Sean Stone and Rob Wilson: RFK Legacy
Rob Wilson produced JFK Revisited for director Oliver Stone. He has now produced RFK Legacy for director Sean Stone, Oliver’s son. This new documentary seems to me to be unique in its field. Because it deals with three Kennedys: John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Robert Kennedy Jr. And the concentration is on Senator Robert Kennedy: his life, and also his assassination.
It begins with Robert Kennedy announcing that he is running for president in 1968. It then briefly deals with three primaries in that race: Indiana, Oregon–the first election a Kennedy lost– and the triumph in California on June 4th over Senatorial rival Eugene McCarthy. We see RFK at the podium reciting his now iconic (and final) public phrase, “On to Chicago and let’s win there.” The film then cuts to the aftermath of that victory: the utter shock, disbelief and hysteria of the crowd as some of them see, and the rest of them learn, that RFK has been assassinated. Recall, this is just two months after the murder of Martin Luther King in Memphis. And it is the second Kennedy to be assassinated in five years. The grief at what had just happened at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles was almost palpable. The Jungian consciousness behind it all was this: it was the premature burial of the sixties.
The film follows as RFK’s body was transported from California to a requiem at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, as that was the state from which he was senator. To make the passing of the era even more symbolic, on that plane were not just Ethel Kennedy, but both Jackie Kennedy and Coretta King. Bobby Kennedy had paid a large part of the cost for King’s funeral in April. And the night of King’s murder, he gave what was probably his finest speech—one which prevented Indianapolis from going up in flames, as almost every other major city in America had. Jackie Kennedy strongly objected to RFK running for president. She feared that what had happened to her husband would happen to him. He had become the substitute father to her children.
What then followed the service was the train ride from New York City to the burial at Arlington Cemetery in Washington, DC. Arthur Schlesinger was on that train. He had originally thought Bobby was a lesser candidate than Jack. He had since changed his mind. At the end, he thought RFK would make an even greater president than his brother. One reason was that he had become more radical than Jack. He wrote in his diary, “We have now murdered the three men who, more than any other, incarnated the idealism of America in our time.” He pledged never to get this close to any other such candidate. It was too tragic. (David Margolick, The Promise and the Dream, pp. 385-86)
The film flashes back to RFK’s career with commentators like Lisa Pease in the present and Ed Murrow from the past. We see a young Robert Kennedy as lead counsel for the McClellan Committee going up against the likes of Jimmy Hoffa and, later, Sam Giancana. Members of the press now pronounced Kennedy “ruthless’ for exposing the Cosa Nostra so relentlessly. Which is something that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were reluctant to do.
When his brother won the presidency, RFK continued his crusade against organized crime as Attorney General. He also, like no other previous AG, pursued the breaking down of segregation in the South and civil rights for African Americans. Further, as the film shows, it was RFK who exposed to JFK that the CIA had deceived him about the Bay of Pigs operation. They knew it could not succeed without Pentagon support. In fact, they knew it would fail. But they thought JFK would commit American power to salvage it. He did not. Therefore, JFK fired Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Dick Bissell.
This split with the Agency was made worse by the fact that the CIA had secretly contracted out with three members of the Cosa Nostra—John Rosselli, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante—to assassinate Fidel Castro. This is after RFK had ordered a full court press on organized crime, and ordered an almost total surveillance over Giancana. When the FBI (accidentally) discovered these plots and informed Bobby about them, he asked for a briefing by the CIA. The Agency told him the plots had stopped. They had not. And the Agency knew they had not when they lied to him about it.
By midway through 1961, Bobby became an advisor to JFK on foreign policy. During the Missile Crisis, there was no one more trusted by the president than Bobby. When there was true fear of having to resort to the Greenbrier Underground Shelter –which the film depicts—President Kennedy opted for the blockade alternative. For which he was harshly criticized, especially by the Joint Chiefs. When the Russians communicated a truce agreement, it was RFK who advised his brother on the terms to accept.
As the film notes, after the double assassinations of JFK and then Oswald, Bobby Kennedy began a metamorphosis. He now became a gentler, kinder, more sensitive politician and person. This was typified by his visits to Mississippi at the request of Marian Edelman, and to California for Cesar Chavez. (I was personally told by the late Paul Schrade that it was Cesar’s idea to approach RFK on this.)
