Robert Kennedy, Jr was born Jan 17, 1954. He’s 70. Donald Trump was born June 14, 1946. He’s 78. I was born Dec 5, 1945, and I’m 78. (Note: I got this information online from Wikipedia, and it is the only factual information I will pass on from Wiki without corroboration.)
John Kennedy (JFK) was the first major political figure that was called “liberal” in my life. I was a senior in high school when it was announced at a school assembly that President Kennedy had been shot, in Nov, 1963. It was our school’s first year of having been desegregated, and when the principal announced it to the school assembly it was the black kids who let out the loudest cries of pain. It seems JFK did mean something more special to those kids than us. My sister was a college senior, and when she got the news at Radford College in Virginia, she took to her bed and called home. She’s now 82, lives in a retirement villa near here, and still calls herself a “liberal”.
Dr Martin Luther King was the image of Civil Rights to blacks, and JFK was the stamp of “liberalism” in America in 1964. Both called themselves “Liberal” although it would be a few years for most of us going onto college to be able to distinguish the differences. At the time those differences were not socially outcome-determinative.
So as not to be confused with “segregation-conservatives”, I called myself a “Buckley-conservative”, from reading my dad’s copy of “National Review” which was largely anti-Marxist.. As for domestic politics, and by being below the Mason-Dixon Line, I was generally conservative. And I remained this way throughout my university years, and throughout my law school years, 1972. In 1968 I married the only-child of a southern textile manufacturing senior executive, and was commissioned an Army 2d lieutenant, Infantry, then went onto an Army JAG-captain lawyer, serving three years in Japan, and my final year along the Arizona border.
It was in law school that I had learned to distinguish conservative from liberal, and it was the conservatives who graduated then returned home to practice law, while the liberals sought agency staff positions in government. Their offices were still small then, and their staffs fewer than 4 desks. Today, they take up a whole floor. My last two years in law school I worked part-time at our state’s strip mining agency legal office aout 50 miles away, my boss an Ohio lawyer, and for two of those three years I spent as much time at the state capital as I did in the classroom, and was recognized as an expert in environmental law. It was there, I began to distinguish between the conservative practice of law at a county seat, and the “corporate” practice of law at the state capital, which was defined almost entirely by federal and state administrative laws…which were almost entirely liberal, as were the surrounding office environments….floor after floor of desks.
When I graduated from law school, I went directly into the Army, with the Army’s JAG-school training at the University of Virginia piled on top of my infantry training. My first law assignment was Headquarters US-Army Japan, recently re-designated a “major” Army command. And its first commanding general was Lt General Welborn G Dolvin, who had served as the Deputy to Gen Creighton Abrams, who had been the US Army commander in Vietnam until the Paris Peace Accords had been signed, ending American military involvement in Vietnam. When those Paris Accords were signed in 1973, Camp Zama, near Tokyo, had been upgraded to a Major Command, over-seeing several army units in the Far East, and I was part of its new legal staff, upgraded to about ten Army lawyers. The whole area was my bailiwick, as I traveled all over east Asia, as Chief of Legal Defense as well as Legal Assistance. A great gig.
My best friends were Army combat officers while they called me “liberal” through 1976. William F Buckley, Jr was my only conservative Ace in the deck (besides the Bible.) and I would have to return to the States and civilian world before I could see “liberal” go one way, and “leftist” go the other, and that the route “left” passed through our universities and state bureaucracies…and in a fairly short span of time.
Sad, in my view, law schools were the first to flip. And men in uniform were the last. I have a Category here called “Famous Common People I have Known” where I leave essays of men and women who shaped me along the way, all outside the political realm. One, noted here, was an Army colonel who had been the Pentagon’s liaison with the passing of American control from our Army to South Vietnam’s, ensuring the money we gave them was spent in accordance with the Treaty. (It wasn’t, and he wanted to report it. (I talked him out that, as he would have been court-martialed.)
Instead he went onto retire, and write several books on wilderness travel and backpacking.
(I also did a piece on a mountaineering trip he organized with 7 officers in ’73, re-opening a part of the Japanese Alps that had been cut off from the West by Tojo in the 30s.
.)
Bottom line, Jefe was also a “liberal” of the old school, and it would be the 1980s-90s that the Left would lure most liberals from the next generation, mostly from GenX, into the office sanctuaries of law schools, corporate and government bureaucracies. The military would be their last stop.
If you are Gen X or beyond, and have filled your library with genuine histories, as I’ve suggested in the various “Categories” of this site, you’ll be able to see the logical procession from Patriotism to Self-indulgence, from Love of America to Love of Self, which the Democrat Party Convention put on raw display the week of 19-23 August, 2024.
And all it took was for Robert Kennedy, Jr to bend over to tie his shoe lace to know who they really are.
The Left no longer can fake it.
Nicely done my friend