{"id":947,"date":"2006-12-01T10:25:38","date_gmt":"2006-12-01T15:25:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=947"},"modified":"2006-12-21T08:59:00","modified_gmt":"2006-12-21T13:59:00","slug":"rfk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=947","title":{"rendered":"RFK"},"content":{"rendered":"

This past week I’ve been soaking in the politics of my distant youth.\u00c2\u00a0Part of this is research on the political climate leading up to the UGRLC scandal <\/a>which I plan to resume writing about,\u00c2\u00a0but part of it has also a welcome change from the distraction of\u00c2\u00a0campaigning for Congress.<\/p>\n

After plowing through\u00c2\u00a0a dozen old Discover magazines that had been collecting dust I read another couple hundred pages of “Master of the Senate.” I was up past midnight the last two nights reading it. What a great book about LBJ!\u00c2\u00a0I plan on spending some time with it today as well.<\/p>\n

I also watched one excellent bit of television this week – PBS’s American Experience. Its program on Bobby Kennedy<\/a> gave me a new apppreciation him. I was just a teenager when he challenged LBJ and I’ve carried my prejudices against him ever since. At the time I shared the common\u00c2\u00a0view of\u00c2\u00a0college whitebreads towards him; that he was simply taking advantage of Gene McCarthy’s courage and unexpected success in\u00c2\u00a0taking on\u00c2\u00a0LBJ. I also appreciated what David Brooks\u00c2\u00a0had to say about RFK<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0in his recent column.<\/p>\n

There is a\u00c2\u00a0 new hagiographic movie about Kennedy, Bobby<\/a>, which is out in theaters now. I’m not sure I’ll rush to see it. Its about 22 characters\u00c2\u00a0each of which,\u00c2\u00a0in one way or another, is caught up in RFK’s campaign and with him on the night of his assassination. I have my own memory from that night.<\/p>\n

My father was a real political junkie so everyone in my family watched the California returns after the news that night. We had an Ethiopian foreign student living with us that year<\/a>. He was probably caught up under the Kennedy spell.\u00c2\u00a0Bedru kept watching the news coverage from California after the rest of us turned in for bed.\u00c2\u00a0He was alone when\u00c2\u00a0the assassination was reported\u00c2\u00a0live.\u00c2\u00a0He stayed up till the television went off the air around midnight then turned off the lights and came to bed without waking us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past week I’ve been soaking in the politics of my distant youth.\u00c2\u00a0Part of this is research on the political climate leading up to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}