Robert Kennedy's daughter on his death, Donald Trump and America's future

On the 50th anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s death, Kerry Kennedy discusses the divisions he tried to heal and what she thinks the next 50 years will hold

Eight years old and jetlagged, Kerry Kennedy woke very early that June morning and switched on the TV. She wanted to watch cartoons but instead there was a special news broadcast. This was how she learned her father had been shot.

Kerry and other younger members of the family flew from Los Angeles to Washington. The next day, word came that Robert Kennedy had died at the age of 42.

“What I remember about that is going into my room and laying on my bed and crying and praying for my father,” she told the Guardian, “and then saying a prayer to God that they wouldn’t kill the person who killed my father because I didn’t want any other family to have to go through this pain, and I didn’t want a mother to lose another son and, if this man had children, for them to lose their father. I just wanted an end to the violence.”

On Wednesday, Kerry Kennedy will join former president Bill Clinton at her father’s resting place in Arlington National Cemetery, for a memorial service marking the 50th anniversary of his death. Civil rights hero John Lewis, 78, and 18-year-old gun control activist Emma González will be among those reading quotations from the slain senator’s works. Two are inscribed in granite near the plain white cross at his grave: “Some men see things as they are and ask ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’” and: “… each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope …”

Like the remembrance two months ago of Martin Luther King’s murder, this American tragedy will be thrown into sharp relief by current circumstances. If Robert Kennedy were still alive, he would be 92 – younger than former presidents Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush – and quite possibly channeling his last energies against Donald Trump. Instead, that falls to surrogates such as grandson Joe Kennedy III, a Democratic congressman, and Kerry Kennedy, president of Robert F Kennedy Human Rights.

“I think that he would have been very distressed about Donald Trump,” she said by phone from her home in New York. “My father spent most of the ’68 [presidential] campaign focused on healing the divisions within our country and he saw that this can get a lot worse than it was. Donald Trump came to power as somebody exploiting those divisions, and he has led through exploiting divisions, and that’s extremely harmful to our country.

“Daddy loved our country, he loved our history. He was always talking about American history and telling us stories from American history, and loved our most treasured values of freedom, democracy, justice. So I think that having Donald Trump as president of our country, and also his impact around the world, would have left my father in dismay.”

The eulogies will not dwell on some aspects of Robert Kennedy’s past: he was an aide to Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt of suspected communists; was named attorney general by his brother John F Kennedy in what now looks like an act of nepotism; and, in that role, ordered the wiretapping and surveillance of King.

But his commitment to civil rights hardened with time. A film clip from 1963 shows him talking by phone to assistant attorney general Nick Katzenbach, who is in Alabama to force the segregationist governor George Wallace to admit African American students to university. In a moment of bathos, he puts Kerry on the line.

“How are you doing?” the little girl asks. “Are you at our house?” Katzenbach asks Kerry to tell her father the temperature in Alabama is 98F (37C) and they should all get hardship pay. Today, Kerry Kennedy recalls: “It was a funny thing for Nick to say but it was also reflective of my father’s sense of humour, his capacity to cut tension, his love of his children.”

On the wall of her apartment is a letter her father wrote to her that day: “Dear Kerry, Today was an historic day, not just because of your visit, but because, over the objections of Governor Wallace, two negroes registered at the University of Alabama. It happened just a few minutes ago. I hope these events are long past by the time you get your pretty little head to college. Love and kisses, Daddy.”

Despite his use of the phrase “pretty little head”, Kerry Kennedy, the seventh of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 children, insists her father was the opposite of a chauvinist dinosaur. “I loved that television show Mad Men because it really was a reminder of what reality was back then,” she says. “And that made him stand out in contrast all the more. He was really a wonderful father, fully engaged, fully present, especially for a father in the 1960s in his kind of position.”

Squabbles among the siblings would be resolved by their father asking each to give their side of the story while the other had to listen quietly without interrupting, Kerry Kennedy recalls. “In that process the truth would out and both sides would understand that neither side was all wrong. Then we would have to kiss and make up and go to our rooms to read for an hour.

