Subscribe to Breaking NewsHillary Defends Her Comments About Assassination
Hillary Clinton invoked the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June 1968 to justify her continued campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Hillary Clinton created a firestorm with her comments about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?” Clinton said on Friday in an interview with the editorial board of The Sioux Falls Argus Leader. “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California,” she added.
Clinton’s reference to the assassination of the man whose Senate seat she now holds has become the story of the Memorial Day weekend, drawing criticism from across the political spectrum, including those who have been supportive of Hillary’s candidacy.
“The unspoken story of this campaign have been the assassination threats against Barack Obama,” said Mark Shields on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer on Friday. “I mean, her history is absolutely faulty. Robert Kennedy’s first primary… was in May 7th of 1968. He was murdered four weeks later,” added the Democratic pundit, who has been very sympathetic to Clinton throughout the campaign. “I really do think it was a reckless statement and one for which she should be held accountable.”
After criticism mounted, Hillary — standing in a convenience store surrounded by salad dressing and liquid soap — mumbled a half-hearted and rambling apology, which the New York Times editorial board called “one of those tedious non-apology apologies.” The Times enthusiastically endorsed the senator from New York for president in February, but on its blog site (The Board), the editorial board asked, “Is it even possible that Mrs. Clinton thinks someone out there was not offended by her remark, Kennedy relative, Obama relative, or just plain folks?” As for Hillary’s excuse in attempting to explain away her comments, the Times noted, “Mrs. Clinton tried to excuse her inexcusable outburst by saying she was distracted by the shock of the news of Senator Edward Kennedy’s malignant brain tumor.”
Significantly, as Karen Tumulty has pointed out, Hillary has made the same reference to the RFK assassination before. “We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A., Hillary said to Time Magazine’s managing editor Richard Stengel in an interview published on March 6. “My husband didn’t wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June,” the candidate said on that occasion. “Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual.” As Tumulty notes, that interview in early March took place more than two months before Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor was made public, so Hillary’s excuse that the Massachusetts senator’s terminal cancer prompted the reference to his brother’s assassination does not ring true.
Perhaps the most eloquent denunciation of Hillary’s extraordinary invocation of the possible assassination of Barack Obama as a justification for continuing her quixotic campaign came from Keith Olberman, who until very recently was reluctant to criticize Hillary. “We cannot forgive you this — not because it is crass and low and unfeeling and brutal,” Olberman said in his commentary TV show on MSNBCm which is worth quoting at length:
“This is un-forgivable, because this nation’s deepest shame, its most enduring horror, its most terrifying legacy, is political assassination. Lincoln. Garfield. McKinley. Kennedy. Malcolm X. Martin Luther King. Robert Kennedy. And, but for the grace of the universe or the luck of the draw, Reagan, Ford, Truman, Nixon, Andrew Jackson, both Roosevelts, even George Wallace. The politics of this nation is steeped enough in blood, Senator Clinton, you cannot and must not invoke that imagery! Anywhere! At any time! And to not appreciate, immediately — to still not appreciate tonight — just what you have done… is to reveal an incomprehension of the America you seek to lead. This, Senator, is too much. Because a senator — a politician — a person — who can let hang in mid-air the prospect that she might just be sticking around in part, just in case the other guy gets shot — has no business being, and no capacity to be, the President of the United States.”
In response to the near-universal condemnation of her comments, Hillary struck back at her critics with an op-ed in the Sunday issue of the New York Daily News, writing that “some took my comments entirely out of context and interpreted them to mean something completely different – and completely unthinkable.”
But how else to interpret Hillary’s comments except as an invocation of the possible assassination of her opponent as a rationale for her continuing candidacy…?
