by Thomas Maier
In Hyannis Port, members of the family, their heads bowed,wept as they silently entered the Kennedy summer house. Each Kennedy was recorded by cameras providing around-the-clock mourning on cable television. From far away, a telephoto lens spotted Ted and Ethel in the large white party tent once meant for a joyous family wedding. They could be seen receiving and holding chalices as Communion was given out at a Mass said privately for the benefit of Kennedy’s loved ones. Father Michael Kennedy, the distant Irish cousin from Waterford who had come for the nuptials, now attended to their grief. In the voracious maw of celebrity, this intensely private family moment became a candid video image surreptitiously commandeered into the homes of millions. At the White House, President Clinton spoke for a nation when he issued a statement of heartfelt sorrow. Even in Ireland, the news came hard. The Taoiseach expressed “the great distress felt by Irish people around the word.”The Kennedy Homestead in Dunganstown closed its doors in tribute, reminiscent of the same sorrow felt on the day John’s father had died.
Once more, supposedly serious commentators on the news wondered aloud about a so-called Kennedy curse. Though ample evidence existed of poor judgment by Kennedy in trying to fly into that evening’s hazy dusk, the fatal outcome was often attributed to a long litany of tragedies bedeviling the family. The circumstances of this plane crash were so heartbreaking that some assumed a Kennedy curse must exist. “He seemed to be a Kennedy without falling under the Kennedy curse,” bemoaned USA Today. “We provide our own interpretations and questions—are these wounds self-inflicted or divine punishment, or coincidence?—because the saga’s bare facts offer no suggestion of a rational universe or a benevolent deity.” Various journalists noted that John Jr.’s plane crash came at about the same time as the thirtieth anniversary of Chappaquiddick and the Apollo 11 moon landing—arguably the low point and the high point of the Kennedy epoch. Even the sober-minded Doris Kearns Goodwin advised that “the curse cannot be seen as something they’ve brought on themselves.”
Although Roman Catholicism comprised the nation’s largest denomination, the American media seemed unable, or unwilling, to explore this tragedy in the religious context that the Kennedy family used to deal with their loss. How does a family that professes to believe in God deal with such repeated instances of tragedy? The answers offered to the American public were mostly trite sound bites or sentimental greeting-card explanations. Only a few offered any insight.“They are people of strong Catholic faith— this is the core of their existence,” explained Orrin Hatch, a Republican senator who counted Ted Kennedy as a friend.“There’s a special hurt that comes from seeing his brother’s only son die.”
Ted Kennedy scoffed at the notion of a Kennedy curse, a divine execration, something he had raised three decades earlier, after Chappaquiddick. “No, that’s not the way we’ve been,” he said, when asked about the Kennedys’ fate, “I’ve been very, very fortunate, and very lucky.” At his nephew’s funeral, he remained a source of strength for his family, no longer jaunty and young but a jowly, older man with white hair, encumbered by age and girth, who bore an increasing resemblance to Honey Fitz, his grandfather. Dutifully, he was there when the bodies were recovered. And he stood aboard the naval destroyer that took John’s cremated remains out to sea. Ted Kennedy seemed destined to attend to the living while burying the dead. At the memorial service held at the Church of St. Thomas More, the small century-old stone church where Jackie had often worshipped, he gave a warm and heartfelt tribute to his nephew. The 350 mourners, gathered by invitation only, included President Clinton, first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and numerous friends and associates from the Camelot era. About a third of the guests were Kennedy relatives. In the church, full of tears and memories, the senator began by humorously recalling what John once said he’d do if he ever ran for president and got elected—“I guess the first thing is call up Uncle Teddy and gloat.”
The assembled guests laughed through their pain. “I loved that,” Ted added, as if telling a yarn at a large Irish wake.“It was so like his father.”
The senator recalled John’s wit and energy, his creative ambition. He remembered how he suggested that instead of model Cindy Crawford posing as George Washington on George’s first cover, John should have used his Uncle Ted.“Without missing a beat, John told me he stood by his original editorial decision,” he said.
