Anti war rally venice beach 19684/8/2024 ![]() To secure his party’s nomination-in an attempt to knock out fellow anti-war Democrat Eugene McCarthy and at the same time fight off the party’s establishment candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a vocal supporter of the administration’s calamitous Vietnam policy-Kennedy needed a convincing win. The all-important California primary would be held the next day, on Tuesday, June 4. Over the next four weeks there’d been ups and downs-a resounding victory in Nebraska, as well as a stinging six-point loss in Oregon-but by that bright summer morning in San Francisco, one thing was clear: time was running out. He won the May 7 Indiana primary, his first, by a large margin. You sit here as white medical students, while black people carry the burden of fighting in Vietnam.” “If they’re waiting for me,” he said to Barry, “we’ll go see them.” “You are the privileged ones here… It’s the poor who carry the major burden of the struggle in Vietnam. Instead Kennedy ordered the procession forward. The plan had been to go straight to O’Hare Airport. Near Chicago the frenzy reached a peak, the avenues lined with voters who’d been camped out all day to meet him. After a while Bill Barry, crouched and clutching the candidate by the waist, lost all sensation in his knees and calves. He passed a family that had strapped a mattress to the roof of their parked car, their four children sound asleep on top of it by the time the motorcade appeared. For blocks he tossed a basketball back and forth with the same young boy, who had no problem keeping pace. In May, on the eve of the Indiana primary, his motorcade traveled for nine straight hours from La Porte County to the Illinois border, an endless throng of supporters. ![]() He made physical contact with more individuals during those few frenetic months than most people do in a lifetime. Everywhere he went that spring it was the same: each night his hands would be chafed and bleeding. At the Greek Theater in Los Angeles so many came out to see him that the resulting traffic jam brought the Griffith Park neighborhood to a halt eventually people began to abandon their cars on the street. The motorcades were monitored by his personal security man, Bill Barry, a former football player at Kent State who, kneeling on the bench of the convertible, would spend hours with his arms wrapped around the waist of the candidate, as to keep him from being carried away.Įarly in the campaign, at Kalamazoo’s central square, a young woman surged forward and pulled off Kennedy’s shoe, its laces still tied. “They’re here because they care for us,” Kennedy observed, “and want to show us.” On a few occasions he was nearly jerked from the car altogether. In his earliest public appearances as a candidate-at the Kansas universities in Lawrence and Manhattan-he’d been overwhelmed by the fervor of the crowds.Īfterward, across his nonstop campaign through the Indiana, Oregon, and California primaries-during which he appealed, first and foremost, to what he liked to refer to as his coalition of the “have nots,” America’s most disadvantaged citizens-people appeared to want, more than anything, to touch him. It had been like this ever since his campaign first began, 80 days earlier. ![]() In return, the members of the crowd reached up. Kennedy was standing on the convertible’s back bench alongside his wife, Ethel, as they passed the first block, then the second. ![]() This was in Chinatown, one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods. Around him the streets were lined four-people deep. On the morning of June 3, 1968, Robert Francis Kennedy, hoping to secure his late-surging campaign for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, was driving in his open-air motorcade through San Francisco. ![]()
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