by Thomas Maier
AS A SENATOR from New York, Kennedy sometimes felt estranged from Democrats who espoused liberal causes for what he deemed all the wrong reasons. Too often, liberals had no idea of the everyday indignities faced by working-class and poor people. They viewed these people with mild distaste or, worse, patronizingly from their town house windows. “Robert Kennedy, who, while espousing liberal ideas, hated to be thought of as a liberal (since there was something quite deep in him which viewed liberals as being soft),” noted David Halberstam. Among intellectuals and media types in Manhattan, Kennedy also sensed a deep strain of anti-Catholicism. He privately repeated a familiar complaint that “anti-Catholicism is the anti- Semitism of the intellectuals.” Some wondered whether Kennedy’s cultural unease with New York liberals might contain some latent anti-Semitism of his own, inherited as the son of Joseph P. Kennedy, reviled for his attitude toward Nazi Germany.
Bobby harbored grudges against particular targets. Liberals on Manhattan’s West Side didn’t like him, he claimed, “because I’m a Roman Catholic with ten children.” Although the New York Times had boldly exposed the religious bigotry plaguing his brother’s historic 1960 campaign, certainly as much as any newspaper in the country, Bobby remained irked by their coverage of himself. In private, he complained that the paper of record never noted Mayor Lindsay’s Protestant religion as it did with his own. To columnist Jimmy Breslin, a fellow Irish Catholic, he expressed surety that the Times was prejudiced.“Their idea of a good story is—‘More nuns leave convents than ever before,’” he told Breslin.
One of the most influential portrayals of Robert Kennedy during this time is contained in journalist Jack Newfield’s 1969 biography, Robert Kennedy:A Memoir. A genuine cri de coeur written in memorial,Newfield’s book recognized the strong Irish Catholic cultural influences on Kennedy,but presented them with distinct ambivalence. “Kennedy’s Catholicism reinforced other parts of his personality,”Newfield contended.“His sense of service, sacrifice and responsibility. His loyalty to his family, with its hierarchical structure. His strong sense of Good and Evil.”Kennedy maintained a sentimental bond to his church, almost as much as his family. As Newfield observed, “In the oddest of places—rural Kansas, the heart of Watts [the scene of a deadly 1965 urban riot in Los Angeles]—nuns would appear in the middle of crowds, and Kennedy’s face would brighten.” Ultimately, Newfield blamed “Kennedy’s cultural condition as a Boston Catholic” for his early admiration of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and for a side of his personality that was more “emotionally sympathetic to policemen” than the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Newfield and subsequent biographers make much of Kennedy’s reading of Albert Camus, the French existentialist writer, and the ancient Greek philosophers, and credit it with more transforming power than anything Kennedy found in his religion. Before his 1969 book, Newfield mentioned Camus in a 1966 article in the Nation, in which he suggested Kennedy’s “complex liberalism . . . has a philosophical base to it,” reflected in Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus, where “fate is cruel and often absurd, but vulnerable man must make the effort to push his heavy burden up the slope of history.”Was Robert Kennedy an “existential hero,” as Newfield termed him, or a Christian believer whose faith was sorely tested by the randomness and cruelty of life?
Family members suggest these existential interpretations of Kennedy were overdrawn and underestimate his faith. “I think he was always a spiritual human being,” said Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, in a lengthy conversation about her father’s beliefs. “With every tragedy, it deepens one’s understanding, and being open to learning from it. And that’s what he was able to do. . . . I think that Jack Newfield story—and he wrote a wonderful book—is sort of exaggerated, because one can always grow, but I think the depths of his spirituality were always there.” Instead, Townsend suggested that much of her father’s stoicism and fatalism, often attributed to French existentialists or ancient Greeks, more accurately finds its roots in his Irish Catholic background.“The Irish have seen lots of cruelty, so there wasn’t a sense that there was a disjunction between God and what happened on Earth,” she explained. “That’s been part of the Irish tradition for centuries, that life is tough. And so, what God gives you is the strength to deal with the toughness. I think with the (Irish) stoicism, you go forward. Those kind of questions [about existentialism] are more modern questions. I don’t think that is part of the Irish tradition, and it was not part of our tradition.”
During a November 2000 conference at the John F. Kennedy Library, Townsend spoke of “one aspect of my father’s legacy that often gets overlooked,” which she described as the “profound link between my father’s religious principles and his political principles.” She said these convictions, moored by his Catholic faith, revealed themselves in everything from outrage at poverty and racism to a need to reform the welfare system so that human beings are not denied a sense of purpose and self-respect.“There was a spiritual grounding to his life, which offered him a sharp lens through which he viewed the nation and the world,” she explained, offering several examples. “It gave him a sense of urgency and passion with which he approached the political realm.” Undoubtedly, this loving assessment by Kennedy’s daughter, more than thirty years after his death, hardly accounts for some of the vitriol and arrogance of her father’s character, particularly in his earlier years as his brother’s enforcer or as an unapologetic wiretapper of Dr. King. But in understanding Kennedy’s politics in the 1960s, Townsend highlighted a major aspect of her father’s development left largely unexplored.
