The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  “You don’t suggest that anyone who opposes the [existing 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration] act or wants to change it is a Communist, do you?” Kennedy pressed.

  Mrs. Sullivan seemed momentarily flustered. “No, indeed,” she replied. Then in the code words of the DAR, a long-time opponent of immigrants, she went on to explain her support for the existing system which, she said, would preserve the nation’s “cultural heritage, its free institutions and its historic population mixture.”

  During the hearings, Senator Sam Ervin, the avuncular, white-haired Democrat from North Carolina, wanted to clamp down on the flow of immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American nations. With great alarm, Ervin predicted the new law could bring a flood of new Hispanics into the United States.“He [Ervin] does not make clear just why this would be so terrible, contenting himself with arguing that many potential immigrants from Great Britain (‘our great ally’) would be cut off in favor of Latin Americans,” Commonweal complained. Others were more direct in their interpretation of the Southern Democrats’ motives. “Nativism is far from dead in the United States,” warned America, the Jesuit magazine, “and the militant bands of Anglo-Saxon breast-beaters have already begun—and will no doubt continue—to predict the dire consequences of disturbing the long entrenched nativist triangular base of anti-Catholic, anti-radical, and anti-foreign sentiment.”At the Senate hearings, Ervin pounced on Attorney General Nicholas De B. Katzenbach when he testified for the bill. The Johnson administration argued the new law would hold the number of new entrants from the Western Hemisphere to 120,000 annually and give priority to skilled and educated émigrés overall.

  “Do you think, Senator, that a maid from Ireland really will contribute more to the United States than a trained doctor from an Asian country?” Katzenbach asked rhetorically during a heated exchange.

  The senator, who preferred that the world know him as a simple country lawyer rather than a studied segregationist, looked over at his colleague Ted Kennedy, who was presiding over the hearing. Ervin seemed to remember enough of the Kennedy family history, even if he couldn’t recall Bridget Kennedy by name.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Ervin replied wryly, to knowing laughs.

  Despite these minor contretemps in the Senate, only a handful of politicians and commentators opposed the 1965 Immigration Reform Act. Ted Kennedy assured his Senate colleagues that “our cities won’t be flooded with a million immigrants annually.” He said the new law wouldn’t change “the ethnic mix” of the country, and wouldn’t displace Americans from their jobs.

  On the Senate floor before the vote, Robert Kennedy echoed the words of historian Oscar Handlin, who proclaimed in an article reprinted in Reader’s Digest that the new immigration law “will have tremendous symbolic significance, and it will remedy wrongs of 40 years standing.” The House passed the new immigration law by a lopsided margin, and the Senate voted 76 to 18 in favor. “After 40 years, we have returned to first principles,” Teddy declared in victory. “Immigration, more than anything else, has supplied America with the human strength that is the core of its greatness.”

  The press dutifully covered the 1965 Immigration Act without any hint of its impact on America in the decades to come, nor did the early Kennedy histories, including those written by Sorensen and Schlesinger, give it much weight. But in her own memoir, Rose Kennedy emphasized the importance of the immigration issue to her family.“Jack had proposed abolishing the discriminatory parts of our immigration laws,” she said.“It was Ted who guided the bill through the Senate.”

  On a sunny October day, beneath the Statue of Liberty, President Johnson signed into law the new bill eliminating the national origins sys tem.“We can now believe it will never shadow the gate to the American nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege,” Johnson declared. Both Ted and Bobby stayed in the background even though they had been prime movers of this legislation. In his speech, Johnson made no mention of them, though the day was a triumph for the Kennedys.

  AT THE FUNERAL for Cardinal Spellman in December 1967, Bobby Kennedy fidgeted impatiently in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a majestic building on Fifth Avenue in the heart of Manhattan. In many ways, the cathedral stood as a defiant, unofficial monument to the rise of Irish Catholics in America. Nearly all Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals in New York City’s formative years were of Irish descent, including Spellman himself.

