Bobby Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

• • •

  Following our country’s politics has been my passion since the early 1950s. I was a young boy when General Dwight D. Eisenhower—the World War II commander who had received the Nazi surrender in 1945—entered the White House as our thirty-fourth president.

  Then in 1960, after Ike had served his two terms, I was riveted by the back-and-forth electoral combat between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon. What decided that turbulent campaign wasn’t the posthumously confected image of “Camelot” but rather the Democrat’s stirring call to “get this country moving again.”

  Yet by 1967, with President Johnson in the Oval Office, the aura of the New Frontier was shrouded by the Vietnam body counts on the nightly news.

  By the fall of that year, 100,000 Americans—I was one of them—convinced that Lyndon Johnson’s continuing war policy had locked their country onto a disastrous path, gathered in the nation’s capital to march from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon. Five months later Robert Francis Kennedy stood in the Senate Caucus Room to declare his candidacy for president.

  My goal here is to come to grips with his story, who and what he was and what lay beneath the man we saw. Born twenty years before me, he was from a different East Coast city and an environment far more privileged than mine. Yet the familiarities of our Irish Catholic world rang ardently through our everyday lives. I’ve discovered that the Kennedy family and the Matthews family shared the same conversations, with the same enduring public friends and foes—and, with them, our common triumphs and resentments. As with the other Americans in the melting pot, we found ourselves in a country explained again and again in the language of such handed-down stories.

  Having grown up in Philadelphia, in 1963 I went to college at Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. There, fifty miles west of Boston, on a campus known for years as “wall-to-wall Irish,” I learned about the ingrained social attitudes of New England Catholics and their historic friction with the Yankee elite. It was, in fact, a Holy Cross fellow who, back in 1910, had delivered this famous toast at an alumni dinner:

  And this is good old Boston,

  The home of the bean and the cod,

  Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,

  And the Cabots talk only to God.

  Like so many Americans of my generation, I’ve kept up my fascination with the Kennedys. Try to think of the era without them and see if you can do it. It’s impossible, really. More than most countries, American politics has tended to the phenomenal, driven by the moment and the person. The national mood often seems to emanate from the White House. When Jack Kennedy was president in those upbeat years of the early 1960s, then again when Bobby ran for president, the special Kennedy atmosphere captured the day. There was a spring in the country’s step, an excitement that could also, to those threatened, mean trouble.

  Bobby was never to get his moment as the country’s leader. There was no Robert Kennedy era. What there was—and what remains vibrant in his legacy—was spirit. I disagree with those who argue that the younger brother’s true soul showed itself only after Jack. I’ve found good early evidence of that compassion which was later to reveal itself so vividly.

  Even when acting the role of his brother’s bare-knuckled enforcer, as Jack made his way from congressman to senator to president, he brought an intangible value to the partnership. Jack had the charm, Bobby the conscience.

  • • •

  The narrative running through these pages has been decades in the making. The portrait is that of the public figure I watched with a powerful interest. That said, the account comes from the list of witnesses I’ve come to trust. They include at the top his wife, Ethel, and oldest daughter, Kathleen, who answered my every question. I’ve relied, too, on the recorded accounts of his confidant Kenneth O’Donnell, which were made available to me by his daughter Helen.

  Not all had known Bobby Kennedy up close. Some were caught up by his message. Among them were the other volunteers with whom I served for two years in the Peace Corps through 1970, those fifty of us who’d left together in late 1968 for Swaziland. Fading quickly behind us as we flew off was an America carrying on in the shadow of Los Angeles and the rioting at a Democratic convention Bobby never got to enter.

  Spread out across the Southern African veld, we’d get together whenever we could and sometimes talk of life at home, especially politics. Looking back, I’ve decided, it was a good time to be away. The America we were missing for those couple of years was turning downcast and divided.

  When I returned to the States in early 1971, I began my career in politics working on Capitol Hill for a liberal Democratic senator from Utah. The top aide who recruited me was a young Mormon, Wayne Owens, who had been Bobby’s campaign director in the Rocky Mountain states. Wayne held a steadfast reverence for the fallen candidate that could only be termed remarkable. That Bobby’s background was different from his own didn’t matter; only his principles did. I remember, too, the Capitol engineer who one day reminisced to me about a behavior he’d noted daily. He’d realized one way the senator from New York differed from many other of his fellow liberal Democrats. While they would enter the building, walking past the Capitol Police avoiding eye contact, it was Bobby, he said, who made a point, always, of saying hello.

  You might call that a small detail, but it’s one that’s stuck with me.

  • • •

  I’ve spent the best part of five decades not just working and living in Washington but also, I believe, intently observing it. I’ve been fascinated, on occasion repelled, but rarely indifferent. If you ever were to ask me what America needs in its leaders, my answer will vary with the times. When I spot indecision at the top, I’ll say “conviction.” When I watch a leader muddling through, I want “purpose.” When I see hawkishness, I look for the peacemaker.

  What is it that’s missing today? Here’s my straightforward answer. We’ve gotten so used to treating our politics as zero-sum that we’ve lost the faith that joint action by the people is capable of bringing joint success. Why can’t there be a patriotism that joins us together instead of dividing us?

