Dear John xxxxxx,
Up until this year, I never thought I would be involved in politics. I had completely given up hope in the political system. Change, I thought, would have to come from the outside. If it happened at all, it would be through a profound collapse and rebirth from the ground up.
Then last April I met Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and a dormant hope—a hope I didn’t know I had—was ignited.
That is why I put a successful career as a writer and philosopher on the back burner, to devote myself full time to the campaign.
I brought with me a vision encapsulated in the phrase, “The America that almost was, and yet may be.” It comes from a sense that America harbors a potential to live up to its founding ideals. Never in history did our nation meet those ideals, but for a brief, golden moment, it looked like we might.
That moment was the early 1960s. America was far from perfect, but powerful movements were afoot to right many of its historical wrongs. The civil rights movement, women’s liberation, and other social movements showed the possibility of justice. Meanwhile, our country was at the very pinnacle of its wealth and power. We carried a boundless can-do spirit and belief in our national capacity. No challenge was too great for us to face, no achievement too difficult. Thus it was that John F. Kennedy was able to inspire Americans with the words, describing the moon mission, “We choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Even though the United States was a dominant global power, JFK was an anti-imperialist who was sympathetic to liberation movements throughout the Third World. He recalled figures of the Roosevelt administration like Henry Wallace and Harry Hopkins who wanted not to take over the disintegrating British empire, but to disband it. They, and Kennedy after them, envisioned a world of free, equal, and peaceful relations among nations.
When asked what he wanted to be remembered for, he said he hoped his epitaph would read, “He kept the peace.” Thus it was that he defied his cabinet and Joint Chiefs of Staff in refusing to bomb Cuba after the Bay of Pigs, in negotiating with Kruschev, and in ordering US advisors out of Vietnam. He was appalled by the runaway power of the military-industrial complex and the CIA, vowing to “split [the CIA] into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind.”
It was shortly thereafter that JFK was assassinated. America then took a very different path—the path of empire and war. The hopes of uplifting its oppressed minorities and ending poverty were bankrupted by the catastrophic expenditures of the Vietnam War, one of a long series of imperialistic wars that continue to this day. Our infrastructure, our civil society, and our national character hollowed out from the inside. The violence and oppression we visited upon the world was mirrored at home.
Sixty years and tens of trillions of dollars later, we have become what imperial powers inevitably become. Staggering wealth inequality, chronic disease, loss of civil liberties, corruption in government, and an epidemic of cynicism and despair—these all plague America today.
Yet, the alternate historical timeline our country could have walked if JFK had prevailed is (like my own hope) only dormant. It is not dead. The incredible response to RFK Jr.’s campaign shows that the popular will still exists to make America what it almost was and yet could be. It is an incredible quirk of history that the man who might rejoin this broken timeline is none other than the nephew of John F. Kennedy and the son of Robert F. Kennedy, also assassinated in 1968.
No leader on his own can reclaim a country like ours. It can only happen through a massive popular movement that unites left and right, Black and White, young and old, rural and urban, the dispossessed working class and even members of the elite who are ready to defect from the establishment. Only such a movement could carry a man like RFK Jr. to the White House in the face of the unrelenting hostility of the media and other mainstream institutions. The elites, the foreign policy establishment, the corrupt corporate interests, and the transnational financial behemoths recognize a threat when they see one. Possessed of intelligence, charisma, and above all, courage, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is indeed a threat.
I am writing to you to perhaps explain a bit of why so many of us feel an unreasonable hope around this candidacy. The tide of history is turning.
This isn’t a fundraising letter. But I would like to make a request. If this letter helps illuminate some of your reasons for hope, could you please forward it to your friends, who may be wondering why you follow this campaign? And if you are one of those friends, please visit our website <[link removed]> to learn more about our candidate and the policies we are developing for peace, freedom, fairness, and economic vitality. And when you get there, please join our mailing list! That’s the core of the movement we need to build. Most of our emails are from the team of course, but some will be from Bobby himself, and I will also write another letter some months down the road.
In times of cynicism and disappointment, thank you for being willing to hope.
Charles Eisenstein
Advisor to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
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