"LINCOLN — Fifty years ago in a Lincoln living room, Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency got on track.
It
was late March 1968 and Kennedy, a U.S. senator from New York, had just
entered the race for the Democratic nomination for president. The
incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, and a staunch anti-Vietnam War
candidate, Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy, were already on the ballot in
Nebraska and other early primary states....Kennedy’s Nebraska campaign organizers — including former Lt. Gov. Phil
Sorensen, who returned to his home state from Indiana as a liaison
between the national and state organizations — huddled at the Country
Club neighborhood home of Edie Van Neste. They had little time to cobble
together a statewide campaign. Nebraska’s mid-May primary loomed in
about seven weeks."
"Mary Ann
Hanson of North Platte (now Mary Ann Strasheim of Omaha), the campaign’s
Lincoln County chairman, said Sorensen wished aloud that there were a
big rodeo or some other event on the state’s spring calendar for Kennedy
to visit and meet people.
“I
sat there thinking,” Strasheim said. “I piped up: What if we could do a
whistle-stop train that would go all the way through the state?”
"....A month later — Saturday, April 27 — a seven-car Union Pacific Railroad train festooned with “Kennedy for President’’ banners rolled out of Cheyenne, Wyoming, heading east into Nebraska. An overnight dusting of snow hadn’t yet burned off the short, winter-bleached prairie grass as Kennedy’s old-fashioned whistle-stop tour to engage Cornhusker voters began."
My younger sister was in 2nd grade at the time, and her teacher was a nun from Boston, who talked up the occasion and told the kids that they should turn out for Kennedy's stop in our home town because it was an historic occasion. So my sister talked Mom, a staunch Republican, into taking her for the event, which occurred at 7:00 am that Saturday morning. There was quite a crowd which turned out. She said she was surrounded by a sea of people taller than she, and she was standing on tip toes trying to see. A man standing behind her lifted her up, and she was able to see Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel.
I was 17 at the time, and I wish I could add some personal memories. Unfortunately I can't, because I wasn't there. I was snoozing in apolitical teen slacker mode. I wish Mom had dragged me out of bed and made me take Kirsten; I don't know why she didn't. She's not around for me to ask her now, but I suspect she wanted to be there herself. We had not yet devolved into such a politically polarized society that people couldn't listen to someone from the opposite party.
It is amazing to me now that Robert Kennedy was able to enter the race that late in the game, and that this event was pulled together in only a month. Tragically he was assassinated less than 2 months later. We'll never know if history might have been different if he had lived.
"....A month later — Saturday, April 27 — a seven-car Union Pacific Railroad train festooned with “Kennedy for President’’ banners rolled out of Cheyenne, Wyoming, heading east into Nebraska. An overnight dusting of snow hadn’t yet burned off the short, winter-bleached prairie grass as Kennedy’s old-fashioned whistle-stop tour to engage Cornhusker voters began."
My younger sister was in 2nd grade at the time, and her teacher was a nun from Boston, who talked up the occasion and told the kids that they should turn out for Kennedy's stop in our home town because it was an historic occasion. So my sister talked Mom, a staunch Republican, into taking her for the event, which occurred at 7:00 am that Saturday morning. There was quite a crowd which turned out. She said she was surrounded by a sea of people taller than she, and she was standing on tip toes trying to see. A man standing behind her lifted her up, and she was able to see Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel.
I was 17 at the time, and I wish I could add some personal memories. Unfortunately I can't, because I wasn't there. I was snoozing in apolitical teen slacker mode. I wish Mom had dragged me out of bed and made me take Kirsten; I don't know why she didn't. She's not around for me to ask her now, but I suspect she wanted to be there herself. We had not yet devolved into such a politically polarized society that people couldn't listen to someone from the opposite party.
It is amazing to me now that Robert Kennedy was able to enter the race that late in the game, and that this event was pulled together in only a month. Tragically he was assassinated less than 2 months later. We'll never know if history might have been different if he had lived.
Only time I directly saw a Kennedy was JFK giving a campaign speech on the steps of the Upper Darby municipal building in 1960. It felt so good to be an American back then. I haven't felt that good about it since then. If RFK had lived and won, I'm sure we would be in a very different place now. Nixon was very good, though, at generating and harnessing a backlash against the hippies and protesters and uppity blacks. RFK's win was not guaranteed. In my opinion, it was our last chance to become the country we could be. I'm not sure we're getting another chance.
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