Good Bobby: The shattered hope of ’68 can still live in us

Hope is fragile thing…unless it’s grounded in truth.

Bobby Kennedy was a speaker and finder of truth. One of the truths he eventually found liberated him to follow his own heart and become the man that we witnessed in the period 1964 to 1968. He seemed to become different in those final years. The Robert Kennedy who was running for President was a man of apparent sensitivity, sincerity, honesty, courage, and, perhaps, comfortable in expressing self-doubt. We loved the 1968 version of Bobby…but was he for real? There were those who doubted. What happened to the ruthless attack dog, the almost vicious inquisitor of Jimmy Hoffa, the manager behind JFK’s election, the bullying Attorney General who lurked in the shadows of the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis? After all, doesn’t even the Bible say a leopard can’t change its spots?

Because of such questions, I was immediately intrigued when a friend told me about Brian Lee Franklin’s play, Good Bobby. The performance (in which Franklin also plays the title role), suggests that the bold, caring, and truly intelligent man who appeared on the stage in those last years was not acting. We were seeing—if Franklin’s recounting is accurate—not a leopard who could change his spots, but the leopard’s true spots. Good Bobby helps us understand how, in the years 1958 to 1964, Bobby Kennedy came to see and live the truth that gave us hope.

The play begins with Bobby serving as counsel for the Senate committee investigating the Teamsters Union, preparing for his famous interrogation of Hoffa (played by R.D. Call). It is quickly evident that the plotline is not really about Kennedy’s role in the world events in which he took part. Rather, it is about the relationship between Bobby and his “Pop”: tough, controlling family patriarch Joe Kennedy (Steve Mendillo). The interactions portrayed between Bobby and his father, and also with Senator John McClellan (William Stone Mahoney), make it very evident that Bobby got the job as Senate counsel because that’s what his father wanted. Joe Kennedy was known as the strong, ruthless man who sought acceptance in the Boston society of the day, and who had dreams of his boys becoming President. Bobby seemed a chip off the father’s ruthless block. But the dramatic vignettes that Franklin has put together reveal that there was a sensitive, gentle core in the heart of Robert Kennedy—a gentle core that had been evident in his childhood but had since become masked and hardened as he lived out his life in an effort to get the approval of his Pop. An early scene throws into relief the father-son conflict and the internal struggle: Bobby always seems to give in even though he hates what his father expects. In the scene, the senior Kennedy insists that Bobby run John’s campaign: “Jack needs you.” The son gives in, and the father says, like a man patting his dog after a good trick: “Good Bobby.”

Confronted with what he has become by trying to please a father who would never give his approval, the Attorney General would plead in his defense: “I did my job”. But he knew things weren’t always right (like the wiretaps on Dr. King). Then we hear Bobby reflect on the boy he once was (the one whom his father always said was “disappointing”), the sensitive, gentle one who deeply cared about people, things, and animals; who cried when a bird died. In the tough jobs that he performed for others, Robert Kennedy saw his own immense talent and ability, even when bullying people. In a final scene, Bobby tells his father of his decision to run for the Senate in 1964 and his reasons for it. He is tired of self-aggrandizing lip-service to public service, the bullying attack dog exercise of power he learned from his father. He hates being the rich kid who never really had to work for what he got. He is ready to work and to serve others, and the advantage the Kennedy name gives can be used for good. The final moments of the play show us Bobby determinedly setting out on his own course, no longer caring what others think. A man has emerged—albeit of imperfect motive—who is greatly capable of growth and change. He knows who he is and what he wants. Unlike Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, Bobby Kennedy’s children could never say “the man never knew who he was.”

Brian Lee Franklin does an outstanding job of portraying Bobby Kennedy. He has an uncanny natural resemblance to his subject. He has obviously captured the mannerisms and speech (however foul) to make us forget the actor and see the life. He is strongly supported by great talent, especially R.D. Call as Hoffa and Steve Mendillo as Joe Kennedy (both in strength and in stroke). Good Bobby is well worth your time and money, whether you were there or not. (It has been extended again, January 9-February 15 at the Greenway Court Theatre).

When Robert Kennedy made his 82-day run for the Presidency, he stirred the hopes and caught the imagination of a generation in the year that changed America forever. Dr. King was taken in an instant, while Bobby lingered with us for two pain-filled days. As we watched him go, many people’s hopes and ideals went with him. Later generations may not appreciate that statement. They know only the horribleness of that era: the War, the cities and campuses that erupted in hate, the drugs—and the assassinations. But those of us who grew up then remember something often missed in the stereotyped rehash of those years: our magnificent idealism. With our young President, we were going to the moon, changing the world through the Peace Corps, launching the “Great Society”. Martin Luther King kept people’s eyes on the prize. He focused us on the dream of treating people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. There was “free speech,” social awareness, and Dylan. Bobby’s now evident gentle strength helped to calm America in the aftermath of the King assassination in April ‘68, and he reignited the flickering flame that seemed ready to die in Southeast Asian mud and burning cities. Yes, there were questions, but when he spoke his heart, you wanted to be there with him. Bobby was fond of quoting great thinkers—and he also thought deeply. One quote (from George Bernard Shaw) might sum up what Bobby was about in his last years: "Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not."

If this 60s idealism doesn’t resonate, picture this parallel, a scene from “The Return of the King,” the climactic moment in which the King (Aragorn) arrives with his ghostly hordes to overrun the enemy and save the kingdom. He jumps over the side of the ship ready to do battle. Change that: instead, he is cut down in mid-jump. That would be 1968.

Was the good Bobby for real? Ultimately, humans can’t know the leopard’s heart. But the heritage he left us was real: he decided to stop living to win approval; he followed his heart and lived out the truth—no matter what; life was not about him, not about the “let me take” mentality inherited from the father, but the “let me give” mentality that had been there from the beginning. He served those he cared about: us. Living out that truth can still provide real hope.

(Written in December, 2008)