Retrospective of 1968

Meet The Press on this extremely warm Sunday morning did a retrospective on Bobby Kennedy and June of 1968. He was challenging an incumbent President because of his failed war policy in South East Asia. That president would eventually announce that “He would not seek nor would he accept the nomination of his party for the Presidency of the United States”. This led to a contested primary season within the Democratic Party with the Vietnam War being the central focus of that contest. It was also in the Spring and then in the early Summer of 1968 that showed the underlying violence that had become the plague of ‘public discourse’ in that decade of shame. Martin Luther King, Junior was murdered in Memphis during April of that year followed by Sirhan Sirhan’s murder of Robert Kennedy in June following his victory in the California Primary.

Meet the Press Remembers RFK




1968 was a significant year in my life as well. I graduated from high School in Fort Wayne, Indiana and then the following Fall I would head off for my freshman year in college. I want to go back to April of that year before I graduated from high school. We had lived in Fort Wayne since January of 1961, but Dallas had been our home since 1954. Spring Break of 1968 was going to be very special for myself and my younger siblings because my mother took us to Dallas for that week. The trip to Dallas though long, remembering the Inter-State System was far from completed, was fun but you often had to travel through metropolitan areas instead of being able to bypass them as you can today.

My mother decided we should go home through Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and finally back into Indiana. It was late in the day when we left Dallas, but we made it to Texarkana that first evening. While we had dinner at a restaurant near our motel, other patrons came in with the news that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis. Reactions and remarks varied but you have to remember where we were and when it was. She didn’t say much but it was quite evident that my mother was much more concerned than she wanted us to realize. I think she was more concerned to not alarm the rest of us and keep us from knowing how worried she was. That turned out to be the best night of the trip home. We were on the road first thing in the morning since Mom knew we had at least two days before we could expect to be home. I was eighteen ready to graduate from high school and thought I was so grown up, but that day opened my eyes to issues and attitudes that began to make me wonder about the promise of America.

What I remember most about that day was one military convoy after another coming south. Encountering military convoys back then wasn’t a strange occurrence, but what confused me was that there were so many of them. I guess we don’t think about it today because they are all in Iraq. The drive to Memphis wasn’t bad but once we were there we had no choice but to drive through the city. What did we encounter and what did we see? Well, it was something I never expected to see in the United States or it was my own naiveté. We drove up a rise in what was then the downtown business district of the city, and you wouldn’t believe what I saw or you shouldn’t be. I saw American troops walking down ‘Main Street, USA’ carrying automatic weapons in the midst of armored vehicles and tanks tearing up streets for which someone just got the City Council to approve improvements. We finally got out of Memphis driving northward seeing more convoys traveling south as we went north and I looked at Mother and asked her ‘WHY’ but she had no answer that made sense.
Then I noticed the increase flow of traffic as we travelled north. It wasn’t just holiday traffic returning home, but the kind of traffic that impedes its flow and speed because of the congestion on the highway. Those of us who grew up during the 1960’s remember well the stark reality of the riots in Watts and Detroit as well as far too many other American cities. Hindsight is a wonderful gift and one not so wonderful at times because it can enlighten us to what was more difficult to perceive at the moment. What I do remember was one gasoline station after another saying no gas, and motels and hotels with flashing signs saying ‘NO VACANCIES’. We had no alternative but to keep driving further and further north eventually finding ourselves in Northern Kentucky with our gas gauge getting closer and closer to empty. My mother had four children with her ranging in age from eighteen to ten, and she knew that a decision had to be made. What she didn’t know was whether it was the wisest or safest one under very strained circumstances.

She took the next exit knowing that we were nowhere close to a large city in search of gas and a motel. I was becoming more frightened with each mile we drove, but finally and well past midnight and probably having driven an additional seventy miles since we had taken that exit we found a motel. It was not the ‘Ritz’ but it was a roof over our heads and as cramped as it was we all had an opportunity for much needed rest especially my mother. The next morning we were able to find gas and made our way back to the highway that would take us to Fort Wayne. Such fear and prejudice still permeated American society in 1968 that many both in and out of government were afraid that a ‘Race War’ or some major expression of violence would follow Martin Luther King, Junior’s death. That did not happen because most supporters of King believed in his Dream and one that was nonviolent.