  The cardinal’s passing held personal and public significance for Kennedy. Fifteen years earlier, Spellman had offered a private consecration before Bobby and Ethel’s marriage, a courtesy as a family friend and favor to Joseph Kennedy. At that time, Bobby shared not only the same religion with Spellman but similar views about international communism, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, and Bobby’s future boss, Senator Joseph McCarthy. In his waning days, Spellman resisted—or reluctantly acceded—to nearly every reform brought about by Vatican II. His politics turned increasingly conservative and he even socialized with Bobby’s old nemesis, Roy Cohn. The cardinal referred to the escalating conflict in Vietnam as “Christ’s war”—a mortifying allusion to the bad old days of the Crusades. Long ago, Bobby Kennedy had distanced himself from the cardinal, and not just because Spellman had committed the unforgivable sin of favoring Nixon in the 1960 presidential campaign.

  American Catholicism was headed in a far more progressive direction than the moral stasis of the septuagenarian cardinal would have permitted, and no one represented this shift in the 1960s more than the Kennedys. Their idealism and high-minded rhetoric exuded the brimming confidence of American Catholics, as church attendance soared and seminaries and religious vocations thrived. Shortly after President Kennedy’s death, the Second Vatican Council approved its “Declaration on Religious Liberty”— largely shaped by Jesuit John Courtney Murray and the experience of the 1960 presidential election—which gave Catholic politicians around the world the freedom to voice their political decisions without interference from the church. In the same vein, twenty-six Catholic university educators met in 1967 to formulate a “declaration of independence” for their institutions from the American church hierarchy—a determined answer to the Blanshard-like criticism of the 1950s that the church, encumbered by religious orthodoxy, fostered anti-intellectualism and a lack of inquiry. Though many still looked to Spellman and the hierarchy as the only voice of the church, some of the era’s most significant actions were being taken by socially active priests and nuns, such as the Berrigan brothers, the antiwar activists far more liberal than Kennedy himself.

  Kennedy was now a different kind of Catholic, no longer the authoritarian-minded former altar boy. At this stage, he had enough confidence in his faith (or possessed enough sheer guts or audacity) to lecture the Pope about why the American church should do more for Latin and Asian immigrants. During a stop in Rome in February 1967,Kennedy told Paul VI that the Vatican must become “the foremost champion for changing this kind of difficult, poverty-stricken life.” Bobby’s experiences in California with Chavez and immigrant workers had made him realize how alienated the official church could be from its flock. Kennedy said that the hierarchy in Los Angeles was “a reactionary force and in New York it was not particularly helpful”—an indirect swipe at Spellman. Although the Pope’s reaction was less than inspiring, their conversation underscored the remarkable transformation between the Vatican and its American laity. Unlike his father, Bobby didn’t curry favor with cardinals or whisper in the ear of Galeazzi to get his point across with the Holy See. Though reverential and courteous,Kennedy spoke to the Pope like an equal, something Joe Kennedy would never have dreamed of doing. For Bobby, Spellman’s funeral marked the end of an era. At the funeral Mass, he dreaded sitting in a pew near President Johnson. Instead, he thumbed through a copy of the Old Testament. “All the way up to Absalom, Absalom,” he delighted in telling a friend, referring to the story of King David and his son, Absalom, in the second book of Samuel.“Test me, and I’ll prove it.”

  BOBB
Y’S APOSTASY from Lyndon Johnson was largely of his own making. Although he was never a key architect of his brother’s Vietnam policy, he remained a staunch anti-Communist who supported the official U.S. position well into the early portion of Johnson’s presidency. As his doubts multiplied, Kennedy kept dutifully silent, loyal to men such as McNamara and Bundy, aides to his brother who were still serving Johnson, even if he was ambivalent about that. (“I thought that they felt the king was dead, long live the king,” Bobby lamented.) Well into 1967, long after other liberals came out publicly against the war, Bobby finally spoke his mind.“I can testify that if fault is to be found or responsibility assessed, there is enough to go around for all, including myself,” he admitted to his Senate colleagues. His delays cost him considerably. Some critics chalked up his change of heart to calculated ambition, a heartless reading of public opinion polls rather than a profile in moral courage. While he fiddled, the war in Vietnam raged; 350,000 Americans were committed there, 10,000 were already dead and more than 60,000 had been wounded. The thousands of civilians killed, particularly the murdered and maimed children, haunted him.

