THE BELL CURVE:’Bobby’ misses some important points

Don’t let the title of “Bobby,” a movie playing around Newport-Mesa these days, fool you into thinking it is about Robert Kennedy. It isn’t. It’s about a handful of disparate characters with less than compelling stories, whose only common link is their presence in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Robert Kennedy was assassinated there on June 5, 1968. The movie provides only a passing look at one of the most evocative campaigns and tragic figures in our political history for a narrative gimmick that deals with Kennedy mainly as a device to bring all of its disconnected threads together.

I had special reasons for wanting to see “Bobby.”

Although I wasn’t at the Ambassador that night, I had spent the few days preceding it following Kennedy about for the Christian Science Monitor as he campaigned to win the California Democratic presidential primary. And my daughter, Patt, was at the Ambassador, along with several dozen young volunteers who had been working for Kennedy and were waiting to celebrate his victory with him in the room toward which he was headed when he was shot.

Both of us carry vivid recollections of that period — and also of the revolution of the young that deposed a sitting president and probably would have replaced him with another Kennedy. Instead, it turned out to be the last political campaign to which a whole generation of American young people fully dedicated themselves.

In 1968, they first rallied around an erudite and little-known Democratic senator from Minnesota named Eugene McCarthy who set them afire with his literate and provocative opposition to our presence in Vietnam.

The McCarthy tidal wave blasted ashore with such force that it almost defeated President Lyndon Johnson in the first Democratic primary in New Hampshire. Johnson won, but by such a slender margin that it convinced him to withdraw, leaving the field to McCarthy and his youthful supporters — until Sen. Robert Kennedy decided to enter the fray.

His very late candidacy angered the McCarthy troops and might have split Democratic liberals had his fight with Kennedy gone to the convention instead of ending with Kennedy’s death in a hotel kitchen. The movie missed all of this background, but even more important, it missed the impact Kennedy had on the powerless and the have-nots in our society who saw him addressing their problems in ways they had never experienced before. He drove about Los Angeles on the bed of a pick-up truck, stopping periodically to shout his convictions and touch hands with his listeners.

I have covered a lot of political campaigns, but I have never — before or since — seen pure love communicated between a politician and his followers the way it happened with Robert Kennedy. The film tries to convey that feeling in a few truncated scenes but never comes close. It was almost ephemeral.

That’s what Patt and her young associates were waiting for at the Ambassador Hotel that never arrived. And that made Patt a two-time loser by bringing back the pain of another assassination.

Patt was a junior at Corona del Mar High School when President John F. Kennedy was killed by a sniper from a high-rise building in Dallas in 1963. She remembers details dimly but not the cheers that sent her fleeing blindly from the campus. She remembers someone bursting into her classroom with the news that the president had been shot. She remembers her teacher crying and some of her fellow students cheering. She remembers running out to the school courtyard and into the midst of cheering students being angrily shouted down. She remembers that in her furious bewilderment at those who would celebrate the death of a president, she fled the campus.

She sought comfort at home. And when we weren’t there, she went to her thinking place at the beach — and that is where we found her, much later. She was reprimanded the following day for leaving the campus, and I remember the fury with which I took her reprimand to school authorities to demand that they address the mind-set among their charges who were so indoctrinated with political hatred that they could cheer a national tragedy.

Patt, like so many of her friends, was still shaken at the murder of John Kennedy when his brother chose to make a run for the presidency. They found a way to expiate their grief by working in Robert Kennedy’s campaign as they had once worked for John.

His assassination drove Patt from political activism, as it did so many other young people who haven’t invested in it since.

The new young person in my household, my stepson Erik, was puzzled by “Bobby.” He felt that the producers should not have assumed knowledge of the back story of the Kennedy-McCarthy dust-up and the charismatic connection Kennedy was forging with his followers. So do I — and I knew the answers.