Mr. Kennedy came over to Brooklyn a lot. I must have spoken to him four, maybe five times. He just would come to the park and walk around and talk to us--about school, our jobs, anything. I last saw him in late April. He seemed tired but we talked a bit. Mr. Kennedy was the only politician I knew. Those other guys--Nixon, McCarthy, Rockefeller, Humphrey--I don't know them from nothing. --a black youth from Bedford-Stuyvesant outside St. Patrick's Cathedral last week

Kennedy was damn smart. Most American leaders aren't. When he came to South America he knew what was going on. Hell, he knew more about student problems than some of the students did.   --a Brazilian student at Harvard outside Lowell House this week

The weeping hasn't stopped. It probably won't for a number of years. Robert F. Kennedy's most fervent supporters seem convinced that the events of the next four years--under a Nixon or a Humphrey--will only intensify the frustration and violence which have come to typify American political and social life in the last few years. One Harvard professor said Monday night, "It's time for another Long March to Yenan."

Why this despair, this sense of resignation? Part of the answer undoubtedly lies in Robert Kennedy's ineffable ability to make his cohorts--professors, lawyers, entertainers, sportsmen, and kids--feel he was not merely their boss or leader or public advocate, but their true friend. Most of his professional associates soon became pals of one sort of another. Tragedy, moralism, and fatalism seemed to give Kennedy a warmth and compassion his detractors denied him to the end.

But the much-maligned James Michael Curley had this same ability to forge personal, emotional bonds with his aides and cohorts. Shy, anxious Bobby Kennedy had something else: his backers were certain that he alone could move to heal the racial, generational, and international crisis hobbling America. As one Boston female lawyer back from the funeral said Sunday. "He had more imagination, guts, and heart than the rest." According to his long-time adviser Adam Yarmolinsky, his constant refrain was "What can I do about it?"

Robert Kennedy, then, made America's problems personal causes. He baited white, suburban audiences throughout the country this spring with tales of life in the ghetto and on the Indian reservations. He told Oregon's hunters that easy access to guns was immoral. His personality, his bristling hope, and his eclecticism were his politics.

So far as his advisers were concerned, this was Robert Kennedy's long suit. Despite the obvious difficulties posed by his bluntness and verbal outrage, Kennedy's message had a purpose: to console and reassure America's "outs"--bitter blacks, exploited farm workers, and war-weary students. These were the groups which were falling out and had to be pulled back in. This is why Kennedy saw himself as the candidate of reconciliation. Given the circumstances, it didn't seem as important if the groups which fought him--generally the wealthier elements, hidebound Republicans, and segregationists--were a little miffed. Besides, it was quite possible that a Kennedy Administration could take care of opponents by giving them economic stability and fewer riots and student take-overs. A dream, but why not?

Bob Kennedy had a good deal of trouble getting his dreams across. Most of the nation's newspapers seemed more anxious to catch his occasional slips, to dwell on his so-called "ruthlessness," than to explain--or even just to analyze--the thrust of his campaign. In their zeal to discuss Joe McCarthy and wiretapping, editorial writers somehow forgot that Bob Kennedy defended the right of Americans to send material aid to North Vietnam and fought bills to cut back the Supreme Court's landmark criminal procedure decisions. They refused to admit that the Bob Kennedy who relentlessly exposed the costs of labor racketeering was the same man who assaulted apartheid on it's home territory. They seemed to forget that the drive for a nuclear non-proliferation treaty began only after Kennedy publicly raised the issue in a 1965 Senate speech. They didn't see that Kennedy meant as much to the frenzied crowds as they did to him. They refused to take his humor for its own sake, but insisted it was his sly reaction to the "ruthlessness" tag.

Though Kennedy's supporters felt he was getting a raw deal, they felt less badly about it by the end of the California primary. It finally appeared that John Kennedy's slight, shy brother had carved out a winning campaign style and more important, one that was his own. Few rhetorical flourishes, high-minded slogans; more caustic straight talk and grueling face-to-face contact. Kennedy gave the nation, as his press secretary Frank Mankiewicz, said, the rare belief that he was a politician who would do what he said, that his "campaign promises" were promises.

There is no way of telling, of course, whether Bob Kennedy would have made the White House on this run. A summer of riots, the impasse in Paris, and rising Vietnam casualty rates could well have eroded Vice President Humphrey's delegate lead. And much of Senator McCarthy's liberal, affluent support might have resigned itself to the former Attorney General. Yet the importance of the Kennedy campaign--or, indeed, the post-1963 Kennedy career--doesn't lie merely in what it might have been. Grief-stricken Kennedy backers should take some solace in a contribution Kennedy has made to the American political culture which in time may overshadow the importance of the Cuban missile crisis or even Vietnam.

Robert Kennedy's curious ability--and desire--to stir the enthusiasm of black people, young whites, and other traditionally dispossessed groups may very well accelerate radical changes

Photos

The photographs of Robert F. Kennedy in California were taken by Didi Pei '68, who in his junior year was photo chairman of the Harvard Year-book, and who recently was working as a Kennedy campaign staff photographer in California. Some of the pictures were taken on the day Kennedy was shot. in America's procrustean political mechanisms. While Kennedy assured such blocs he would represent them, he also tried to give them a sense that their own participation, wholly apart from his own future, would in time yield results. The upshot of his pitch was a multiple victory: alienated blacks and poor whites voted en masse in Indiana and California, clinched Kennedy wins, and got a brief feeling that their votes actually meant something.

In short, poor white laborers, Mexican-Americans, and blacks were given a sense of possibility about Ameri-politics political bosses heretofore denied them. It remains to be seen whether the dispossessed will form their own local political organizations, but Kennedy has finally given them electoral, and maybe social, hope.

Richard E. Neustadt has called this "urban populism." To the extent that it appeared this spring, this movement is probably one of the main reasons Kennedy met such modest success snaring delegates in northern industrial, non-primary states. Oldstyle political leaders not only feared the possibility of a President dealing actively with upstart urban alignments; they were also chary of Kennedy's rather pronounced enthusiasm for community action projects and increased private investment in ghetto self-development. Much of what Kennedy said was also directly threatening to rural political leaders who frequently rely on minimal voter participation.