In keeping with the title of the film, we now shift to RFK Jr. He consciously followed his father’s footsteps by first attending Harvard and then the University of Virginia School of Law. He developed a chronic drug problem after his father’s death, which included running away from home. He was eventually arrested for heroin possession in South Dakota. As part of his probation, he worked for the conservation group the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). It was that experience which transformed him into an environmental lawyer of the first rank.
Some of his successful crusades were his legal actions over pollution of the Hudson River, during which he joined the Riverkeepers group, which had started with fisherman John Cronin. It was this longstanding Hudson River campaign which many feel was the real beginning of the environmental movement in the USA. Kennedy also took on Monsanto and General Electric. He became well known in New York and was featured on the cover of several popular magazines for saving the Hudson River from becoming a cesspool. New York magazine captioned him as “The Kennedy Who Matters”. He wrote a book called Crimes Against Nature, railing against George W. Bush’s environmental policies. This and his speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 got him interviews with Jon Stewart and then Stephen Colbert. He was so in demand that he was doing almost 200 speeches per year.
The film deals with what eventually caused the MSM to turn on Kennedy. It began with his campaign against mercury in pollution and the fact that it was in some vaccines wrapped in a preservative called thimerosal. He was not the only person to warn about this. Congressman Frank Pallone had done so in 1997. The film also features people like psychologist Sarah Bridges, actress Grace Hightower and essayist Lyn Redwood on the issue. I am not qualified to render any kind of definitive judgment on the subject, so I will not.
The film then deals with the other issue that turned the MSM against Robert Kennedy Jr. That would be his view of the assassinations of his uncle and then his father. As the film shows, RFK Jr. was first suspicious about his uncle’s death. This was based on the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby. He could not understand why Ruby did what he did in public and in front of TV cameras. He later found out that Ruby was much more than just a patriotic strip club owner. At this point in the film, Sean Stone brings in David Talbot, who does a very nice job describing what happened when RFK heard the news from J. Edgar Hoover that his brother was dead. He immediately suspected a conspiracy, as Talbot described in the early part of his book, Brothers.
RFK could not stay for the rest of the LBJ term. So after he, Thomas Kuchel and Hubert Humphrey got his brother’s civil rights bill through the Senate, he departed. (As Clay Risen shows in his book The Bill of the Century, what LBJ did on this bill has been greatly exaggerated.) As senator from New York, Kennedy became what author Edward Schmitt called the President of the Other America. He was there for the poor, the young, and the downtrodden.
He was obviously the candidate to run against Johnson in 1968. After all, as he himself told Daniel Ellsberg, his brother’s policy would not have allowed Vietnam to escalate as under Johnson. (Ellsberg at Harvard JFK seminar in 1993). As Talbot states, by 1968, RFK was going to run on civil rights, poverty and withdrawing from Vietnam. Contrary to popular belief, and as revealed by author Jules Witcover in his book 85 Days, Kennedy had decided before the New Hampshire primary that he would run. McCarthy’s strong showing in that primary, plus the devastating Tet Offensive, forced Johnson out. As Witcover notes, Johnson would have lost in Wisconsin. And he knew that.
The film closes with two powerful strophes. First is President Kennedy’s advocacy for Rachel Carson. Specifically in her battle against DDT and other pesticides in her 1962 classic Silent Spring. Carson had attended the May 1962 White House conference on conservation. And she testified before JFK’s Science Advisory Committee. She was battling breast cancer at the time, and she passed on in April of 1964. She was viciously attacked by the chemical companies, but she stood her ground.
The second strophe is the assassination of Robert Kennedy. Robert Kennedy Jr admits that he had accepted the orthodoxy on this case until he talked to Paul Schrade. Schrade was one of the victims of the shooting at the Ambassador Hotel that night. When the trajectory of the bullet that hit him was explained, he knew that the LAPD was passing horse manure. He eventually convinced Bobby to read Thomas Noguchi’s autopsy report. That did it for RFK Jr. Thankfully, Sean Stone features Lisa Pease in this last segment. There is no better authority on the RFK murder than Lisa. And her book, A Lie Too Big to Fail, is mandatory reading for anyone interested in that case. Stone’s closing twenty minutes or so is quite pointed intellectually and well done artistically. Kudos should also go to Oliver Stone, who did the face-to-face interview with RFK Jr., editor Kurt Mattila, composer Jeff Beal and cinematographer Egor Povolotsky.
I would recommend viewing the film to our readers. It is being streamed at Angel.com (https://www.angel.com/blog/rfk-legacy/posts/where-to-watch-rfk-legacy).
