by Thomas Maier
Although he was drawn to things Irish,Ted didn’t demonstrate a public interest in the political affairs of his family’s ancestral homeland until 1971, the year he spoke out in the U.S. Senate against the actions of British troops in Northern Ireland. “The Troubles,” as the crisis in Northern Ireland became known, bothered Kennedy deeply. Catholics in the six partitioned counties of Northern Ireland began to object in the late 1960s against the prejudice and discriminatory practices of the dominant Protestant-controlled government. Their peaceful civil rights rallies gave way to a steadily growing anger that revived the old Irish Republican Army (IRA) with a new generation of young militants committed to violence against a recalcitrant government. In response, the British sent in more than thirteen thousand troops to occupy these six counties. Violence against protesting Catholics erupted in Ulster, leaving scores of innocent people dead in the streets.
As with most historic injustices in Eire, the international community was slow to respond. By fall 1971, John Lynch, prime minister of the Republic of Ireland, threatened to ask the United Nations to intervene after the British blew up roads leading into Ulster in an effort to stop IRA gunrunning. But the most stinging criticism that year came from Ted Kennedy, who introduced a U.S. Senate resolution calling for the ouster of British troops from Northern Ireland. Reviving De Valera’s old demand, Senator Kennedy insisted on new talks toward unifying all of Ireland into one nation again. The measure was submitted jointly with Democrat Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, an old Kennedy ally, but it was Ted’s words that particularly upset the English.
“Ulster is becoming Britain’s Vietnam,” Kennedy proclaimed, a particularly galling statement for Whitehall, England’s foreign ministry, given the international unpopularity of the U.S. war at the time. “The conscience of America cannot keep silent when men and women of Ireland are dying. Britain has lost its way, and the innocent people of Northern Ireland are the ones who now must suffer.” He recalled President Kennedy’s description of America as a nation of immigrants and how many were wild geese forced from Ireland,“where millions have been driven from their homes, forced to leave the land they love, obliged to see a new life in nations where the yoke of repression could not reach.” His words sounded like something Honey Fitz said decades earlier, a pungent renunciation of British cruelties against the Irish by a proud Irish-American.
Kennedy’s analogy of the Irish troubles to Vietnam implied that both were unwanted imperialistic forays into essentially local civil wars—a lesson that his brothers never fully grasped in their handling of Vietnam. “Britain has seen it all before, for the tragedy of Ulster is yet another chapter in the unfolding larger tragedy of the empire,” he said.“Indeed, it is fair to say that Britain stands toward peace in Northern Ireland today where America stood in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s.” He pointed out that the people of Ireland voted 81 percent in favor of a united independent republic in 1918 and had been denied ever since by the British.“If only the cruel and constant irritation of the British military presence is withdrawn, Ireland can be whole again,” Kennedy asserted.“To those who say that the inevitable result of a troop withdrawal will be a blood bath in Northern Ireland, I reply that the blood is upon us now, and that the bath is growing more bloody every week.”
Ted’s words were a distinct departure from his family’s previous public positions. His ambassador father, eager to be accepted in a world of Yankees, generally avoided the Irish question whenever possible. During his 1963 visit, President Kennedy cannily dodged the issue of Ireland’s partition and De Valera’s insistence on an end to it. Even if he privately agreed, Jack Kennedy intended to do nothing right way. But in the America of the 1970s, humbled by its Vietnam and Watergate experiences, Ted Kennedy had absorbed the lessons of unbridled imperialism. He felt free enough to look backward, to comment on Ireland and his Irish heritage, without incurring bigotry at home. He first commented on the Northern Ireland troubles in 1969 when he sent an encouraging telegram to John Hume, leader of the protesting Catholics. “Today, the Irish struggle again, but not alone,” Kennedy cabled.“Your cause is a just cause. The reforms you seek are basic to all democracies worthy of the name. My hopes and prayers go with you.” Two years later, Kennedy’s Senate proposal was downright radical. He insisted that British troops leave Northern Ireland and that local law enforcement be returned to civilian control. He asked that all IRA and Catholic protestors—“ imprisoned under that brutal and arbitrary” system—be released by the British from their jails. He called for the dissolution of Northern Ireland’s parliament as “one of the overriding symbols of oppression of the Ulster minority,” and insisted that many promised reforms in housing, employment and voting rights be put into place. A united Ireland of Catholics and Protestants could learn to live together peacefully, he suggested, just as the Protestants who formed 10 percent of the Irish Republic to the south had resided for years without incident. Without these changes, Kennedy warned, only more bloodshed would result.“No one doubts that Ireland stands today on the brink of a massive civil war,” he concluded. “The specter we face is nothing less than the senseless destruction of Ireland herself. No American who loves Ireland or who remembers her proud and noble history can stand silent in the face of the tragedy and horror now unfolding in Ulster.”
