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This chapter examines the restructuring of Kansas religion and politics that began in the late 1960s and continued for at least two more decades. On March 18, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy traveled to Lawrence. Two days earlier, Kennedy had declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. Kennedy's visit punctuated a restructuring of Kansas religion and politics. The quiet conservatism of the 1950s gave way to activism borne of concerns about the escalating war in Vietnam and the struggle for racial equality. The chapter first considers the impact of the Vietnam War on Kansas politics before discussing issues of school desegregation and black power in the state, along with Richard Nixon's law and order speech at Kansas State University in September 1970. It also explores the internal conflict in the local churches.

Chapter Five follows the halting, inspiring, and ultimately heartbreaking campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. Especially among poor minorities, he had a particular magnetism – at once shy, boyish, and tough. As part of his own evolution, he found himself most comfortable in black inner cities, on Indian reservations, or among striking Chicano workers. Yet the former Attorney General also preached “law-and-order,” winning cheers from white working class audiences. His assassination in the immediate aftermath of his California primary victory stained an already-marred year, with deep effects on the electorate’s moods and the candidates’ fortunes.

This chapter explains the origins of the VEP. Over four years, three very different sides came together to form the VEP: the Department of Justice, civil rights activists, and liberal philanthropists. After John F. Kennedy became President, the Department of Justice under his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, signalled a willingness to help African Americans vote. Civil rights activists worked with philanthropists like Stephen Currier to create a source of funds for widespread registration fieldwork. Working together, all parties sought tax-exemption for the project, and to do so, they kept the VEP idea discreet because they did not want to attract attention from segregationists in government.

In Chapter 4 I assess Taylor’s influence in the Kennedy administration and his contribution to the lack of trust by civilian leaders in the JCS after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. I also discuss Taylor’s advice on crises ranging from Laos and Vietnam to Berlin and Cuba. Taylor emerged as counterinsurgency coordinator in Washington, drafted a doctrinal framework, and oversaw American efforts in Vietnam and half a dozen other countries. By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Taylor had just been installed as JCS chairman. He was a hawk on Cuba, but even though he advised air strikes against missile bases, he backed Kennedy’s naval quarantine against the opposition of the service chiefs. In Vietnam, too, Taylor was a hawk who pushed for the use of air power.

This chapter tells the story of Ambassador vanden Heuvel's meeting and subsequent close working relationship with Robert F. Kennedy. Appointed assistant attorney general at the Justice Department in 1962, he was tasked by the Attorney General with re-opening the public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, after four years of closure due to local officials' resistance to desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education. His efforts led to the creation of the Prince Edward County Free Schools, which opened in September 1963. After President John F. Kennedy's assassination two months later, vanden Heuvel remained with RFK at the Justice Department, eventually working with his campaign for Senator and then president. Along the way, he travelled extensively with RFK in South America and Europe. He includes his speech commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the closing of the Prince Edward County Schools.

This chapter explores the increasingly hostile climate faced by Arab American activists by examining Sirhan Sirhan and how his assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, his trial testimony about Palestine, and the U.S. media’s treatment of Sirhan and the Israel-Palestine conflict affected the environment for Palestinian activism in the United States.

This chapter describes how Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called attention to the situation in Prince Edward. “We may observe with much sadness and irony that, outside of Africa, south of the Sahara, where education is still a difficult challenge, the only places on earth known not to provide free public education are Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras—and Prince Edward County, Virginia,” Kennedy lamented. The attorney general's hard-won recognition of the gravity of the situation was one of the few public federal acknowledgments of the constitutional crisis in Southside Virginia. Aside from an unsuccessful Justice Department attempt to intervene in the case in April 1961, the federal government largely adopted a hands-off approach to Prince Edward, counseling patience, restraint, and faith in the judicial system.

Chapter 3 details the challenges of political consolation in the postwar era. It first draws on recent work across a number of disciplines—including literary theory, political theory, anthropology, and sociology—to recover the concept of the “tragic” for contemporary use. It then traces the growing salience of a tragic mode of political consolation in the U.S. context beginning in the 1960s. With origins in Lincoln’s second inaugural address, the tragic mode resurfaced powerfully in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations and in the effort to come to terms with the Vietnam War. The hallmark of the tragic mode is its engagement with moral ambiguity, and its rejection of moral absolutes. It thus complicates the sharp symbolic binaries associated with the dualistic mode outlined in the previous chapter, approaching national calamities as occasions for reflection and self-examination.

The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 cast a dark shadow over the end of the decade, and that very year found Schuman exploring in his own music the power of death. His major work of the year was based on a massacre that had taken place in Rome near the end of World War II; Schuman took pains not to make the work a specifically Jewish memorial but one that could speak for and to all. He also composed a work that, though instrumental from start to finish, was based on a text from his favorite poet, Walt Whitman. Its emotional tenor led Schuman to ask that the first performance be dedicated to King and Kennedy and that the audience remain silent after the work had concluded. The theme of death presages Schuman's own tenure at Lincoln Center, as his days in the corner office were numbered.

Transition-era Hollywood began with the dead body of Elizabeth Short and ended with two more discarded young women, Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe, two more casualties found at the crossroads between a dreamed-of life in the sunny city of angels and the reality lived by so many naïve arrivals after the Second World War. Payton and Monroe were glamorous movie stars who began their careers at the very moment Short ended hers. The Black Dahlia murder maybe did not register much with them. Or maybe it did and they figured a shot at movie celebrity was worth the risk. Payton and Monroe believed they were going to be different. They believed in what men had for years been whispering in their ears: “you’re so pretty you should be in pictures.” They were (pretty that is)… and they did (appear in pictures). But movie-land success was for them a mixed blessing at best, their dreamed-of Hollywood celebrity hopelessly complicated by a new breed of industry middlemen, gangsters, and gossip, their lives cut short before their fortieth birthdays.

This chapter provides a history of the development of the Community Action Program within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It complements those histories that have focused on the role of social scientists and academic theory in the development of the program by providing accounts of key program architects’ encounters with marginalized Americans, including Native Americans and urban gang members. Out of such encounters grew a critique of the federal bureaucracy that, in turn, produced community action.

The introduction lays out the problematic explored in the book. It takes as its starting point a 1961 quote from Robert F. Kennedy, the US Secretary of State: in the midst of a dispute between the Netherlands and Indonesia on West Papua’s future, Kennedy observed that the Papuans were “still, as it were, living in the Stone Age,” and thus had no ability to decide their own fate. The chapter examines the contemporary problems caused by this assumption, and then offers a brief history of the idea of the Stone Age. Then it introduces the book’s argument on how a particular experience of colonial state building fed the notion that western New Guinea was a Stone Age land. It goes on to provide an overview of the colonial conditions that gave rise to the mission of establishing a Dutch presence in the highlands, before introducing the various chapters and the characters featured in them. The introduction ends with a reflection on the importance of the history described in the book in shaping the fortunes of West Papuans today.

In 1964, Reies López Tijerina was unceremoniously deported from Mexico on the suspicion that he was interfering in governmental affairs. The suspicion was baseless, but it left Tijerina, who had always taken pride in his Mexican heritage, no choice but to appeal to the U.S. government to promote the agenda of the organization he headed, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes. Specifically, Tijerina, now emphasizing his U.S. citizenship, sought an investigation into how land originally deeded to Spanish-speakers in New Mexico before the American takeover of the region had rapidly fallen into American hands afterward. Tijerina traveled to Washington D.C. and met high-level officials, including Robert F. Kennedy. Ultimately, only the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) paid him any sustained attention, convinced that Tijerina might be a Mexican operative.