Despite the remembrances of wit to ease the moment, there remained an unbearable sense of loss, a yearning for what once was and an inclination of what might have been. “From the first day of his life, John seemed to belong not only to our family, but to the American family—the whole world knew his name before he did,” the senator said.“He had a legacy, and he learned to treasure it. He was part of a legend, and he learned to live with it. . . . He had only just begun. There was in him a great promise of things to come.”
Then Ted recalled the poem written by Thomas Kiernan, the Irish ambassador, shortly after John’s birth and presented to his parents at the White House in 1961.The verses, once a hopeful wish, now seemed almost prophetic (“If the storms break for him,May the trees shake for him / Their blossoms down / In the night that he is troubled / May a friend wake for him / So that his time be doubled . . . ”).Teddy’s eloquent good-bye ended with his own reference to another poem.“We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side,” he lamented, his voice cracking. “But like his father, he had every gift but length of years.”
When he had finished, Caroline Kennedy stood up, walked over to her uncle and hugged him.
THE DAY BEFORE this ceremony for John, a memorial Mass placed the Kennedy legacy in greater historical context. Sponsored by the Emerald Isle Immigration Center—a group helping the current wave of Irish immigrants, some here illegally without immigration green cards—this event wasn’t so much to mark a singular death as to recognize and give thanks for what an Irish Catholic family had achieved in America.
At the old St. Patrick’s in downtown Manhattan, the cathedral where generations of newly arrived immigrants once attended Mass and received the sacraments, they held their own poignant commemoration. The pews were filled not only with Irish faces, the first immigrant wave, but those succeeding groups of racial, ethnic and religious minorities who arrived from Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. Seated inside was Sargent Shriver, as a family representative, but most of those at this remarkable “people’s Mass”were the unknown laborers of the city. In a different time and a different city, one might have seen Patrick Kennedy from Dunganstown sitting out there among the immigrant faces. Three thousand more stood in the nearby streets, lined five and ten rows deep on that humid night. “If the Kennedy family is America’s royalty, then John Jr. was the people’s prince,” declared Carolyn Ryan of the Emerald Isle Immigration Center, who helped bring the event together.
The influence of the Kennedys as chieftains, as rallying points for the disparate groups of underprivileged and underrepresented people in American society, was never so evident. If the service uptown illustrated what the Kennedys had become with their power and celebrity, this Mass gave a true sense of where they had come from, the long journey of Irish-Americans struggling to succeed in a new and often hostile land. To these new Americans, the Kennedys represented the promise of opportunity, the chance that they could not only survive but someday thrive. There were tributes that recalled the contributions of the Kennedys to American life, along with Irish songs and bagpipes wailing and poems read, one of them about Owen Roe O’Neill. Even the priests were consumed by a distinct Irish fatalism. At the Mass, the church pastor, the Reverend Keith Fennessy, paraphrased Senator Moynihan’s comment after President Kennedy was killed. “Part of being Irish is knowing that someday the world will break your heart,” said the priest.“We all feel very Irish tonight.”
DESPITE THE SORROW of the evening, the presence of this crowd underlined the family’s longsta
nding commitment to immigration, the most hopeful and enduring part of its legacy. Indeed, many of these immigrants wouldn’t be in these pews, wouldn’t be living in America, if not for the intervention of the Kennedys in public life. Most probably could not recite the family’s history chapter and verse. They just knew the Kennedys had been there for them—the immigrants of the city—when they were most vulnerable, most in need.
