"For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these 'it might have been.'"
-John Greenleaf Whittier
As a historian, I tend to be skeptical about the role of “Great Men” in shaping history. To say as Carlyle did, that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men,” is patently absurd.
That being said, some men and women do shape history more than others, if not to the extent Carlyle believed. An individual may not be able to reverse the current of history, but he or she may be able to shift it, in a more positive (or negative direction).
Senator Robert F. Kennedy said that “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
I believe Senator Kennedy, if given the chance, could have shifted the current of American history (or rather, he could have prevented it from taking the rightward shift of the last half century).
I was born long after Kennedy was murdered. I was born in the middle of the long night of American politics, at a time when conservatism was dominant and even Democrats towed the corporate line. That night has yet to lift.
I believe it is the hesitancy and impotence of the Democratic Party that has brought us to this moment. But imagine, for a moment, if instead of electing Richard Nixon in 1968, a man who played on the fears and resentments of the white middle class so expertly that he convinced them to vote against their own economic interests and so shattered the New Deal coalition, imagine we had elected Senator Kennedy.
It is not so difficult to imagine a president willing to say that “The national system of health care has failed to meet the most urgent medical needs of millions of Americans.” I am sure Obama has made statements like that. Kennedy made that statement during his 1968 campaign, at the University of Indiana Medical School. But what happened next is something I fear we will never see from our current Democrats.
A black janitor shouted from the balcony, “We want Kennedy.” A student responded, “No we don’t.” Another student asked how Kennedy where the money to fund his proposal would come from. Kennedy snapped, “From you.” He continued:
“Let me say something about the tone of these questions. I look around this room and I don’t see many black faces who will become doctors. You can’t talk about where the money will come from…Part of civilized society is to let people go to medical school who come from ghettos. You don’t see many people coming out of the ghettos or off the Indian reservations to medical school. You are the privileges ones…It’s our society, not just our government, that spends twice as much on pets as on the poverty program. It’s the poor who carry the burden in Vietnam. You sit here as white medical students, while black people carry the burden of fighting in Vietnam.”
Can you imagine Obama, or any other serious Democratic candidate today speaking that way? I certainly cannot.
I highly recommend these three books on Booby Kennedy:
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times
Jack Newfield, RFK: A Memoir
Edward R. Schmitt, President of the Other America: Robert Kennedy and the Politics of Poverty