Politicians in London, threatened by IRA terrorism, reacted with outrage. They seemed mystified that Kennedy, an heir to America’s Camelot legend, could speak like an heir to De Valera, and call for a reunited Ireland. A Conservative member of Parliament introduced his own motion criticizing the Massachusetts senator “for expressing moral judgments on any-thing”— a none-too-subtle reference to Chappaquiddick as a way of defusing Kennedy’s remarks. “Looks like Kennedy’s driven in at the deep end again,” sniffed a sarcastic cartoon in London’s Evening Standard. In Northern Ireland, Prime Minister Brian Faulker’s comments were less personal but more direct. He said Kennedy “has shown himself willing to swallow hook, line and sinker the hoary old propaganda that IRA atrocities are carried out as part of a freedom fight on behalf of the Northern Irish people.”
Ironically, this most recent Irish struggle could be traced to America. As they watched the 1960s civil rights movement, many Catholics in Northern Ireland identified with the plight of Negroes in the American South. They were inspired by the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedy brothers. John Hume and other leaders of the Catholic cause in Northern Ireland later acknowledged their debt. “The people of Ireland took great pride in President Kennedy, and, having listened carefully to what he had to say, I found his words to be of supreme relevance to our own problems in Northern Ireland,” Hume wrote in his memoir. “I am certain that it was no accident that the civil rights movement began here in the sixties, directly inspired, I believe by the American movement.” At peaceful rallies against government discrimination in Northern Ireland, Catholics sang the old spiritual “We Shall Overcome” before being broken up by troops. A generation of young people became radicalized by the IRA when the British began a policy of internment without trial and alleged torture of Irish Catholic prisoners. “The random midnight roundup of suspects . . . the knock on the door, the violent entry, the arrest in the dark of night—rank as yet another flagrant example of the repression of the Ulster minority,”Kennedy complained in his Senate resolution. In January 1972, Kennedy was incensed over the massacre of fourteen innocent Catholic civil rights marchers in Derry (the name for Londonderry often used by Catholics)—what became known as “Bloody Sunday”—and he compared the slaughter with another Vietnam analogy. He called it “Britain’s My Lai.”
Despite the bitter British response, Kennedy kept up his criticism, though his comments became more nuanced. He learned that despite De Valera’s almost messianic desire for a united Ireland, many Irish in the republic were now content to keep things as they were, especially since partition kept out “the troubles” of the North. The Irish in Boston might still call for a united Irela
nd, but the cooler heads in Dublin weren’t so sure. Increasingly, Kennedy asked Hume, a former teacher and founder of the opposition Social Democratic and Labour Party, for his insights into the problems of Northern Ireland. It turned into a close friendship that would last for the next three decades.
