Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Major Garrett wrote about John Steinbeck, whose novels echo in our memory “like a favorite family hymn, a true American hymn.” Today, Will Rahn reflects on Jack and Bobby Kennedy—their lives, their legacies, and the family America just can’t quit. —The Editors
Jack and Bobby. You see those bouncy, boyish nicknames and know exactly who I mean—you picture their faces, you hear the famous voices that went with them. I wonder, What keeps us turning back to them? The truth is, we never turned away.
Maybe it’s the drama of their deaths. John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the great formative moment of the Boomer generation. It gave birth to the myth of the ’60s, those few short years we compulsively revisit in our movies, our television shows, and our fashion. The notion that he would have avoided the Vietnam War had he lived, that we could have had the sunny part of that decade without the darkness, is one of the rare historical counterfactuals widely believed to be true.
Whether Bobby’s 1968 bid for the presidency would have succeeded is somewhat mythical too; he was winning primaries before they truly mattered. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, his main rival for the nomination, was seen as heroic by anyone who remembered his stand for civil rights when it divided the party in 1948. He also had more than enough support among the party bosses who would pick the nominee in the literally smoke-filled rooms. But his death shrouded him in permanent possibility.