By the time of this old St. Patrick’s memorial, the full impact of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act was evident throughout the United States. Over the previous thirty years, millions of new immigrants from places such as Mexico, China,Vietnam, Haiti, Poland and El Salvador had transformed the nation in the same way the large influx of Irish, Italians, Germans and Eastern European Jews had invigorated the nation a century before. Just as they did then, some politicians demanded protective barriers. They railed suspiciously against these newcomers, and some blamed the Kennedys. “Seldom has a bill had such unintended consequences. In fact, the 1965 Act opened the floodgates,” complained James Goldsborough in a 2000 issue of Foreign Affairs. “By the early 1980s, the United States had a full-blown immigration crisis.” In response, Ted Kennedy noted the 1965 act was intended to end discriminatory policies and not increase the nation’s immigration numbers.“At that time, no one could have predicted the economic trends that would shape U.S. immigration in the years to come,” he added. Since 1965, Kennedy has helped to pass several measures designed to fix problems in America’s immigration system; but he believes the current system still is ripe with abuse, having “created an underground labor economy that encourages smuggling, document fraud, exploitation, and low wages.”
The historical parallels are not lost on Kennedy. Today’s unwashed immigrant workers who barely speak English are often willing to take virtually any job, regardless of risk. The hovels they live in, the dangerous jobs and below-minimum wages, the poor sanitation and the marginal health care are often analogous to the conditions Patrick and Bridget Kennedy found along the Boston waterfront 150 years ago. Arguably, given the tenuous legal status of more than eight million undocumented newcomers in states such as California,Texas, Florida and New York, their plight is even worse. Though his own family is now far removed from the customs gate, Ted Kennedy, as a leader of the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has done as much to help today’s immigrants as any other legislator. In this sense, he’s been quite true to his family legacy. “There are similarities between the early Irish immigrants and today’s immigrants, particularly undocumented workers,” said Kennedy. “As with the early Irish immigrants, the undocumented community has been blamed for all sorts of societal ills such as high crime and high unemployment. In many ways, it is not fairer today than it was when my great grandparents arrived.”
Nationally, the challenge of giving voice to this recent generation of newcomers may fall to some other immigrant family—perhaps a Latino “Kennedy” somewhere—who might recognize their own version of the “emerald thread” of which President Kennedy once spoke. Today, the path to power is likely to be as difficult as ever. Since JFK’s groundbreaking 1960 election, minorities and newcomers have won many notable races for state and city offices. But in the intervening years, the reform measures designed to eliminate the old inner-city political machines has, in effect, reduced the chance of today’s immigrants to use local politics as a way to bring about meaningful changes. Many “illegals” cannot vote, and other immigrants are too afraid or too overworked to exercise their electoral franchise. Without the clubhouse, without outspoken leaders to rally them, these immigrants depend on the social, charitable and advocacy groups that, for all their good intentions, lack the political acuity to produce a city mayor like Honey Fitz, or even a local chieftain like P. J. Kennedy. For today’s immigrants, the path contains far more obstacles than the Kennedys ever faced in marching from ward healer to City Hall and, perhaps, someday to the White House.
In a similar way, the Catholic Church is unlikely to provide the kind of symbiotic aid that enabled John F. Fitzgerald to build an organization from Boston’s immigrant church, nor for his grandson Jack Kennedy to succeed after World War II, when he recruited hundreds of new voters at Communion breakfasts and Knights of Columbus meetings, and doled out foundation checks to Catholic-run orphanages and old-age homes. Today’s newcomers to America don’t turn to the immigrant church in quite the same way as those immigrants from County Wexford or Limerick. A sizeable number who crossed the border as Catholics have since joined evangelical or other Protestant denominations. In the Catholic Church, prelates such as Boston’s former Cardinal Bernard Law appeared to abandon the outreaching spirit of Vatican II and that short-lived era of “the two Johns.”The scandal of priest sex abuse, originating in the Boston diocese and spreading across the nation, highlighted the sexual duplicity in the church’s own ranks. More so, it undermined the singular and hard-won moral authority of the church in a society that prizes the secular and homogenous. The hierarchy’s cover-up eventually forced Law to resign, but left a generation of Catholics staggered by their actions. In Rome, Pope John Paul II—for all his effectiveness in combating the evils of international communism— seems constantly at odds with American Catholics on issues of sex, family planning and the role of women. That the Kennedys, once venerated as the leading Catholic family in America, should so often be in public disagreement with Rome speaks volumes about the state of the church itself, estranged from so many of its faithful. The Irish, as research studies show, still believe in the old verities of God, eternal life and the sanctity of the family. But they are at a loss, like so many of their co-religionists, to explain the behavior of their priests.