Regardless of his Irish cousins’ Republican sympathies in the past, Kennedy purposefully kept his distance from the modern-day IRA, especially as their terror bombs murdered innocent civilians in Great Britain. The Kennedys were shocked when Caroline Kennedy, the only daughter of the late president, nearly got killed by an IRA bomb in October 1975.The blast was intended for Conservative Parliament member Hugh Fraser, an old British friend of the Kennedys who had spoken against terrorism. Seventeen-year-old Caroline was staying as a guest at Fraser’s home when the attack occurred. It took the life of a local doctor—an innocent stranger walking by when the bomb went off too early. Caroline was moments away from getting into the sabotaged red Jaguar, to be driven by Fraser that morning to Sotheby’s, where Caroline was taking an art course. The bomb planted beneath the car’s front wheel ripped through the quiet, tree-lined street, shattering windows and leaving Caroline “very shaken.” Jackie convinced Scotland Yard to assign an undercover officer to her daughter. IRA opponents pointed to the incident as an example of the terrorism receiving financial and moral support from the United States. “Irish Americans who don’t want to be part of this shabby act should resist whatever temptation there is to contribute to Irish organizations that may be fronts for the terrorists,” the Chicago Tribune warned after Caroline Kennedy was nearly killed. In America, little tolerance existed for terrorists who called themselves freedom fighters.
On St. Patrick’s Day in 1977,Ted Kennedy and three other well-known Irish-Americans—Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, New York Governor Hugh Carey and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York— renounced the money and armaments sent to the IRA by private American organizations such as the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), which had a storefront in the Bronx. The pull of ethnic ties for these Irish- Americans remained as strong as the days of the Fenians. One estimate in July 1972 put the number of NORAID chapters at more than a hundred, with eighty thousand members,many of them third- and fourth-generation Irish-Americans who seemed to yearn for an ethnic identity in an increasingly diverse United States. Though many who sent cash to NORAID were conservative in their politics at home, they voiced approval for the IRA in Northern Ireland, whose official wing endorsed Marxism. The “Four Horsemen,” as Kennedy called his colleagues (a humorous reference to the legendary Notre Dame football linemen with the same nickname), underlined that prominent Irish-Americans would not stand for terrorism. Hume, an advocate of peaceful methods, advised Kennedy in putting together their statement. When President Carter issued a similar statement in 1977, along with an offer of American foreign aid for job development in Northern Ireland, the British were incensed, but Kennedy was overjoyed. “No other President in history has done as well by Ireland,” he penned in a note to Carter. Unlike the secret societies of his grandfather’s era,Kennedy’s group, as Newsweek magazine later noted,“helped make support for the IRA less fashionable—and have forced Irish-Americans to consider the bloody uses of their guns and money.”
Critics of Kennedy’s outspokenness on Northern Ireland suggest that he merely pandered to his Boston Irish constituents back home at a time when they were upset about school busing, abortion and his other liberal views that gave them pause. Others say Kennedy wanted to maintain his own national image during a time when his presidential chances seemed in eclipse. (After much speculation in 1972 and 1976, Kennedy declined to run both times for the Democratic nomination.) Yet consistently, Kennedy kept in touch with Hume and other Irish leaders. He held frequent meetings on the status of peace in Northern Ireland.“Were I neither Catholic nor of Irish heritage,” he answered back,“I would feel compelled as a member of the Senate to protest against the killing and the violence in Northern Ireland.”Awareness of his Irish background became part of Ted Kennedy’s way of relating to people in other foreign lands who suffered oppression. “You do not have to be Irish to appreciate the Polish,” he said during a 1980s visit to Communist-ruled Poland where he met with Solidarity’s Lech Walesa,“but it helps, because our two proud people share . . . a role as victims in world history.”
ONCE, THE PRESIDENCY had seemed inevitable. After the assassinations of his two brothers, however, Cardinal Cushing advised that “the smart thing for Ted Kennedy to do is to get out of politics and take care of the kids.”A sense of impending doom—a repeat of Dallas and memories of the bloody floor in the Ambassador Hotel—stalked his potential candidacy.“We all know he might be assassinated, but it’s never discussed,” Rose Kennedy told the Ladies Home Journal in 1972.