AS THE WHOLE WORLD witnessed, Robert Kennedy knew what it was like to be humbled in the deepest sense. On the campaign trail and as a public servant, he referred to a fragility in life born of his own family tragedy. He often mentioned human suffering. He spoke of it with great empathy, enhancing his appeal to those alienated from American society.“I always felt that Bobby had an aura of fatalism around him after his brother’s death,” remembered speechwriter Michael Novak. “He would do his best and do what he had to do, and the rest would be left in the hands of God. He seemed the most vulnerable of the Kennedys.”
In various speeches after November 1963, Robert Kennedy turned his own pain into a greater understanding of the afflicted and found a shared comfort in suffering. Never were these sensibilities more on display than the night Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968. Once again, Kennedy’s face showed the struggle to rectify, somehow make sense of a world where a proponent of nonviolence and Christ’s love—a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize—could be struck down by an assassin’s bullet. Before a group of one thousand mostly African-American people in Indianapolis, Kennedy announced the horrifying news and then, extemporaneously, he spoke from the heart.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling that justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
Riots and looting erupted that night across America, though not in Indianapolis. We don’t know whether Kennedy’s speech helped soothe the anguish and righteous anger of African-Americans in that city, nor do we know whether any of his words helped at all. No one could dispute, though, that Kennedy’s pain was real, for he, too, had experienced the “awful
grace of God.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Politics of Outsiders
AFTER A CONTROVERSIAL TOUR of South Africa in June 1966, Robert Kennedy’s entourage flew to Rome, where the senator from New York confronted Pope Paul VI with all he had heard and seen of apartheid.“I told him how important it was the church take a clear position . . . how cruel the system was,”Kennedy recorded in his notes. He even warned that many Africans believed, as one informed him, that “the Christian God hates Negroes.”
The pontiff ’s response was polite but tepid, while Kennedy’s soul remained inflamed. Throughout South Africa, he had witnessed the devastating impact of racism in the name of religion. Whites justified their system of apartheid by arguing that blacks, after centuries of tribalism, couldn’t be trusted with such a Western refinement as democracy. “Suppose God is black?” Kennedy replied at a South African university to a questioner defending the state’s white supremacy. “What if we go to Heaven and we, all of our lives, have treated the Negro as inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?”
South Africa struck a chord in Robert Kennedy, as did similar trips abroad in the mid-1960s to Communist-dominated Poland and poverty–ridden Latin America, where minorities suffered from bigotry and oppression. For all his power, fame and money, Kennedy still could identify with those beaten down by the system. In his own personal mythology, the Kennedy family had suffered such a fate. “My father left Boston . . . because of the signs on the wall that said ‘No Irish Need Apply,’” he told the crowds in South Africa. When a writer back in the United States questioned him about his recollection of his father’s departure (“the Irishman who left Boston . . . in his own Railway car,” as the dubious letter writer put it), Kennedy good-humoredly acknowledged a bit of blarney in his facts. In reply, he argued that his Irish anecdote about his family was “symbolic . . . at least that was what I was told at a very young age . . . both my parents felt very strongly about the discrimination.” Family history became a parable, if not gospel truth.
ROBERT KENNEDY’S heritage was so infused in his being that he generally didn’t need to parade his ethnicity or religion as other politicians might. Yet his family’s Irish Catholic cultural sensibility often surfaced in issues where Kennedy showed his greatest passion, like his rooting out of organized crime figures in the 1950s Payoffs, beatings and other forms of corruption became morality tales where the sides of good and evil were often sharp and distinct. Murray Kempton later said that RFK had never felt so “at home with sister and brother Catholics” as when he mingled with those without power, particularly those involved in the labor union struggle for decent wages and health safeguards. Kennedy strongly endorsed unionizing efforts among immigrants and minorities, and he praised the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists as “the brightest spot” in the movement. Robert Kennedy became what Kempton called “a Catholic radical” who interpreted President Kennedy’s words and policies into a bolder and much more progressive ideology. “From the need to identify at once with his triumphant brother and with the great company of losers in life to which he had fallen, he invented a John F. Kennedy that never was, the buried spirit of radical discontent,” wrote Kempton.
As a senator, Robert Kennedy’s concerns revealed him to be a socially conservative Catholic as much as a disciple of liberal orthodoxy. He questioned the role of the federal welfare system and its impact on poor families, and he stressed the need for neighborhood control in running schools and antipoverty programs. His appeals to the conscience rather than to convenience seemed to assume that every citizen was able to feel responsibility as well as pleasure. He implored a materialistic American society to be more charitable, yet he believed that government handouts were ultimately corrupting. These infusions of spirituality into his down-to-earth politics were captured in an oft-quoted speech in South Africa, where Kennedy beseeched:“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and dar- ing those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Increasingly, his politics, like his religion, became visionary rather than dogmatic.
