On 18 March 1968, the University of Kansas canceled classes. Robert Kennedy had declared for the presidency two days earlier, spoke that morning at Kansas State, flew into Lawrence, and at half past one walked into Phog Allen Fieldhouse in front of twenty thousand students. They interrupted him thirty-eight times. Somewhere in the middle he did something no candidate does. He attacked an accounting convention.
The gross national product, he said, stood at over eight hundred billion dollars a year. Then he told them what was inside the figure: air pollution, cigarette advertising, ambulances clearing wreckage from the highways. Locks for the doors, and jails for the people who break them. The felling of the redwoods. Napalm, nuclear warheads, armored cars for the police. And then what was not inside it — the health of children, the quality of their schooling, the joy of their play, the strength of a marriage, the integrity of a public official.