By the late 1970s,Ted’s family obligations seemed to preclude any challenge against the incumbent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter. Journalists noted Kennedy’s established reputation as one of the Senate’s most effective leaders, and that the Oval Office didn’t seem as appealing to him as it had to his brothers. As the head of an extended clan,Ted’s many nieces and nephews, particularly Bobby’s children, looked up and depended on him as a steadying force in the turbulence of their young lives. His own son, Teddy Jr., at age twelve, suffered a leg amputation for a cancer that eventually went into remission. The senator’s marital problems were compounded by his own rumored affairs and bouts of drinking. He separated from his wife Joan, who moved to Boston and sought treatment for her alcoholism and depression. With the 1980 presidential campaign approaching, even his mother agreed he shouldn’t run. “The temptation to be the one who kills the third Kennedy brother is just too great,”Rose said.“It’s ironic, the polls indicate that he could be President . . . but then there is that. ”
Assassination became an acknowledged risk factor calculated into his decisionmaking with almost the same matter-of-factness that other politicians worried about endorsements or campaign donations. Ted Kennedy didn’t have his brothers or father to rely on should he make a run for the White House. None of his aides was willing to render judgment on the potential life-and-death gamble, lending a certain solitude to his decision about whether to run. “Because of, uh, what, uh, happened to my brothers,” Ted explained, “nobody close to you will advise you.”
His political instincts told him the time was right. Carter’s abysmal ratings in the national polls, exacerbated by the taking of American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Iran, prompted Kennedy to challenge the incumbent president, whom he’d grown to dislike immensely. Pre-primary surveys underscored Kennedy’s ability to beat Carter and potentially any Republican in the fall. Regardless of the risks,Ted was willing to answer the public’s call, to rescue the nation from its White House occupant, a man of genial ineptitude in a cardigan sweater. As journalist Richard Reeves wrote in Esquire: “Americans aren’t quite ready to roll over and play dead yet, and Kennedy . . . seems at the moment to be the only politician capable of tapping America’s most traditional trait, optimism.”
Kennedy’s campaign differed markedly from his methodical nature in the Senate. It possessed little of the machine-like quality of Jack’s 1960 campaign. Ted’s presidential effort had a slapdash feel to it, rather like Bobby’s sudden jump into the 1968 race. His announcement speech in Boston failed to inspire, and his television interview with Roger Mudd of CBS News proved that he’d given little thought to his reasons for pursuing the presidency. “Nostalgia appeared to be his most important campaign issue,” concluded political writer Joe Klein, who quoted a White House aide who once worked with Kennedy as saying, “‘I feel sorry for Ted. He just hasn’t figured out why he’s running for president, other than the fact that he’s a Kennedy and that’s what Kennedys are supposed to do.’”Ted’s organizers seemed to assume that once they sounded the clarion call, the vaunted throngs of Kennedy supporters—particularly the white ethnic Catholics who provided the swing vote in several key
states—would rally to his cause. Some friends, among them Tip O’Neill, advised him not to run because they were trying to avoid internecine warfare among the Democrats. O’Neill even brought up the “moral issue,” his polite euphemism for Chappaquiddick. But neither Ted nor his aides could see how much this last of the Kennedy brothers had alienated his family’s bedrock of support.
For many Irish-Americans,Ted no longer represented the 1960s idealism of his brothers, but rather the aimless, indulgent libertinism of the 1970s; a Kennedy no longer pushing his church in a progressive direction but repeatedly at odds with its clergy and teachings. Ted repelled many culturally conservative Catholics with his public persona as a playboy and his liberal positions on public policy. Though he had inherited the luster of Camelot, Kennedy also reaped the consequences of all the revisionist exposés of his brothers’ actions. In the Senate,Ted masterfully helped enact many pieces of important legislation close to the heart of working-class America—improving health care, education, minimum wages—as well as expanding civil rights for women, the disabled and other minorities. Yet as a campaigner, his reputation remained muddled and his rhetoric appeared off-putting to traditional Catholic voters. Though the Soviet empire was still intact, he rarely spoke of communism’s threat with the same urgency that Jack once expressed. Whereas an unorthodox Bobby had wanted to expand the Democratic tent, managing to condemn the culture of welfare while calling for compassion,Ted seemed content to stand on his reputation as an orthodox liberal.