  For the first time in his public life, Bobby Kennedy appeared weak. In trying to find some middle ground, trying to straddle the narrow gap between the antiwar protestors and the more conservative ethnic voters in the Democratic Party who supported Johnson’s effort, Bobby lost his greatest political strength—the millions of Americans who admired the Kennedys and yearned for a restoration of the Camelot era. In his own gut, he knew that many Catholics, with a long history of showing their patriotism in times of war, still backed the administration’s position. At Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York, he talked about the war and found, in an informal survey, that students at this all-girls school favored more bombing of North Vietnam, not less. Kennedy chastised them with the zeal of a recent convert. “Do you understand what that means, when you ask for more bombing?” he cajoled.“Don’t you understand that what we are doing to the Vietnamese is not very different than what Hitler did to the Jews?”

  He no longer viewed Vietnam as a moral battle against the atheistic forces of international communism, the Red guerillas intent on disassembling the regime run by Catholics, but rather as a regional civil war where the presence of a large imperial power was deeply resented. Drawing upon biblical imagery, he appealed to Senate colleagues to rethink their Vietnam commitment:

  Few of us are directly involved while the rest of us continue our lives and pursue our ambitions undisturbed by the sounds and fears of battle. To the Vietnamese, however, it must often seem the fulfillment of the prophecy of Saint John the Divine: “And I looked and beheld a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and hell followed him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death.” All we say and all we do must be informed by our awareness that this horror is partly our responsibility; not just a nation’s responsibility, but yours and mine. It is we who live in abundance and send our young men out to die. It is our chemicals that scorch the children and our bombs that level the villages. We are all participants.

  Invoking this apocalyptic vision, Kennedy portrayed an America so absorbed in its materialism, so caught up in its own political hubris, that the consequences of its actions were ignored, its collective conscience inured to the suffering it caused. His speech addressed diplomacy and public opinion, but there was no doubt that its impetus, its driving force,was his own conscience. As he asked in that same Senate speech, “Are we like the God of the Old Testament that we can decide in Washington, D.C., what cities, what towns, what hamlets in Vietnam are going to be destroyed?”

  Bobby Kennedy remained a paradox. Unlike most liberal politicians, Kennedy didn’t placate the young. He grew his hair longer, shaggier, like the 1960s generation, yet scolded students he caught smoking and thought ill of those who engaged in sex outside the bonds of marriage. Although he became one of the most forceful advocates for peace, Kennedy’s critics didn’t think of him as part of the New Left found in intellectual circles and on college campuses. His own Catholic sense of obligation, his own conservative, almost prudish ethos, looked askance at the hippie generation of free love, acid trips and dropping out of the system. Was this what his brother’s New Frontier and its call to youthful idealism had come to? Bobby didn’t consider himself a “dove” demanding an immediate withdrawal, but instead favored a negotiated settlement. He particularly objected to the selective service system as a way of evading military duty. Despite his increasing doubts about Vietnam, he still lectured college audiences about the inherent unfairness of the draft, a system that sent poor minorities to war but allowed deferments for university students. In his eyes, those who fled to Canada to avoid the war were cowards, but those who paid the price and went to jail as conscientious objectors somehow earned his begrudging respect. He supported his brother Ted’s proposal in 1965 to replace the draft system with a no-exemption lottery. “It’s the poor who carry the major burden of the struggle in Vietnam,”Kennedy lectured to an audience at the Indiana University Medical Center in a talk interrupted by boos and catcalls. “You sit here as white medical students, while black people carry the burden of the fighting in Vietnam.”

