In the weeklong celebration of Ronald Reagan's life, blogger Andrew Sullivan linked to one of the forgotten episodes of Reagan's life, his one public appearance with Robert Kennedy. It was on CBS-TV on a program called Town Meeting of the World. Kennedy and Reagan were questioned by CBS's Charles Collingwood and by students in the United States and in London. The subject was "The Image of America and the Youth of the World."
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It is fascinating to read the answers of the first-term senator and the first-term governor, both of them seen as possible future presidential candidates; indeed, both of them did run for president the next year. They were speaking at a time when the United States seemed bogged down in Vietnam, when protest demonstrations were conducted on major campuses and in large cities, when the faith of the foreign policy Establishment—a term borrowed in the 1960s from British journalism by John Kenneth Galbraith—in the rightness of American conduct was visibly fraying. The Establishment, which exempted college students from the draft, was shaken by the angry opposition to the war on the same campuses where they had been schooled to fight, in the words of one slogan, "for God, for country, and for Yale."
Robert Kennedy and Ronald Reagan had quite different responses to this movement. To the first question, Kennedy placed the blame for the war on "our adversaries, the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong, National Liberation Front." He went on, "I think that if all the protests were ended, and even if all of the objections to the war came to an end here in this country, that the war in Vietnam would continue." And he rejected an invitation to call the war "illegal, immoral, politically unjustifiable and economically motivated." But he quickly added, "I have some reservations, as I've stated them before, about some aspects of the war." He was not quite to the point of breaking with the Johnson administration, of which, after all, he had been a part, but he seemed to be headed in that direction.
Reagan took a different tack. "I definitely think the demonstrations are prolonging the war in that they're giving the enemy, who I believe must face defeat on relative comparison of the power of the two nations, they are giving him encouragement to continue, to hold out in the hope that division here in America will bring about a peace without defeat for that enemy." In other words, Reagan wanted us to seek a military victory. He went on: "Many of the demonstrations now taking place in this country could not legally take place if there was a legal declaration of war, so we, I think, are faced with a choice here. But again, and I'm sure the senator agrees with me, America will jealously guard this right of dissent, because I think the greatness of our country has been based on our thinking that everyone has the right even to be wrong." So Reagan suggested that he would seek an all-out military victory and noted that some actions would be a crime if war had been declared; later he named some: "avoiding the draft, refusing service, blocking troop trains and shipments of munitions." But he was careful to set himself out as a solid supporter of freedom of speech and generously allowed that Kennedy was one too.