“The message he had for us as children was the same message he had for our country, which is we must create peace. It’s not just about the war in Vietnam. You have to look at your enemies as brothers and sisters.”

In the family home, the air was thick with politics and poetry, Kerry Kennedy recalls in a new book, Robert F Kennedy: Ripples of Hope, which contains interviews with Clinton, Lewis, Barack Obama and others. At dinner on Sunday nights, they would recite lines from Rudyard Kipling’s If, Robert Service’s The Cremation of Sam McGee and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses. Books filled every nook and cranny of the house and newspapers and magazines coated the breakfast table.

Kerry Kennedy says: “All of us were expected to read the newspaper and to go round the table and tell one story that we had read that day. Then there would be a discussion about the issues that they raised.

“Every night without fail he would read from the Old Testament, and then we would play games and then go upstairs and kneel around our parents’ bed and say rosaries and go to bed. It’s pretty remarkable how much he really was present considering how busy he was and how many kids he had.”

‘Daddy was never ruthless but he was tough’

In November 1963, John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. His younger brother and closest confidant was shaken to the core. “Daddy was never ruthless but he was tough,” Kerry Kennedy says. “I think part of that toughness was a confidence that allowed him to really embrace the mourning process and to go very deeply into his sadness and despair and not to run away from that and not to be fearful of it, which so many people are to their great detriment.

“He was pretty absent from public life for about six months, and that’s when he read The Greek Way [by Edith Hamilton] and became really enthralled with the ancient Greeks. I think that process deepened his capacity to understand pain.”

Robert Kennedy’s erudition stands in contrast to the anti-intellectual populism embodied by Trump. At the Democratic National Convention in 1964, Robert Kennedy paid tribute to his late brother by quoting Shakespeare. Four years later, in a speech from the heart, he broke the news of King’s death to a potentially febrile crowd in Indianapolis. He reached for Aeschylus.

Robert Kennedy became a US senator for New York and ran for president in 1968 after Lyndon B Johnson – “I think they really disliked each other,” Kerry Kennedy says – decided to not to seek re-election. When he won the California primary, Robert Kennedy told aide Kenny O’Donnell: “You know, Kenny, I feel now for the first time that I’ve shaken off the shadow of my brother. I feel I made it on my own.” Had he gone on to clinch the Democratic nomination, then emulate his brother by beating Richard Nixon, history might well have looked very different: no Watergate, probably a shortened Vietnam war, perhaps less division and more healing.

Instead, after his victory speech at the Ambassador hotel in Los Angeles in the early hours of 5 June, Robert Kennedy made his way through the kitchen to avoid the surging crowd. There he was shot by a Jordanian citizen, Sirhan Sirhan. He died the following day. The BBC journalist Alistair Cooke was standing a few feet away. “Down on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child, lying on a cathedral tomb,” he wrote.

Each Kennedy child responded to the loss in his or her own way. Kerry, now 58, formerly married to the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, has spent most of her life as a human rights activist. After all the challenges posed by tyrannies abroad, she never expected to be confronted at home by a figure like Trump, rattling allies, praising authoritarians, advocating torture and popularising terms such as “fake news” around the world.

She says: “We have a president of the United States who has launched a full-frontal attack on human rights in myriad ways.”

Yet the shards of memory from being a child of the 60s – the killings of John F Kennedy, Malcolm X, King and Robert Kennedy, the urban uprisings and Vietnam – offer a sense of perspective today. “It was an amazing time. People feel that this moment, our moment here in 2018, is such a difficult time in our country’s history.

“Boy, in 1968 we had 125 cities burning on fire and not for one night, not for two nights – Philadelphia, I think, was three months of basically martial law in that city. This was all over and huge demonstrations against the war, this incredible rage of black against white, rich against poor, young against old and back and forth.

“So when people say how horrible it is that Donald Trump is president, well, yeah, but we’ve faced a lot worse than this and our country went on to go from the world of Mad Men to the world it is today, and that’s what’s going to happen now. That’s what’s going to happen in the next 50 years. We’re going to be fine.”