This week, as the confirmation battle over the Trump nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be secretary of Health and Human Services peaks, as the saying goes: like father, like son.

As someone whose teenage political hero in the 1960s was then-New York Senator and Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, the opposition today to RFK’s namesake son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is amusing.
As someone around at the time, the recollections now of the political attacks on RFK Sr. are still vivid.
The central charge around which everything else gathered was that RFK Sr. was “ruthless.” In essence, his zeal to elect his older brother Jack to the presidency, then to serve him as an activist attorney general in times of tumultuous upheaval that was embodied first by the civil rights movement focused on de-segregating the American South, then, as a Senator, protesting and fighting a president of his own Democrat Party — Lyndon Johnson — to end the Vietnam War, revealed RFK Sr. to be relentlessly focused. He had his goals and he was committed to them.
Back in the day, these causes appeared gradually, driven by events that in fact had nothing to do with him. The demand by African Americans for the recognition of full equality had finally burst full-blown on the American political scene, something that had begun before RFK became attorney general.
With the rise of television, the nation was mesmerized and appalled by television images during the Kennedy administration of peacefully protesting blacks in Birmingham, Ala. having the local authorities turn on them with fire hoses while also literally having them set upon by police dogs.
They were riveted as Kennedy himself sent his deputy attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, to get two young black students admitted as they attempted to enroll in the heretofore segregated University of Alabama. With Alabama Governor George Wallace literally standing in the university’s doorway, Katzenbach was supported by and accompanied by a...