Flashback - June 5, 1968

Flashback – One year earlier - Wednesday morning June 5, 1968

Wednesday June 5, 1968 was the morning after the New Jersey and California primary elections in which my candidate Eugene McCarthy had lost narrowly to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., 36 to 31% in New Jersey and 46 to 42% in California, a fact I had known when I went to sleep.

What I wasn’t prepared for when I awoke that morning was my father – a Camden homicide policeman, stuck his head into my bedroom door and woke me with the announcement that “Bobby was killed last night.”

Bobby was killed last night? What did that mean?

Looking back, I was attracted to Eugene McCarthy like young people are attracted to Bernie Saunders today – not because of his looks and charisma but because of his ideas, and Gene McCarthy was one of the first Senators to come out publicly against the war in Vietnam.

I too, as an ignorant teenager, recognized the folly of Vietnam as not a war to protect our freedom, liberty or justice, it was a political war being waged by young Americans to boost the defense contractors stocks on wall street. I found a radical book store in downtown Philadelphia and began to buy Evergreen Magazine, a slick New Left publication that had good articles and even some real literature. It once ran a doctored photo of LBJ as a fat army sergeant with grenades handing from his chest and made the point.

So I was one of the first young students to attend a meeting for McCarthy for President in South Jersey, where a number of delegates pledged to McCarthy were chosen or volunteered to be on the campaign ballot, including Rutgers professor Jay Sigler and the owner of the Cherry Hill Mall book store.

One of McCarthy’s biggest supporters in South Jersey was John Testa, who owned a pet shop on Route 38 in Cherry Hill, and according to my father, under FBI observation for being a suspected communist. Testa had fought against the fascists with the Abe Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and though on the right side they lost the war that was to be a harbinger for World War II. Testa’s son was a school teacher in the Camden ghetto and Testa permitted the McCarthy campaign to use a store front he owned as a campaign headquarters.

My father warned me that Testa was a communist and to be careful as he was considered a serious subversive, and one afternoon he took me to a meeting at another vacant store front on Kaighn Avenue in Camden, one of the worst parts of town. There he introduced me to a half dozen old men in loose fitting wrinkled suits – the last local survivors of the Abe Lincoln brigade and the group that the FBI and the US government considered to be the biggest threat against democracy. They weren’t a threat to anyone.

But the kids were. Backed by a small regiment of youths, including me, who got “Clean for Gene,” and adopting the old style political tactics of identifying every registered voter in the county who supported McCarthy and opposed the war, we swarmed New Hampshire, went door to door and convinced a near majority to vote against the machine. While President LBJ won the March 12 primary 42 – 49%, it was a slim enough victory that caused LBJ, a few days later, to announce that he was no longer a candidate.

That stunning announcement was met a few days later with the entrance of RFK into the race. Since RFK had also, belatedly come out against the war in Vietnam, both Democratic candidates were anti-war candidates, and after losing two primaries to McCarthy RFK began to pick up momentum and support based mainly on his charisma and brother’s martyrdom.

I didn’t like RFK because of that, but I didn’t hate him either, so when my father woke me to tell me he had been murdered, I didn’t know what the repercussions would be.

How could such a high profile politician be murdered by his enemies who would be allowed to literally get away with murder?

After giving a victory speech in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel, RFK was led out by way of the kitchen, where he was shot by two pistols, one by Siran B. Siran who was a few feet in front of him, and another shot by a pistol that was inches from his head, as described by the pathologist who performed the autopsy.

A recently discovered audio tape of the assassination includes more than ten shots, more than can be fired by one gun alone.

But none the less, only one crazed programmed assassin was convicted and he doesn’t remember anything.

Later, during the 1980 election Bobby, Jr. and his younger brother Michael stayed at my home in Ocean City while on the campaign trail, and I got them to attend a fund raising party in Margate at a Stockton professor’s home and had Larry Harrris at the black WUSA radio station to interview Bobby on the air.

I also skied with some of the Kennedys and was saddened to learn that Michael had died of a skiing accident.

But it was the assassination of RFK that June 1969 night in California that radicalized me politically against the machine that still runs things today.

With the death of Bobby Kennedy the McCarthy campaigners like me expected his followers to join us in the effort to end the war, but instead they put up a fudgy George McGovern to carry Bobby’s cross, and McGovern would screw things up enough that Richard Nixon would be chosen to lead the country for better or for worse.

I was a loyal Leo however, and I stuck it out with my candidate McCarthy, and somehow got out of work at Mack & Manco’s for a week that August to attend the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a lesson in how democracy works, and the subject of many nightmares and at least one future flashback.

In reading the Press of Atlantic City news articles on the continuing investigation of the 1969 Memorial Day Parkway Coed Murders, there is a photo of the Kennedy family placing flowers at the Arlington Cemetery grave of Robert F. Kennedy on the first anniversary of his murder, and an article on protests of some veterans because RFK was not a veteran, despite being murdered as a civil servant.