Today’s “This Day In History” marks a couple of significant anniversaries in 20th Century American History: The Allied invasion at Normandy (“D-Day”) began 63 years ago on this date, and Robert Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles 39 years ago today.
There isn’t any particular link between the two, but both are worth noting. Most Americans have an overly idealistic image of both. We don’t learn much about World War II except that we were the good guys and “we won the war”. We blithely overlook the widespread support for Hitler in the United States and the U.K. throughout the 1930s, our complicity in the extermination of the Jews, and the far-greater military effort and sacrifice of the Soviet Union in defeating Germany. Not to mention our own concentration camps, crimes against humanity, and so on. Nevertheless, the efforts of the American, British and Canadian forces on the beaches of Normandy were genuinely heroic, and there can be no doubting the significance of re-establishing a Western front in the military defeat of Germany. The invasion was a very hard-won fight, and there would be others as the Allies marched toward Germany, but our military victories eventually overwhelmed the cloudier pre-war political machinations to shape our overall perception of the war.
Similarly, we’ve constructed Bobby Kennedy into a legendary figure with a mythos he doesn’t completely deserve. His father, who, coincidentally, thought Hitler was a better bet than Churchill, was also a big fan and supporter of Joseph McCarthy and got Bobby hired to be one of McCarthy’s gunslingers along with the genuinely evil Roy Cohn and David Schine. Then, when McCarthy hit the skids, young Bobby somehow managed to escape relatively politically unscathed. Later, as Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy used illegal wiretaps against a number of figures the Justice Department investigated, including Martin Luther King, Jr.
Always politically opportunistic, Bobby Kennedy used the goodwill going his way after John Kennedy’s assassination to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the emerging liberal majority. He used Lyndon Johnson as a foil and was able to win a sympathy vote into the Senate. He managed to turn himself into the very symbol of Democratic liberalism itself in time for the 1968 election, and I think it’s likely he would have trounced Nixon if he hadn’t died, but there was probably more in common politically between RFK and RMN than most people would admit.
It’s easy to boil down the complexities of history as time passes. There are fewer and fewer people alive who remember D-Day personally, and the prominent figures of American politics in 1968 are themselves in that dwindling category. We’re left with iconic images like these, histories written for our eighth-grade education level, and our cultural tendency toward selective perception. We need to pay closer attention to what really happened then, and we especially need to pay closer attention to what is going on right in front of us now so that there is genuine accounting for our own actions, our own political figures and our own history when our grandchildren look back through their imperfect lenses half a century on.
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