RFK and MLK
RFK. Robert ‘Bobby’ Kennedy.
Back in 1968, I did a few designs for another poster of one of my own heroes, radical Irish-American politician Bobby Kennedy, one of which I completed and published at the time.
Robert ‘Bobby’ Kennedy was another one of my heroes who was assassinated like so many who stood up to the evil forces which dominated much of American society and political discourse -and denounced these forces while pushing through the very first Civil Rights legislation.
Bombs away with Curtis LeMay
I was a fanatical admirer of both JFK and brother Robert Kennedy and even today that admiration has not diminished. Thanks to the intervention of Bobby Kennedy US Chief of Staff, Curtis LeMay (‘Bombs away with Curtis LeMay’) was refused permission to invade or nuke Cuba after the Bay of Pigs disaster and during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
‘We do not do Pearl Harbours’, was his, Bobby Kennedy’s, reply to LeMay’s demand for a surprise attack and undeclared war on the Cuban mainland.
LeMay was even reported during the Cuban M
Cool, wise heads prevailed over the military warmongers and the world was spared a nuclear holocaust.
Dark Forces
At home he stood for black civil rights and made many dangerous enemies but it was only when RFK opposed the pointless Vietnam War and stood as a candidate in favour of ending it that the dark forces behind the assassination of his brother John Fitzgerald Kennedy and also of Martin Luther King, conspired to assassinate him too and they succeeded without any consequences for them or their clandestine killers, using a North Korean-style brainwashed Sirhan B. Sirhan as their patsy, just like Lee Harvey Oswald before him.
MLK. Martin Luther King Jr.
The third in this projected series was to be another hero of mine from that same tumultuous era, the Reverend Martin Luther King. In an ironic twist of history it was Bobby Kennedy’s eulogy for the slain martyr for Civil Rights, Martin Luther King, that always stayed with me and reaffirmed my determination to honour them both.
As a young man living in Ireland, far away from the centre of this epic struggle, it was Martin Luther King and his powerful, pacifist speeches that made its mark for life on me as we listened to them virtually every night on the TV news, while he and his marchers were battered and
Slowly but surely I was becoming convinced that the pacifism of King and the entire American Civil Rights movement was the only path to real political freedom and change.
Civil Rights, Home and Abroad
That ability to endure the harshest treatment, without resorting to violence, left the deepest and most enduring mark on me in 1972 as the Civil Rights marchers in Derry were being batoned and brutalised live on Irish television.
I felt they would, like their black counterparts in the US, eventually ‘overcome’, which, of course, they did in the end but not before we were forced to watch as over 3,000 innocent Irish men and women were butchered by ‘Republican’ and loyalist militants, British military and British state-sponsored murder squads.
They, those early Catholic and Nationalist marchers, even sang that gospel song ‘we Shall Overcome’, inspired by MLK and his supporters, as they marched for equal rights in Northern Ireland.