Different Roads

Much beloved of historians is the game of “What If?”, exploring how our past could so easily have been very different. How would Britain look today if William of Normandy had been repelled in 1066, for instance? Or what consequences would have followed an Allied defeat on D-Day? What if the Spice Girls had actually been able to sing? (Ok, not that one but you get the idea). History is a chaotic tumble of cause-and-effect and we don’t need forensic analytical skills to recognise that nothing was, or is, ever certain. We simply live with the one outcome which actually came to pass.

These ‘hypothetical’ histories are important because they show us how a single event can change everything which follows. One “What If?” in particular is close to my own heart and I would like to share it here. It concerns an event which occurred exactly fifty-five years ago this month with the assassination in Los Angeles of Senator Robert Francis Kennedy. Widely known as ‘RFK’ he’s always been something of a hero of mine. Shockingly, his murder in June 1968 came just nine weeks after that of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”, wrote Vladimir

Lenin, who knew a thing or two about unforeseen events.

I was twelve years old then and I’m pretty sure my overly serious nature became more immersed in the nightly TV news bulletins than was healthy. In my defence, though, I’ll add that I was also fixated with blues music and Liverpool FC. Don’t think I was a one-topic obsessive.

I believe Robert Kennedy was a unique politician. Certainly, he was not without character flaws; he could be unnecessarily blunt in conversation. Also, despite fathering 11 children with his wife, he still shared the family weakness for the, ahem, shapely ankle. However, greatness surely lies not in the absence of failings but in the overcoming of them. My admiration stems from the way RFK evolved over the astonishing arc of his life. I’ll keep it brief: Born into wealth and privilege, he became first an attack dog for the notorious antiCommunist hearings and later US Attorney General, determined to smash organised crime. He was a tough cookie, as they say. But overwhelmed by the loss of his brother in Dallas in 1963, he stepped back and the next few years brought about a remarkable personal transformation.

White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars

He travelled widely through Latin America and South Africa, opening his eyes to, and developing immense empathy for, the poor and dispossessed. By 1968 Robert Kennedy had become an anti-war liberal, advocating gun control and defending the rights of minorities. Outraged by the poverty he had seen across his own country, he announced his run for the presidency, determined to defeat racism in America.

“Half a century on, why does it matter?” you cry. Well, had he lived, there was a reasonable chance Robert Kennedy would have been elected US President in November 1968. Instead, America got Richard Nixon with his cauldron of personal grievances, the Watergate conspiracy, and a massive escalation of the war in Vietnam. Nixon’s vengeful character viewed those with different ideas not as opponents but as “the enemy”. US politics today bears the legacy of this tribalism, the merry band of zealots with their firearms fetish, viciously disparaging those of whom they disapprove. That’s why it matters. In 1968 one disgruntled young man with a cheap handgun in a Los Angeles hotel catapulted America down this road.

Robert Kennedy’s doctrine was to mobilise people’s hopes not play on their fears; advocating not what to avoid but what to aspire to. Of course an RFK presidency would have seen the scandals and missteps which batter every government; the Kennedy name itself could inspire a visceral dislike in some quarters. But intent is everything, the belief in the government’s responsibility to improve the lives of as many people as possible. Our bookshelves include three biographies of Robert Kennedy plus “Thirteen Days”, his own blood-freezing account of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Another book, compiled by his son Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, is a collection of his father’s writings. As well as quotations and the thoughts of those he admired (FrenchAlgerian writer Albert Camus was a favourite), it contains drafts and notes made by RFK for his own speeches.

The book takes its title from this pledge: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago; to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”

A road not taken, a future denied. Not so much a “What if?” as an “If only.”