
Kennedy's ability to move beyond divisions that threatened to tear our country apart and reach out to all Americans -- black and white, rich and poor, young and old, urban and rural -- meant that every place, even a bastion of conservatism like Kansas, was suddenly in play. Every state was a swing state.
Now, John Kerry has the opportunity to draw a clear line between the politics of hope and the politics of fear. If he does, and offers a bold vision forged by his unique personal narrative to connect with, inspire, and empower voters all across the country, he too can catch fire and turn red states blue -- winning not in a toss up, but in a landslide.
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