In 1966, the plight of California’s migrant workers roused Kennedy’s moral outrage. Kennedy was persuaded by friends to fly to Delano, California, for a hearing of the Senate’s Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. In the vineyards of Delano, located in the San Joaquin Valley, grape pickers earned below minimum wages, were sprayed like produce with harmful insecticides and were fired or threatened when they tried to unionize. Eventually, they declared a strike and marched with signs warning Huelga, “Strike.” Some Mexican workers were imported as scabs to help break the union’s effort. Cesar Chavez, an earnest, unschooled Mexican-American whose heroes included St. Francis and Gandhi, led the farm workers. Some called him a Communist for trying to extend basic government labor protections afforded most Americans, such as minimum wage, to his members toiling in the fields. Though some were sympathetic, many white Southern California farm owners reacted with angry nativisttinged bigotry toward these Hispanic immigrant workers and the Catholic clergy who supported their cause. A handful of young, idealistic priests set up a Migrant Ministry to aid striking workers, some of whom were beaten by thugs. These priests spoke up for the workers at public hearings and helped them pay for food, lodging and other essentials. For these embattled migrant workers, the church was a refuge, a source of strength.“All the Mexicans are Catholic,” Chavez explained. “The church is the one group that isn’t expecting anything from us. All the others, the unions, the civil-rights groups, they all want something in return for their support. Not the church.”
Kennedy’s appearance at the Senate subcommittee hearing put a national spotlight on the problems facing migrant workers. His outrage was so intense that he grilled the local sheriff after he had explained how striking workers were arrested for unlawful assembly when they were simply protesting. “Can I suggest that the sheriff read the Constitution of the United States,”Kennedy said dryly. A gaggle of reporters followed Kennedy to the hearing and one asked whether Chavez and his union organizers were Communists. “No, they’re not Communists,” Kennedy replied with authority.“They’re struggling for their rights.”
Chavez was surprised by Kennedy’s peppery, hard-nosed questioning at the hearing and “at how quickly he [Kennedy] grasped the whole picture.” The farm workers strike dragged on for months. “Boycott grapes” signs were placed in groceries and liquor stores across the country. In early 1968, Chavez went on a hunger strike. During the fast, Senator Kennedy sent him a telegram saying: “I fully and unswervingly support the principles which led you to undertake your fast.”When it ended twenty-five days later on a Sunday,Kennedy joined Chavez for a Mass and a bread-breaking ceremony attended by more than four thousand people. Chavez was so weak that he had to be helped to the local park where a flatbed truck was used as an outside altar. Though some liberal supporters of the union were uncomfortable with it, Kennedy marveled at the grassroots role of the Catholic Church in helping these workers, and appreciated Chavez’s use of religious symbolism in his struggle. That day, the large gathering of immigrant laborers treated Kennedy as something more than a visiting politician. They waved their tattered union flags and soiled baseball caps in salute. Some blessed themselves as he passed.
“Hool-ga!” Bobby shouted, in fractured Spanish meant to sound like Huelga. “Am I murdering the language?” he turned and asked, laughing with the crowd at his poor Spanish. But Bobby felt a sodality, a cultural connection, that wasn’t readily apparent.“He was a hardscrabble liberal who clearly sympathized with the plight of migrant workers and the poor,” explained historian Douglas Brinkley. “But perhaps most importantly, like all of them, he was a Catholic in America run largely by Protestants.”
In these California vineyards,
among immigrant laborers and the radicalized clergy who supported them, Bobby Kennedy found himself closer to his faith than he ever had in Rome.“God, those priests—Communists,” he said mockingly, in a way that probably wouldn’t have occurred to him a decade earlier. Chavez and his union of Latino immigrants looked at Kennedy “as sort of a minority kind of person himself,” Chavez attested, “with Senator Kennedy, it was like he was one of ours.”Though the bigotry faced by Jack Kennedy eight years earlier had abated, Chavez noted that when Bobby “was put down for being a Catholic, this made points with the Mexicans.” In time, a photo of Bobby would hang in Chavez’s union office in Delano, part of a trinity of 1960s memorials on the wall to the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King.
IMMIGRANTS BECAME, once again, an important part of the family’s constituency. In early 1965, the Kennedy brothers in the United States Senate, Robert of New York and Edward of Massachusetts, continued to push for the immigration reform legislation first proposed by JFK. “It doesn’t make any sense that we discriminate against people because of the color of their skin and its doesn’t make any sense when we discriminate because of their place of birth,” Bobby said, reprising his brother’s language from 1963. Looking back decades later,Ted Kennedy is even more blunt in his assessment. “At the time, our immigration policies supported legally sanctioned race discrimination,” he said.
The racial aspect of the immigration issue became clear when President Johnson reintroduced the bill in 1965.Ted Kennedy, as floor manager of the bill, encountered problems from several Southern Democratic senators, some of whom had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Savvy to the Senate’s ways, Ted Kennedy convinced Senator James O. Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi, to hold Judiciary Subcommittee hearings despite his own opposition to the bill. During the hearings, the president of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), a woman who identified herself as Mrs. William H. Sullivan Jr., said that getting rid of the national origins quota system would destroy the country’s “first-line of defense” against a tide of “potentially unassimilable aliens.” Eastland seconded the DAR’s view. Ted Kennedy disagreed but didn’t quiz Mrs. Sullivan until she claimed that elimination of the existing national origins system was a major goal of the Communists.