i just saw “Bobby”, the new movie about Senator Robert Kennedy and the day of his assassination in Los Angeles in June 1968.
I have never cried so much in a movie; I am still full of tears 20 minutes after leaving the cinema.
It’s not just a story about the end of the era that the assassination marked - and the loss of hope felt by those who believed the Senator represented a way out of the angst America was experiencing in the midst of the Vietnam war. It’s about a generation and the loss of youthful innocence.
Put in perspective for me, June 1968 was the end of high school, the end of my life on the farm and the sheltered and safe life my parents guaranteed me. I was soon to leave the home of my childhood to move to the city and begin university; starting down the road of my own adult life and making my own choices.
The Kennedy assassinations were the bookmarks of m high school years. President Kennedy was killed early in my first year, grade nine, when I was still too young and immature really to be affected. There were the immediate fears; we knew about the threats of the cold war and had just come through the Cuban missile crisis and were always conscious of the threat of nuclear war. In fact, we half expected Armageddon - world war worse even than the one out parents came through 20 years before. But when the immediate danger passed, we got on with life for the next five years.
My high school years were good ones, I was on top of my life game, honoured at most every turn and confident that my future was boundless with good fortune. The war in Vietnam was not of immediate concern for Canadians in the early years until the wave of draft resisters and deserters mounted. The racial tension was not of immediate concern as we convinced ourselves that Canadians were better than that. Even the separatist bombings in Québec were remote.
But the trauma began to hit home in the spring of ‘68. Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis in March started it. The Kennedy-McCarthy campaigns offered hope and, possibly, an honourable way out of the war that our Prime Minister, Lester Pearson was, by then, opening criticising. When Johnson announced he would not seek a second term as president, the hope blossomed. And then the flower was ripped out in June.
So many things were happening in 1968. There were the two assassinations in the spring. Czechoslovakia was experiencing “Czech Spring” under Vaclav Hamel as the Soviet grip appeared to be lessening, and then, in August, the tanks rolled in and crushed the new-born freedoms. In Canada Pierre Trudeau ascended to power with the promise of a “Just Society”.
The Graduate (I saw it on a grade 13 class trip to Toronto to visit the Ontario Legislature) was a milestone movie. mildly scandalous in its day (as is well documented in Bobby). Protest music was emerging as the sound of our generation.
In Chicago, in August, the frustration in America boiled over in the riots at the Democratic national convention. Students were tearing up the streets of Paris in a bid for modernization and greater democracy in Europe and the academy.
Bobby is 1968, overwhelming me with nostalgia as it referenced the movies, music and fashion of the time and so vividly reminding me how my world has changed, for better and for worse.
I have never cried so much in a movie; I am still full of tears 20 minutes after leaving the cinema.
It’s not just a story about the end of the era that the assassination marked - and the loss of hope felt by those who believed the Senator represented a way out of the angst America was experiencing in the midst of the Vietnam war. It’s about a generation and the loss of youthful innocence.
Put in perspective for me, June 1968 was the end of high school, the end of my life on the farm and the sheltered and safe life my parents guaranteed me. I was soon to leave the home of my childhood to move to the city and begin university; starting down the road of my own adult life and making my own choices.
The Kennedy assassinations were the bookmarks of m high school years. President Kennedy was killed early in my first year, grade nine, when I was still too young and immature really to be affected. There were the immediate fears; we knew about the threats of the cold war and had just come through the Cuban missile crisis and were always conscious of the threat of nuclear war. In fact, we half expected Armageddon - world war worse even than the one out parents came through 20 years before. But when the immediate danger passed, we got on with life for the next five years.
My high school years were good ones, I was on top of my life game, honoured at most every turn and confident that my future was boundless with good fortune. The war in Vietnam was not of immediate concern for Canadians in the early years until the wave of draft resisters and deserters mounted. The racial tension was not of immediate concern as we convinced ourselves that Canadians were better than that. Even the separatist bombings in Québec were remote.
But the trauma began to hit home in the spring of ‘68. Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis in March started it. The Kennedy-McCarthy campaigns offered hope and, possibly, an honourable way out of the war that our Prime Minister, Lester Pearson was, by then, opening criticising. When Johnson announced he would not seek a second term as president, the hope blossomed. And then the flower was ripped out in June.
So many things were happening in 1968. There were the two assassinations in the spring. Czechoslovakia was experiencing “Czech Spring” under Vaclav Hamel as the Soviet grip appeared to be lessening, and then, in August, the tanks rolled in and crushed the new-born freedoms. In Canada Pierre Trudeau ascended to power with the promise of a “Just Society”.
The Graduate (I saw it on a grade 13 class trip to Toronto to visit the Ontario Legislature) was a milestone movie. mildly scandalous in its day (as is well documented in Bobby). Protest music was emerging as the sound of our generation.
In Chicago, in August, the frustration in America boiled over in the riots at the Democratic national convention. Students were tearing up the streets of Paris in a bid for modernization and greater democracy in Europe and the academy.
Bobby is 1968, overwhelming me with nostalgia as it referenced the movies, music and fashion of the time and so vividly reminding me how my world has changed, for better and for worse.
