Robert Parry: RFK's Death and the Hope of the Young

[babylonsister]

RFK's Death and the Hope of the Young
by Robert Parry | June 6, 2008 - 9:47am


The 40th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination may be a fitting time to recall how young Americans in an earlier generation ended up alienated from their parents, much as this year’s battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has created its own generational divide.

Before June 5, 1968, it seemed possible that RFK’s anti-war candidacy might overcome the Democratic establishment’s choice of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, thus opening a path for ending the Vietnam War and rekindling the embers of American idealism.

Instead, after Kennedy’s murder, a divided Democratic Party settled on Humphrey, who lost to Richard Nixon. The Vietnam War dragged on bitterly dividing the country, a legacy that continues to afflict the nation four decades later.

Today, the mainstream media's conventional wisdom focuses most of the criticism for the turbulent Sixties on the unruly and often crude behavior of America’s anti-war youth. By contrast, there is virtually no criticism of the World War II generation, which arguably came up very small and let down its own children by not demanding more truth and accountability from the government.

Though the so-called Greatest Generation deserves credit for surviving the Great Depression of the 1930s and winning World War II in the 1940s, many of its members then became absorbed during the growth years of the 1950s into a corporate world of conformity and careerism. Many became Company Men.

So, when the U.S. government used lies and propaganda to take the nation into an open-ended war in Vietnam, many in the Greatest Generation tended more to their status in the Rotary Club or the VFW than to the safety and survival of their own children.

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http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/15085

[OhioChick]

1. K&R

Thanks for posting. :)

[Doctor_J]

2. Parry is my favorite journalist. Another gem. the comments are great too

:thumbsup: