On Remembering Primary Elections

Our home in Baltimore County – 1982 – 1993

There will be primary races decided on successive Tuesdays over the next two weeks.  Big ones.   Lots of delegates.  Michigan.  Ohio.  Florida.  It could be all over soon.

Many of you who have supported Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren feel as if your heart has been ripped from your chest.  Its been a tough primary season for you. If you are young and worked hard for your candidate your will remember this primary for decades to come.

I am 77 years old and though you may not believe it, I can relate.  I know how you feel, for you see, I was a twenty something in 1968.

Torittto had been discharged from the Army the previous November, had a decent job at the New York office of the Bank of California and was living in his own house on Staten Island with his bride.  We went to work together each day; she was a secretary at a steamship company and we worked only a few blocks apart.  On Fridays we would have lunch together.

I had spent the last two years of my four year enlistment making notifications to the next of kin of New York soldiers killed in Vietnam.  It was a soul killing duty.  After Tet I knew the war was a grave mistake.

Bobbie Kennedy was running for the Democratic Presidential nomination on an antiwar platform against Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968.  Humphrey was a decent man, a good liberal, but tied to the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson and his war policy.

Senator and poet Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, a staunch antiwar critic of the President was the first to challenge Johnson in the primaries.  McCarthy finished a strong second in New Hampshire, exposing the President’s weakness.

Sensing the strength of the antiwar platform, Bobby Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Presidency.  Many supporters of McCarthy felt betrayed by Kennedy’s move but Eugene McCarthy, Senator and professorial poet was not going to beat the odds on Republican nominee – Richard Nixon.

Thinking we should find a way out of Vietnam and defeat Richard Nixon, I supported Bobby Kennedy.  I worked for him, knocking on doors, handing out flyers, volunteered to serve as a poll watcher for the Democrats.

Then came the night of the California primary, a victory for Bobby.

My wife and I sat watching the results on our new Sylvania color television, simply elated.

And then came Sirhan.

Earlier in the year the nation saw the asssasination of Martin Luther King.

Now this.  What was happening to my country?  Next day Bobby Kennedy was dead and I felt that despair that comes from the tearing out of one’s heart.

Did Sirhan act alone?  Who knows.  Perhaps the entire truth will come to light in  hundred years, revealing that our politics are more cruel and dirty than we would like to believe.

Flash forward to the mid-eighties and a little birthday party to which my eldest was invited a long time ago.  She was in middle school, probably 11 years old and her class mate Meghan’s birthday was coming.  And Meghan was having a party at her house.

The invitation duly arrived and my daughter wanted to go, which was fine with us.

We were living in a nice area of Baltimore County at the time but nowhere near as nice as the toney area where Meghan’s family lived.  Notwithstanding, we all shared the same fine public schools.

My girl got a cute, new outfit and we prepared for the Saturday afternoon party.

At the appointed hour I drove to Meghan’s home with my daughter, she all dressed up and bearing a birthday gift.  A number of adults and kids were already outside greeting the young guests.

And so I left my daughter to attend the first  “grown up” party to which she had been invited.  Picked her up later that afternoon – she had a good time for which my wife and I were pleased.

A couple of weeks go by, the party now over and forgotten.

One evening after another routine day at the office I’m sitting in my favorite chair after dinner reading Time magazine.  We did that sort of thing back then before the internet.

My eldest walks by on her way to do homework.

“Oh!  There’s Meghan’s mom”

“Where?” says I, somewhat perplexed.

“On the cover!” says she.

I turn it over and look –  “THIS is Meghan’s mom??”

“Yup,”

“Do you know who this is?”

“Yup.  Its Meghan’s mom.”

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

Eldest daughter of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

He will be gone 52 years this June.

And today I thought about how America might have been different if he had defeated Richard Nixon in 1968.  And how my little girl attended his grand daughter’s birthday party.

I know what it feels like to lose,  We  don’t always get what we want.  Let us band together and get what we need.

Victory in November.

Now listen to how America’s leaders used to sound.

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