  It’s now the accepted wisdom, for example, that the interests of the discarded factory worker and the ignored inner-city youth cannot be met together, so why try? Don’t we need leaders eager to champion the future of both? The faces and salutes of those thousands of Americans, white and black, lining the route of Bobby’s funeral train make for moving testimony to the fact that this country once had a brave figure who they believed could.

  I lived through the times of both Kennedy brothers and carry within me still the memory of those moments when we knew we had lost them. It’s often said that we all remember where we were when we heard each was gone. But where are we now? And where are we heading?

  I’ve written two books about John F. Kennedy. My need to know more about Robert pushed me to write this one. He was there at his brother’s side, yet was always his own person, contributing and supporting but also taking charge and leading. No one who knew him was indifferent to him. No one who encountered him ever forgot him. In that, he was like his brother. His own path, however, led him elsewhere, into new places and new concerns that, most strikingly, became his heartfelt priority.

  It was, after all, Bobby Kennedy of the two, who’d recognized the historic urgency of making civil rights a national priority, who saw how vital it was to elevate the struggle to a main goal of his brother’s presidency. It was he who’d argued that ending segregation was a matter of American conscience. Over the following years, up until his own death, one can see clearly how—after that signal beginning, when serving as his brother’s vigilant attorney general—he progressed further and further into the role of activist champion of the country’s disinherited.

  Recognizing the stubborn, burning passion that lay within him, I find myself now wanting to look into his life and understand both the origins and the evolution of that deepening commitment to a greater justice.

&
nbsp; Bobby, 12, with younger brother Teddy.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ALTAR BOY

  The Child is father of the Man;

  And I could wish my days to be

  Bound each to each by natural piety.

  —WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  The immense wealth and security of the Kennedy family in twentieth-century America must be measured against the horrid poverty of their immediate ancestors. For those who lived, worked, and died on the subsistence farms of mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, life itself hung on the annual harvest of a single crop—the potato, which was the basic food for much of the country. A family had to survive an entire year on those pulled up the previous fall. If a new crop failed, as it did in what’s known as the Great Famine, the people starved.

  Over a period of years beginning in 1845, owing to a spreading blight, a million tenant farmers and their families, making up much of the country’s rural population, died of both hunger and disease. They were not Ireland’s only loss. More than a million others fled across the Atlantic, through what poet John Boyle O’Reilly would call “the bowl of tears.”

  The English government—at its head Queen Victoria, who’d assumed the throne eight years before at the untested age of eighteen—gave little sympathy, less help. In February 1847, it was announced in the House of Commons that fifteen thousand people a day were dying in Ireland. The young monarch “was so moved” by the ongoing tragedy, as a sarcastic Robert Kennedy would remark more than a century later, “that she offered five pounds to the society for Irish relief.” All official assistance issuing from London came, in fact, with a terrible condition: any family accepting it must forfeit its land.

  The occasion on which Bobby recalled that history was St. Patrick’s Day 1964, in the Hotel Casey’s ballroom in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The hundreds seated before Bobby, all wearing formal attire, were proud members of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick of Lackawanna County. It was a significant appearance, the first speech Bobby had agreed to give in the shocked, grieving months after the killing of his brother in Dallas. Many listening were soon weeping openly.

  What Bobby wanted was for the crowd, so close to him in heritage, to hear him explain his and his lost brother’s commitment to ending another injustice. He wanted to engage them on an emotional level, connecting their shared past to that of another disadvantaged people: the African Americans. He reminded them how the Irish once had poured into America, escaping the heartlessness of their historic British rulers only to be confronted by the New World’s dismissal of their basic humanity.

  In Boston, for example, there were NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs everywhere to greet those seeking jobs. “Our forefathers,” he pointed out, “were subject to every discrimination found wherever discrimination is known.” Now, with Congress engaged in landmark legislation aimed at ending segregation in its Southern strongholds, Bobby was raising the well-known specter of Irish servitude and English disregard to enlist support for it.

  It was not the Kennedys’ only experience with victimhood. Throughout his life, a very different sort of Irish legacy—one he would never speak of yet would invoke in ways stronger than words—had been carried across the Atlantic by his forebears. This, too, had long been haunting the third son of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. In much of Ireland, tradition had dictated that a farmer, facing retirement, would divide his land among his sons. In County Wexford, on Ireland’s southeast coast, where the economy was better off, such rural inheritance was handled differently. There, the father kept his farm intact, awarding it when the time came to the son born first. It was this rule of primogeniture, carried on by Joseph Kennedy—already two generations settled in America—in this country that would leave its invisible stain on the young Robert. He was the Irish son who would not get the land.

  Bobby’s great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy, a third son himself, had arrived in Boston’s North End in 1848. In this city the Kennedys stayed and prospered until 1927 when Patrick’s grandson Joseph P. Kennedy moved his young family to New York. Again, the reasons had to do with rejection, though now upon a rarefied level.

