By endorsing Trump, RFK Jr. betrays the Kennedy legacy

His bizarre campaign for president this year — with its revelations that he had a dead worm in his brain and once left the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park — was an embarrassment. But his announcement on Friday that he would “throw my support” to Donald Trump in battleground states represents a betrayal of a higher order.

Given how low Kennedy has been polling, his endorsement probably won’t make much of a difference in the presidential race. Yet in casting his lot with a former president who preaches intolerance and division, he has cast aside the principles for which generations of Kennedys have stood.

Among the earliest of those causes was immigration. While still a senator in 1958, John F. Kennedy wrote an essay highlighting the contribution that new arrivals make to America, and arguing for more generous policies toward them.

His own Irish forebears had faced “the hostility of an already established group of ‘Americans,’” the future president noted. “It is not unusual for people to fear and distrust that which they are not familiar with. Every new group coming to America found this fear and suspicion facing them.”

He did not live long enough to see the immigration reform he envisioned become law in 1965. However, JFK’s essay, “A Nation of Immigrants," was published as a book after his assassination and inspired his youngest brother, Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, to carry forward a cause that both of them viewed as integral to the full realization of civil rights in this country.

“Our streets may not be paved with gold,” Ted Kennedy said during the Senate debate on that law, “but they are paved with the promise that men and women who live here — even strangers and new newcomers — can rise as fast, as far as their skills will allow, no matter what their color is, no matter what the place of their birth.”

Compare that with what Trump expressed the day in 2015 that he stepped off an escalator in his Fifth Avenue tower and announced he was running for president. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Beyond stoking the xenophobia so abhorred by the Kennedy brothers, Trump has animated his candidacy with grievance and calls for retribution against all his enemies. This he portrays as a sign of his strength.

How different that is from the character displayed in April 1968 by Robert F. Kennedy. As he was preparing to deliver a presidential campaign speech in a poor Black neighborhood of Indianapolis, the New York senator learned that civil rights champion the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Knowing the potential for violence in a city that was yet unaware of the news, Kennedy climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck and delivered, extemporaneously, what is regarded as one of the greatest orations of the 20th century.

He implored the shocked crowd to put aside hatred and instead “make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.”

After quoting from memory the words of his favorite poet, Aeschylus, about the discernment that comes from pain, he said: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be White or whether they be Black.”

That speech would be cited as a reason that Indianapolis was peaceful in its grief even as riots erupted in other cities across the country. But just two months later, on the night he won the California primary, Robert F. Kennedy himself was shot to death.

“I think my father would be disappointed by what was happening in the political landscapes in our country today,” the great healer’s namesake son told CBS in 2018.

Back then, before his vanity campaign and his sad grovel for a place in Trump’s orbit, RFK Jr. still understood his father’s legacy: “He saw America as an exemplary nation. … That we should know the difference between leadership and bullying, that we should try to promote democracy.”

Indeed. He surely would.