00:00So it is said that the legacy of JFK is more in his figure and his words than his actual
00:06politics.
00:07What do you think of this?
00:08Well, I think it's important to remember that the Kennedy presidency was cut very short.
00:13We don't know what would have happened in the remaining year or even years had he won a second term
00:20of the Kennedy presidency.
00:22And so we're left with sort of the unfinished agenda of Kennedy when we look at his presidency as a
00:29separate unit.
00:30This was a president who clearly learned a lot on the job.
00:34He was very, very effective in the key crisis, of course, of his presidency was the Cuban Missile Crisis.
00:41He had to figure out a way to deal with the Soviet Union in the nuclear age that no previous
00:47president had to deal with.
00:48But during the Eisenhower years, the Soviet Union was so far behind the U.S. in terms of military hardware,
00:55particularly with respect to nuclear weapons, that Kennedy had to face a very different situation.
01:00And the wisdom and the judgment that the Kennedy presidency developed really set the stage for the way that the
01:09United States and the Soviet Union dealt with each other throughout the Cold War and avoided that nuclear catastrophe.
01:15It's also clear when we think about the Kennedy legacy, that there was a real commitment to civil rights and
01:21to voting rights in the American South.
01:23This was a period of time when Kennedy took office, where African-Americans generally couldn't vote.
01:28And they were often subject to a lot of violence if they tried to argue for any kind of equality
01:34in the United States.
01:35Now, this is something that develops more extensively after Kennedy's death.
01:39Do you think that Robert and Ted tried to follow the legacy of JFK or they tried to do their
01:46own thing?
01:47Well, I think it's important to recognize that for Robert Kennedy in particular, who had been John F. Kennedy's attorney
01:53general,
01:54he had really been very much at the core of some of these civil rights and voting rights issues that
02:00were sort of bedeviling the Kennedy administration.
02:04You had a bunch of Southern governors who were very conservative, who didn't necessarily work with the Kennedy brothers.
02:09But I think that Bobby Kennedy basically has his own journey and goes in a somewhat different direction than John
02:18F. Kennedy after the president's death.
02:20Bobby Kennedy, who might very well have been elected president in 1968 had he not been assassinated,
02:26was a very much committed to the development of economic opportunity in marginalized communities.
02:35If you think about the Latino farm workers of the Southwest, you think about the African-Americans struggling to gain
02:43more civil rights.
02:44You think about even poor whites in farming communities and mining communities where economic prosperity had really passed them by.
02:52Kennedy really had a connection to this dynamic of poverty in America, and it was much more an emphasis of
03:02his time as a U.S. senator and as a presidential candidate than it was for John F. Kennedy's presidency.
03:09But, of course, Bobby Kennedy's opportunity was also cut short by an assassin, and that is one of those big
03:17sort of might have been ends of American politics.
03:19If you think about the 1960s and the tumult and the rise of Richard Nixon and conservative politics that followed,
03:29we can imagine a very different America if John F. Kennedy had lived or if Bobby Kennedy had lived.
03:34Either of them, had they had more time in public life, might have made a much more gentle society, a
03:42much kinder society,
03:43and a society, at least in Bobby Kennedy's case, that would have gotten out of the Vietnam War a lot
03:48sooner.
03:50Of Teddy Kennedy, the youngest brother, the youngest Kennedy brother, becomes a senator and lives in public life much longer
03:59than either of his brothers.
04:00He becomes one of the key voices for the issues that motivated his older brothers, but also his own commitment
04:09to poverty.
04:10If you put the three Kennedy brothers together, it's a legacy that's pretty rare in American politics.
04:19You generally don't have a dynasty.
04:22What do you think in politics specifically the Kennedy family is most remembered for?
04:28I think that the Kennedy story is going to be very different depending on how old someone is and what
04:34happened when they were looking at politics.
04:37But the story itself is one of a commitment to public service at great, great sacrifice.
04:44It is astonishing when you look at it in retrospect that after having two brothers assassinated, a third brother is
04:51willing to be prominent in politics.
04:54It was a horrible, horrible experience for the family to go through, and yet they continued to return to public
05:01service.
05:02And the next generation as well, there was a lieutenant governor of Maryland who was a Kennedy, and there were
05:09congressmen in the Kennedy family.
05:11And so there is to this day a Kennedy legacy that really is committed to this issue of economic opportunity
05:22and educational opportunity especially.
05:23Thank you very much for joining us today, and thank you very much for joining us today.
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