In 1968 when Hoosiers found themselves at the center of a dynamic struggle over a Presidential nomination and the future direction of our nation gave insight into the tensions, tragedy and emotions of a singular moment—Senator Robert Kennedy's remarks in Indianapolis just hours after Dr. Martin Luther King had been shot—and provides a deeper understanding of one of the more significant events in our nation's long, contentious civil rights journey." —U.S. Senator Evan Bayh

The following is a report of how Robert Kennedy received the news of Martin Luther King, Junior’s Assassination while making a campaign a campaign stop in Indianapolis, IN April 4, 1968.

It was supposed to be a routine campaign stop. In a poor section of Indianapolis, 40 years ago, a largely black crowd had waited an hour to hear the presidential candidate speak. The candidate, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, had been warned not to go by the city's police chief.

As his car entered the neighborhood, his police escort left him. Once there, he stood in the back of a flatbed truck. He turned to an aide and asked, "Do they know about Martin Luther King?"

They didn't, and it was left to Kennedy to tell them that King had been shot and killed that night in Memphis, Tenn. The crowd gasped in horror.

Kennedy spoke of King's dedication to "love and to justice between fellow human beings," adding that "he died in the cause of that effort."

And Kennedy sought to heal the racial wounds that were certain to follow by referring to the death of his own brother, President John F. Kennedy.

"For those of you who are black and are tempted to ... be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling," he said. "I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man."

Many other American cities burned after King was killed. But there was no fire in Indianapolis, which heard the words of Robert Kennedy.

A historian says a well-organized black community kept its calm. It's hard to overlook the image of one single man, standing on a flatbed truck, who never looked down at the paper in his hand — only at the faces in the crowd.

"My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus," Robert Kennedy said, "and 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.

"What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black."

RFK Announces the Death of MLK




Two months later, Robert Kennedy himself was felled by an assassin's bullet.

Assassination of RFK




Total Popular Vote in the Democratic Primaries of 1968:

Eugene McCarthy: 2,914,933 (38.73 per cent)
Robert F. Kennedy: 2,305,148 (30.63 per cent)
Stephen M. Young: 549,140 (7.30 per cent)
Lyndon B. Johnson: 383,590 (5.10 per cent)
Thomas C. Lynch: 380,286 (5.05 per cent)
Roger D. Branigin: 238,700 (3.17 per cent)
George Smathers: 236,242 (3.14 per cent)
Hubert Humphrey: 166,463 (2.21 per cent)
Unpledged: 161,143 (2.14 per cent)
Scott Kelly: 128,899 (1.71 per cent)
George Wallace: 34,489 (0.46 per cent)
Richard Nixon (write-in): 13,610 (0.18 per cent)
Ronald Reagan (write-in): 5,309 (0.07 per cent)
Ted Kennedy: 4,052 (0.05 per cent)
Paul C. Fisher: 506 (0.01 per cent)
John G. Crommelin: 186 (0.00 per cent)

The two leading candidates in 1968 were Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy who both advocated Peace and an end to the Vietnam War. The nomination should have gone to Eugene McCarthy, but as a result the influence of President Lyndon Johnson and the DNC Hubert Humphrey who had received just over 2 per cent of the popular vote won the nomination. Hubert Humphrey would go on to lose the general election to Richard Nixon in a close election.


Richard Nixon: 31,783,783
Hubert Humphrey: 31,271,839


There are political analysts who have maintained for many years that Humphrey’s failure to disassociate himself from the policies of Lyndon Johnson was the single greatest factor in his loss. Would a Robert Kennedy candidacy in the 1968 Presidential election have made a difference? I think so but it is something we will never know because it did not happen. There was part of Tim Russert’s retrospective that I found interesting especially in the context our election in November. He pointed out in a Speech that Robert Kennedy had given as Attorney General his belief that in forty years a Negro could be elected president and hold the same office as his brother. If someone would have suggested this same possibility in 1968, he or she would probably be given the mantel of ‘Fool’ for such naiveté. Yet, it is 2008 and we find ourselves in historic times. Yes, we have an African American as a candidate of a major political party for the Presidency of the United States but we also have the opportunity of redefining ourselves and how we expect government to operate. Do we want a government that puts the needs/desires of Corporate America over the Human needs of its citizens? Do we want a government that allows speculation on commodities that drive fuel and food prices higher and higher? Do you want a government that separates families from one another because they can no longer afford the gasoline to visit them? The social divide that Katrina showed so clearly to the nation and the world, now Wall Street is showing almost daily how deep that chasm is in the United States of America.