A lesson from RFK to Gov. Mills to run against Senator Collins

Boston Globe

01-07-2025

Advertisement
Governor Janet Mills, on the other hand, has
Mills, however, misses RFK's real lesson: The best way to change national policies is to seek national office like Kennedy did in 1964, when he challenged a middle-of-the-road US Senate incumbent much like Collins. So how about it, governor: Will you run against Collins next year if she continues to waffle about standing up to Trump?
Crossing swords with the president is hardly easy, of course. Trump has demonstrated his readiness to eviscerate his opponents, even ones from his own party. But it wasn't easy for Smith to go up against McCarthy at the start of his red-baiting crusade in 1950, when no other Republican would. What's more, she was the Senate's only woman. It would be her proudest moment in the chamber, and one for which she would pay dearly.
Advertisement
On June 1, 1950, Smith
It was a 15-minute act of sheer courage, one that McCarthy listened to silently from his desk two rows behind Smith's. The counterattack was as fast as it was furious. Columnist and McCarthy friend Westbrook Pegler derided Smith as 'a Moses in nylons' who 'took advantage … of her sex.' Others suggested that she and McCarthy had been romantically involved, or she'd wanted to be, and that the speech was personal revenge. McCarthy had the most belittling quip, dismissing Smith and the half-dozen Republican co-signatories to her Declaration of Conscience as 'Snow White and the Six Dwarfs.' His words were reinforced by splenetic action. Using his authority as ranking Republican, in 1951 he dumped Smith from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations that he'd named her to, replacing her with the more hawklike Richard Nixon.
Advertisement
Kennedy's challenge in taking on Senator Kenneth Keating of New York was even more daunting. The silver-haired incumbent, a born and bred New Yorker, had won all seven elections he had contested. Kennedy, a carpetbagger from Massachusetts, sent a young aide across the state to assess his chances, and the news wasn't good: Keating would trounce Kennedy by 650,000 votes.
Yet on Aug. 25, 1964, the US attorney general announced to New York and the world that he was running and meant to win. 'There may be some who believe that where a candidate voted in the past is more important than his capacity to serve the state,'
Even with his family money and connections, it wasn't easy for RFK. Through early October it looked like he might lose, but that prospect propelled him to break out of his shell, let the public see his wit and spunk and focus on issues that mattered, like ending poverty and the war in Vietnam. In the end he won by 719,693 votes, the biggest margin a New York Democrat had managed, for senator or governor, since 1934.
Are you listening, Governor Mills?
At 77, and after 35 years of public service, you might be too tired to run for Senate even if it would help your fellow Democrats retake that chamber and restrain the president. But as you recently wrote in a Globe Opinion essay, channeling RFK's call to arms 60 years earlier, 'Each of us can send forth that tiny ripple of hope; we can restore the rule of law, we can revive our rights, recharge our nation, and rewrite the history of our world.'
Advertisement