Baby Boomers going nuts over Kamala.

[deurbano]

47. For me, it was RFK-- the GOOD one!

I was in 8th grade, just parroting my parent's choice (Nixon) until I heard Robert Kennedy on the radio, and that was that. I was up watching the election returns the night he was killed, and was just devastated. Because my parents were pretty political, I had been vocal in my support of Nixon (without having a clue), so at my 8th grade graduation (the day RFK died), my English teacher asked me if I was happy! (That still stings...)

My parents were Southern Democrats from the MS Delta (I spent my first two years there, before they moved to Bakersfield), and when I was about 40, I learned my dad had been a member of the White Citizens Council, and that both parents knew the men who killed Emmett Till. (We lived in Glendora, and his body was pulled out of the river not far from there.) My mom attended the trail, and neither parent ever expressed any regret about the murder of a 14-year-old Black child. They had voted for JFK in 1960, but switched to the Republican Party once they found him too supportive of integration, especially in schools. We had an album by a kind of "folk" group called "The Goldwaters," that came out before the assassination, with a lot of songs mocking him and his administration: "Bobby, Bobby, we've been thinking, when you studied for the Bar, did you read the Constitution, did you ever get that far?" And: "Barry's gonna win in '64, the New Frontier will be no more..." Etc. (Including imitations of the Boston accent.)

My parents loathed JFK so much that I was stunned at the country's reaction to his death (when I was nine). I didn't "get" it at first, and just assumed everyone would be relieved. Within a few months, though, JFK had become my new hero, since I always fell hard for hagiographies. I really started departing from the family line about then, especially in questioning my parents' views on race... but after RFK, I was definitely never going to vote Republican.