  Joe Kennedy was, by almost every measure, an American success story. A graduate of the prestigious Boston Latin School, he’d gone on to Harvard, class of 1912, where he majored in economics. At age twenty-five, having maneuvered his way to control of a bank, one of whose major shareholders was his father, it was his boast that he was the youngest bank president in the country. Socially, he advanced rapidly amid the Boston Irish elite, marrying the daughter of Boston’s mayor, a colorful pol known as John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. From there, Joe proceeded to new heights, reaching past Boston, wheeling and dealing his way in Wall Street, Hollywood, and beyond. Yet there was a Gatsby quality to him—his rise so meteoric—that his success always carried in equal measure awe and suspicion.

  What separated Joe Kennedy from the other Irish around him were the high ambitions deep inside him, ones that couldn’t be satisfied by the usual scoreboard. He saw his destiny as grander than a law degree allowing him to put “Esq.” after his name, with an income just enough to secure a cottage on the Cape. “The castle or the outhouse,” he declared, “nothing in between.” What drove him in those early climbing years was what he was prevented from achieving—namely, social acceptance by the gatekeepers of the old New England order.

  The doors shut to the Kennedy family had to do with their very name—such an obvious giveaway—and the background it proclaimed. Joe’s children—smart, lively, prosperous, attractive, well-schooled—were no different in their own eyes from their Protestant neighbors. They suffered from the basic handicap of their birth. Even if the rejections they faced were not those of employment opportunities slammed in the face of Irish immigrants seeking jobs, the reason was the same. The social gates closed to them were those through which the well-off if newly rich Kennedys believed they had a right to pass. It was not that they’d been given less in the new country; they wanted more.

  So it was, in 1927, that the Kennedy family left Boston to settle eventually in leafy, moneyed Bronxville, a short drive from Manhattan. The move south from Massachusetts was hardly of the sort to earn sympathy from onlookers. The travails of the lace-curtain Irish clearly lacked the fearful drama of the exodus across the ocean. But that didn’t stop the Kennedys from their refrain. Joe Kennedy and his children would, for the rest of their lives, continue to recount the saga of being forced from their hometown to seek social refuge elsewhere, even if sympathy from listeners was in short supply. As a friendly skeptic, a fellow Irish American, later would put it, Joseph Kennedy was the only person driven out of Boston “in his own railway car.”

  “Yes, but it was symbolic,” his son Robert would insist until the end of his life. “The business establishment, the clubs, the golf course—at least that was what I was told at a very young age. Both my parents felt very strongly about the discrimination.” For her part, Rose could rarely bring herself to such an admission. She’d claimed they’d made the move down to New York simply due to her husband’s business. But even she would ask in dismay why the “better people” of Boston had closed their doors to them.

  It was young Bobby who took the Kennedy self-banishment from Boston—lasting a dozen years, beginning when he was five—to heart. For him, it had the effect of creating a continuum, linking him to blood feelings stirred by stories of the Great Famine and the British indifference to his own family’s latter-day exile. It made him more Irish.

  The year following the Kennedy family’s arrival in Bronxville was a presidential election year, bringing with it a fresh episode of rejection to bind together America’s Irish Catholics in their apartness.

  The 1928 Republican nominee for the White House was Herbert Hoover, whose name is known to us because he won. His Democratic opponent was Al Smith, a figure often and unfairly lost to history. Born into an Irish Italian family living under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, Smith had been first a newsboy, then toiling long hour
s at the Fulton Street Fish Market. From there, rising steadily in accomplishments and status—he joined the Tammany Hall political machine, which enabled him to pass through a number of worthy positions, winding up as a four-time governor of New York. He was a city kid made good.

  Yet the “Al Smith legacy” is the relevant story here. It’s the one I grew up with, exactly as the Kennedy brothers and sisters had earlier. Nominated to head the Democratic ticket, Smith lost to Hoover in 1928, failing even to carry his home state of New York. Why was he beaten? Whatever the fuller, more complicated reasons, we Catholics all knew the answer: because he was one of us.

  Others might say differently—that 1928 was still a time of roaring prosperity—and that his Republican rival, Herbert Hoover, had made for himself a first-rate reputation as an economic manager, earning praise for his distribution of U.S. food aid to post–World War I Europe.

  Such an argument didn’t carry water with us, not enough to displace the often taught belief that anti-Catholic sentiment was widespread enough in pre–World War II America to doom Smith’s chances. In short, one reason for Smith’s defeat was handed down as if part of the catechism. My mother, born Mary Theresa Shields, of whose five sons I was the second oldest, knew exactly what she believed. As, I’m quite sure, did the pious Rose Kennedy, even if her husband had voted for Hoover.

  Being Irish Catholic has always meant a tribal as well as a religious loyalty. Back in Ireland, under British rule, it was “them” versus “us.” In America, where it meant to stand in strength against the Protestant majority, it required loyalty to the clan as well as to the faith. Whatever their social ambitions and desire for higher acceptance, the ingrained habits of the Kennedys, as well as their fealty to their shared traditions and rituals, put being Catholic and Irish at its center. Even Jack, the least churchy, would go in and light a candle for his older brother or kneel—a physically painful act for him—at the gravesite of a beloved lost sister or for one of his two lost children.