Soap-operatic Bobby won’t make history
Although the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy is the reason behind actor-writer-director Emilio Estevez’s long-in-preparation Bobby, Kennedy himself is barely in the film.
He’s occasionally seen in newsreel footage, usually as a face on a TV screen. The emotional finale of the film, which re-creates the assassination of the senator in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, in the early morning hours of June 5, 1968, shortly after Kennedy won the hotly contested California presidential primary, is a combination of new footage restaged by Estevez and newsreel footage taken at the time. (You can always tell the new footage because Kennedy is only seen out of focus or from the rear in it.)
An actor playing Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin, is seen even more briefly, uttering only a few words as he pulls the trigger.
Rather than a replay of historic facts, Estevez has “re-imagined” June 4, 1968, the day leading up to RFK’s victory speech early the next morning, with 22 fictional characters. They range from a hotel switchboard operator involved in an adulterous affair with the hotel manager to a young man who is trying to avoid serving in Vietnam by marrying a pretty friend. They’re all placed at the hotel on June 4 and their little stories, shuffled back and forth in the editing room, all play out while leading up to RFK’s assassination that night.
I did notice in the trailer, one comment made is: "Johnson got us into this war."
Eisenhower (the Peacemaker in Korea) had considered the use of American combat troops in Vietnam, but knew it would be difficult to gain political support. Bobby Kennedy, was willing to let history know exactly what his brother's intentions in Vietnam had been as early as 1964 and 1965, before it was called "Johnson's War."
In a series of oral history interviews for the JFK Library, RFK said that "it was worthwhile for psychological, political reasons" to stay in Vietnam.
RFK said: "The President felt that he had a strong, overwhelming reason for being in Vietnam and that we should win the war in Vietnam....If you lost Vietnam, I think everybody was quite clear that the rest of Southeast Asia would fall." (32)
John Bartlow Martin point-blank asked RFK: "if the President was convinced that the United States had to stay in Vietnam." The one-word response was "Yes." (33)
good post.
the book of bobby kennedy's own words sounds interesting--i've always heard from liberal worshippers of jfk that he would have pulled out of VN.