HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s, father swept into Lawrence, Kan., 57 years ago this month to give a campaign speech. It was just his third day as a 1968 presidential candidate, and he clearly was trying out themes for his challenge to President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was still a candidate for re-election.

Though still a very tentative work-in-progress as a contender for the White House, Kennedy delivered remarks that offer a time capsule from another fraught moment in American civic life, a period of similarly great divisions, another point in history when important American values were at stake, a juncture when, as now, the character of the country was in the balance. It was a time very much like our own, and yet, as his comments will demonstrate, also a time very different from ours.

The contrasts are apparent from the very first words of the Kennedy remarks. In his opening, Kennedy, arguably a member of the 20th century’s greatest Democratic family — the other contenders, the Roosevelts, included the 26th president, a Republican — began by saluting Kansas Sens. James B. Pearson (“who has fought for the interests of Kansas and has had a distinguished career, and I’m very proud to be associated with him”) and Frank Carlson (“one of the most respected members of the Senate of the United States”).

Both men were Republicans, and Kennedy’s comments about the two are the functional equivalent of Donald Trump visiting Nevada, which he carried twice, and saluting Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (who voted for the GOP spending bill last week) and Jacky Rosen, two Democrats. He is more likely to be hit by the asteroid 2024 YR4, apparently a threat to strike Earth in 2032.

Kennedy went on to speak about the issues of the day — the continuing war in Vietnam, the racial divide, the alienation of the youth who composed his audience at the University of Kansas. He was at times lighthearted and at times heavily reflective, but overall, he thought the country was on the wrong track, a view Americans share today by about a 2-to-1 margin, according to a recent Gallup Poll.

The senator from New York lingered on education; he gave a thoughtful defense of the values of a university and then delivered two sentences that you will not hear from the current occupant of the White House. They went this way:

“If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vision and vigor, then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come out of our college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.”

He knew that his listeners thought those words were his, and then, a master of rhetorical surprise, he revealed the true provenance of those fiery sentences. “Despite all the accusations against me, those words were not written by me,” he said. “They were written by that notorious seditionist, William Allen White.”

The name William Allen White was, of course, well-known to that audience. He was the late editor of the Emporia Gazette, a small but beloved newspaper, and there was no more revered figure in Kansas than White, who died in 1944 and whose name now graces the university’s distinguished School of Journalism and Mass Communications. The roster of Americans who made the pilgrimage to Red Rocks, as the White home was known, included such radicals as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and the widow of the financier J.P. Morgan. I myself have twice made a trip to the office of the Emporia Gazette.

Commentary magazine once described White, who endorsed Alf Landon over Franklin D. Roosevelt for president in 1936 — the Kansas governor went on to lose 46 states — as an editor/​activist who “consistently served the most reactionary elements in the Republican Party.” And yet here was the Sage of Emporia, arguing that, on campus, “there must be clash and if youth hasn’t enough force or fervor to produce the clash, the world grows stale and stagnant and sour in decay.” This is not part of the Trump playbook, and it won’t be part of a Trump speech.

The following RFK passage might, however, be part of a Trump speech: “The fact is, that men have lost confidence in themselves, in each other, it is confidence which has sustained us so much in the past.”

That lack of confidence helped fuel the Trump campaigns, and Kennedy explained, as the president might, that “hundreds of communities and millions of citizens are looking for their answers, to force and repression and private gun stocks — so that we confront our fellow citizen across impossible barriers of hostility and mistrust.”

But Kennedy went on to say, “I don’t believe that we have to accept that. I don’t believe that it’s necessary in the United States of America. I think that we can work together — I don’t think that we have to shoot at each other, to beat each other, to curse each other and criticize each other, I think that we can do better in this country.” This language of accommodation rather than division is the divergence point between Trump and Kennedy.

And yet, both RFK, Jr.’s, father and the 47th president share a certain perspective on the country. These Kennedy comments also could easily be cited by Trump: “I have seen proud men in the hills of Appalachia, who wish only to work in dignity, but they cannot, for the mines are closed and their jobs are gone and no one — neither industry, nor labor, nor government — has cared enough to help.”

The passage that follows might be provocative for Trump, eager to disrupt longstanding American alliances, from Canada to NATO:

“From the beginning our proudest boast has been the promise of Jefferson, that we, here in this country would be the best hope of mankind. And now ... we wonder if we still hold a decent respect for the opinions of mankind and whether the opinion maintained a decent respect for us or whether like Athens of old, we will forfeit sympathy and support, and ultimately our very security, in the single-minded pursuit of our own goals and our own objectives.”

Kennedy’s speech has not grown old. Perhaps all Americans, and their president, should read it again, or for the first time.

David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

First Published March 23, 2025, 4:00 a.m.