WHATEVER THEIR human failings, the idealism surrounding the Kennedy legacy endures, particularly as a personal beacon of hope for America’s minorities. Sophisticates such as television commentator Tim Russert still remember how the Irish Catholics in his old Buffalo neighborhood, the morning after the 1960 election, bounded out of their houses and yelled, “We won! We won!” “He was Irish Catholic and one of us,” Russert recalled. “For me it was so important because I now realized we could do anything. There were no more obstacles, no more limits.” Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the first Jewish person nominated on a major national ticket, recalled how much Kennedy’s victory meant to him: “When JFK broke the barrier, I felt—as I’m sure so many other Americans who seemed outside the full mainstream of American life—that President Kennedy was bringing us in with him, that he was opening the doors of opportunity not only for Catholics, but for everybody in America.”
During his vice-presidential run in 2000, Lieberman didn’t confront the KKK and organized hate groups that plagued Al Smith. He didn’t have to face the repeated questioning about church and state that Kennedy endured. Because of JFK’s victory, Lieberman’s Jewishness didn’t become the prime issue in the campaign, nor did any sizeable portion of the electorate vote against him simply because of his ethnicity or beliefs. Perhaps only those who had lived long enough, someone like Lieberman, could appreciate the changes since 1960, the remarkable transformation in the United States so thorough, so complete that it became ubiquitous, nearly taken for granted. “You can see how far America has come, how much America has changed for the better,” he said at the Kennedy library in May 2001 at a symposium touching on the family’s legacy. “I faced no bigotry, and had to explain nothing more than the perfectly understandable questions about what I could or do not do on the Sabbath, with the dispatch of my public responsibilities.”
IT SHOULD NOT be said that more cannot be done, as Bobby Kennedy often insisted and as this generation of Kennedys repeatedly point out. Four decades after John Kennedy’s election, America has yet to elect another president from a minority group, and the White House is still a bastion of white Protestant men. Perhaps the grossest omission involves women, whose numbers would make it a misnomer to call them a minority except for their continued secondary treatment i
n American society. Although a host of nations—Ireland, Israel and Great Britain among them—have have selected female national leaders, no woman has occupied the Oval Office, nor does the possibility appear on the horizon. Within the Kennedy family, women have played a significant, arguably preeminent role in public life during the past decade, far from their supportive but subservient role in the past. Jean Kennedy Smith helped bring a semblance of peace to Northern Ireland, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend sought the governorship in Maryland in 2002. Maria Shriver became a distinguished national news anchor, and Caroline Kennedy continued writing books, running the family’s “Profile in Courage Awards” and, in the fall of 2002, accepted a nonpaying role as chief fundraiser for the New York City school system.
Like many Irish Catholic women who once felt constrained by the demands of their culture or church, these women emerged with a public-minded independence in American society that Rose Kennedy could only have imagined. During this decade, the Kennedy women have acted as chieftains, leaders of the clan, like the emerald kings of old, willing to step forward even when the men in their family stumbled or failed. They were mindful of their heritage, which informed so much of their work, yet they were not afraid to differ with male authority figures. “I figure they were wrong about Galileo, and it took them a couple of centuries to figure that out—and they’ll figure this out, too,” said Townsend of the current difficulties in the American Catholic Church.“It is an institution . . . and they have done a lot of good. But that doesn’t mean they are going to change immediately. You can still love the Mother Church with an understanding that it may take a little longer to learn modern science—and using Galileo is a good example.”