Robert F Kennedy Dbq

In 1968, the United States was an extremely divided nation. It was divided among many issues from the ongoing Vietnam War, continual inner city riots, and the assassination Martin Luther King Jr., which led to federal troops actively patrolling American cities; something that hadn’t occurred since the Civil War. An election year promised to be a great one, but none of the presidential candidates recognized the nature of these incidents as wounds much less sought to heal them, with the exception of one man – Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Robert F. Kennedy was many things to many people, but to the American public he represented something that had been lost and forgotten; he represented hope. Crowds responded to him not because he was a Kennedy or because he was John F. Kennedy’s brother, though they undoubtedly may have helped, but because he ignited a passion that a better country was possible. He represented the best of people and ran his campaign in the only way he knew how, honestly and with every fiber of his being. Robert F. Kennedy appealed to the nation because he was unlike any other candidate the nation had ever seen before and made a stark contrast to the other candidates during 1968. People loved Robert F. Kennedy for many reasons; chief among them being because

They saw young people burning the flag, soldiers burning villages, blacks burning their own neighborhoods. Vietnam had stopped being the victory it was promised to be as more and more soldiers were killed with nothing to show for it. The nation yearned for a leader who could reunite the people as one, rather than the many splintered factions that had been the result of continued unrest and discontent with the status quo. Robert F. Kennedy sought to heal the nation and he believed the way to do this was to reconcile the differences among white and black Americans in order to create equality throughout the