  When not throwing out invectives about the war, he looked inward, almost in disgust at his own equivocation about Johnson. His rancorous private confrontations with the president made it easier to disagree with Vietnam policy, but he still found it quite difficult not to support his brother’s successor for reelection. Even if Johnson’s administration was engulfed in Vietnam, his domestic agenda accomplished many of the New Frontier’s goals and provided a far better direction than where either Nixon or Goldwater would lead the nation. For months, Kennedy seemed unable to find a resolution, his own answer for the country’s troubles, which, he later said, “flow from the fact that for almost the first time the national leadership is calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit.” In his private notebook, Kennedy wrote down a quotation from Camus that seemed to address his own dilemma:“We are faced with evil. I feel rather like Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said, ‘I tried to find the source of evil and I got nowhere.’ But it is also true that I and a few others know what must be done.”

  Kennedy equivocated and waited so long that another Democrat, Senator Eugene McCarthy, launched his own bold challenge to Johnson in 1968. McCarthy’s strong second-place showing in the early New Hampshire primary rallied the antiwar Democrats to his banner. The professorial Minnesotan emerged as a giant killer, the rightful claimant as the peace candidate. Some old-time Kennedy aides such as Richard Goodwin, thinking Bobby wouldn’t run, committed themselves to McCarthy’s campaign. Goodwin found McCarthy, who had once thought of becoming a priest, to be different from any Irish politician he had met in Boston.“He was a reverential Catholic but not in the way most Irish are Catholic,” Goodwin wrote.“He responded to priestly authority not in dread of eternal damnation, but in the more intellectual, ideological—not less fierce in belief—manner of the educated European. . . . Committed to the moral ambiguities of politics, something in him longed for the purifying possibilities of religious life, which, later, he would seek in its only secular counterpart— the austere discipline of poetry.” When issuing words of praise, Goodwin recalled, McCarthy quoted St. Augustine to him.

  Kennedy disliked McCarthy’s highbrow loquaciousness and his attitude of moral and intellectual superiority. His antipathy dated back to 1960, when McCarthy supported Lyndon Johnson at the convention after Minnesota’s favorite son, Humphrey, lost in the primaries.“Gene McCarthy felt he should have been the first Catholic President just because he knew more St. Thomas Aquinas than my brother,” Bobby ridiculed. Despite their similar ethnic heritage and political outlooks, neither man could abide the other. As a politician,Kennedy’s approach was more visceral, more from the gut, than McCarthy’s cerebral, somewhat aloof manner. Speechwriter Michael Novak, obse
rving the differences between the two men, said that “it’s a mixture of lower-class-Catholicism-become-wealthy against middle-class Midwestern Catholicism, which is rather comfortable and easy going. They don’t understand one another too much.” Jack had begrudgingly admired McCarthy, even if they differed politically at times. His youngest brother,Ted Kennedy, once had McCarthy campaign for him in his 1962 Senate race. “He was all Irish, making all the Irish rounds in Boston,” McCarthy recalled of the jocular, thirty-year-old Teddy. Decades later in an interview, McCarthy expressed affection for President Kennedy and nothing but disdain for Robert Kennedy. “Bobby had an inferiority complex, but Jack never did,” McCarthy insisted.

  ON ST. PATRICK’S DAY in March 1968, Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency in the same Senate Caucus Room in which his brother had launched his 1960 bid. Bobby’s speech contained both the soaring rhetoric of the New Frontier and some seemingly necessary fabrications. He claimed his challenge “reflects no personal animosity or disrespect toward President Johnson,” and that his campaign against McCarthy would “not be in opposition to his, but in harmony.” (McCarthy’s response was incredulous: “An Irishman who announces the day before St. Patrick’s Day that he’s going to run against another Irishman shouldn’t say it’s going to be a peaceful relationship.”) There might be more than a little truth to this judgment on Robert Kennedy, who offered an insightful political self-assessment after the victorious 1968 Indiana primary. When asked why, given his controversial support for civil rights for Negroes, the more conservative, somewhat bigoted ethnic working class voted for him, Bobby could offer only a depreciating reply. “I think part of it is that Gene [McCarthy] comes across as Lace Curtain to those people,” he jested to Jack Newfield.“They can tell I’m pure Shanty Irish.”