It’s been a few days now since I motored to Memphis, Tennessee, from Nashville to interview Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as part of the Presidential Roller Coaster 2024 series.
The first of these, with Vivek Ramaswamy, has already aired on Epoch TV and NTD. The second with RFK Jr. is being edited and will premiere on July 28.
Driving down, I admit to having what the French call “le trac,” often translated as “stage fright”—basically an attack of nerves.
Bobby, after all, is a Kennedy—they had a rather significant role in the dreams and aspirations of my generation.
Specifically in my case, Mr. Kennedy’s uncle, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was assassinated on my 20th birthday. I sat in a motel room in Saratoga Springs, New York, with my then-girlfriend, a Skidmore student, watching open-mouthed two days later as someone I learned was named Jack Ruby appeared out of nowhere and fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged presidential assassin.
How could such a thing have been allowed to happen?
As for Robert F. Kennedy père, either one or two days before he was shot (June 1968), I watched him speak amid nonstop cheering and shouts of “Viva!” to a largely Mexican American crowd in East Los Angeles. He was brilliant, charismatic, and destined to be our next president, I was then certain.
He would be the one to get us out of the Vietnam quagmire.
It turned out that Richard Nixon did.
On that three-hour-plus drive, I kept mulling over how much the Democratic Party had changed since then.
The party of free speech had become the party of “Shut up!”
The party of peace had become the party of endless missiles for Ukraine.
The party of “our bodies, ourselves” had become the party of "Take your vaccines and put on your mask or else."
How had that happened? |