Bobby Kennedy For President

Commemorating the tumultuous events of 1968 is practically a full-time job.

Fifty years ago the United States was stuck in a going-nowhere war in southeast Asia made worse by the My Lai Massacre of Vietnamese women and children by U.S. soldiers. Anti-war hippies were protesting in the streets. Black athletes rose up against racial injustice at the Olympics in Mexico City. A surge for individual rights called the Prague Spring resulted in more than 2,000 tanks and thousands more Warsaw Pact troops invading and occupying Czechoslovakia. There were student demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro and Paris and London.

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Feminists protested against the Miss America beauty pageant. A blockage by Nigeria resulted in the deaths of millions of Biafran civilians by starvation. President Lyndon Johnson, while announcing plans to abolish poverty and racial inequities, added that he didn't plan to run for re-election.

And then there's Robert F. Kennedy, who in 1968 was running for president. He was assassinated on June 5. His personal and political legacy, which incorporates many of the game-changing occurrences listed above, is told in Bobby Kennedy for President, a four-hour documentary series that debuted April 25 at Tribeca Film Festival and began streaming on Netflix today.

Directed and executive produced by Dawn Porter, the series covers seven years of RFK's life, culminating in an 83-day presidential run that began March 16 and ended with him being shot down at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel three months later (at the age of 42) by Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan, who disliked Kennedy's support for Israel.

The documentary starts out predictably, delivering a boiler-plate summation of RFK facts: Boyish and with often tousled-haired, he was the runt of the Kennedy litter (three brothers, five sisters), played football at Harvard, got a law degree from the University of Virginia, managed his older brother John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign, fought for the civil rights movement and against organized crime. Nothing new here.

But slowly, quietly, the seemingly ordinary narrative focuses closer and closer on poignant, memorable images (archival footage and evocative photographs), meaningful conversations, and well-edited interviews that identify this as a relevant document. Especially pertinent are passionate statements by singer and activist Harry Belafonte, who at first questioned the Kennedy commitment to civil rights, then changed his mind when RFK got Martin Luther King Jr. out of jail after King was arrested in Atlanta for sitting in with students at a lunch counter in 1960.

Few need to be reminded that RFK's brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas. JFK had appointed RFK as his U.S. attorney general, where he served from 1961-63. RFK Remained in President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration for several months after his brother's assassination, then ran for U.S. Senate from New York in 1964.

The series includes interviews with U.S. Reps. John Lewis and Neil Gallagher, Dolores Huerta, Ambassador William Vanden Heuvel, Paul Schrade, Franklin A. Thomas, William Arnone, Marian Wright Edelman, documentarian D. A. Pennebaker (who enjoyed free-ranging access to RFK while filming 1963's Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment about the integration of the University of Alabama by two black students), and Peter Edelman. Many of the interviews trace RFK's transformation from a law-and-order attorney general and U.S. senator to a progressive with an intense focus on civil rights and social justice.

Despite a lack of comments by RFK's widow, Ethel Kennedy, or any of their nine surviving children -- the filmmaker wanted to concentrate on his career -- endearingly rowdy film clips of RFK playing with his young children at the Kennedy family's Hyannis Port compound show his devotion to his family.

"He was a great father," Belafonte said. And, as this documentary shows, RFK had the promise to become much more.

MovieStyle on 04/27/2018