by Larry Tye
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IN THE RICH white communities where Bobby grew up—Hyannis Port, Riverdale, Bronxville, and Palm Beach—race wasn’t a topic of dinner-table conversation. “What we did grow up with [was] the idea that there were a lot of people that were less fortunate…this was during the 1930s,” he said. But “as far as separating the Negroes for having a more difficult time than the white people, that was not a particular issue in our house.” True as that was, his siblings said Bobby was a bit less sheltered than he suggested. Jackie Bell, the son of the Kennedys’ white laundress in Hyannis Port and her black husband, lived three blocks away and was one of Bobby’s closest friends as a child. In law school, Bobby overcame opposition from the Virginia legal code and the University of Virginia student government to bring in as a speaker diplomat Ralph Bunche, the first black Nobel laureate. Racists tossed fiery missiles into their yard when Bobby and Ethel invited Bunche to sleep in their attic. “They were all over the lawn,” Ethel recalls. “We just thought, why would anybody get that exercised because of somebody’s skin color?”
All the Kennedy kids knew that being Irish and Catholic brought their own kinds of prejudice. It was less overt than in Patrick Kennedy’s day, when signs warned that “no Irish need apply” for jobs or housing, or in Joe’s time, when neither his money nor his influence could fully erase lingering prejudice. “I was born here. My children were born here. What the hell do I have to do to be called an American?” Joe bristled when Boston papers persisted in calling him an Irishman. Bobby bristled, too, when the Spee Club at Harvard blackballed an Irish American classmate and when Jack’s Catholicism looked as if it might keep him from the presidency.
Disabilities were not considered a civil rights issue in the mid-1900s, certainly not on a par with discrimination against Negroes or even Irish Catholics. But in the Kennedy home the afflictions of Rose Marie, the oldest daughter, gave her siblings their first up-close lesson in misfortune. What it was that afflicted Joe and Rose’s third child, known as Rosemary, remains unclear.*8 Her parents initially told her brothers and sisters that she was shy and, as Rose put it, “a little slow.” They hoped that, with encouragement and special schooling, she could live a normal life. For a while that seemed possible. At Cape Cod, she crewed a sailboat steered by Bobby and her younger sister Eunice. She traveled to Switzerland unchaperoned at age nineteen with Eunice, and she kept a diary that reflected the active life of a Kennedy. “Went to luncheon in the ballroom in the White House,” she wrote in 1937. “James Roosevelt took us in to see his father, President Roosevelt. He said, ‘It’s about time you came.’ ” But by the time she was twenty-one, Joe decided his Rosie, who had been at convent boarding schools since she was fifteen, was better off staying there over vacations, too. Within two years even that became problematic. She began experiencing what her mother called “tantrums, or rages, during which she broke things or hit out at people.” There were convulsions, too, which may have indicated epilepsy and which Rose said made clear “there were other factors at work besides retardation.” She would wander off from school, and her parents worried that something terrible could happen to such an attractive young woman with so limited an IQ.
Joe had been searching for medical remedies since Rosie was a child, trying everything from glandular injections to two years of one-on-one tutoring. In 1941 the “miracle cure” was a lobotomy, an experimental procedure in which doctors removed or destroyed part of the brain’s prefrontal lobe as a way of calming distraught patients, often at the price of their personalities. Rosemary was among the first patients with presumed retardation to be lobotomized, and the outcome was calamitous. Her mild mental defect now presented as severe. She lost much of her memory and speech, along with the use of her left arm and hand. “The operation eliminated the violence and the convulsive seizures,” Rose wrote in her memoir, “but it also had the effect of leaving Rosemary permanently incapacitated. She lost everything that had been gained during the years by her own gallant efforts and our loving efforts.” For most of the next sixty-three years, until her death in 2005, she lived in a ranch-style house that Joe had built on the grounds of the St. Coletta School in rural Wisconsin. A pair of nuns oversaw her round-the-clock care. The remote location kept her out of the reach of prying reporters, and those who asked were told that she “cares for and teaches ‘exceptional’ children.” Few knew she herself was exceptional and, with the family focused on Jack’s soaring fortunes, none knew about her failed lobotomy. “The solution of Rosemary’s problem has been a major factor in the ability of all the Kennedys to go about their life’s work,” Joe wrote to a St. Coletta nun in 1958.
Bobby and his younger siblings knew only marginally more than the public did about the fate of their big sister, gleaning what they could from their father’s overly upbeat updates. Only Joe visited her, and he stopped going once she got settled at St. Coletta. Everyone in the household had a different way of responding to what Rose called “the first of the tragedies that were to befall us.” Joe made mental retardation—and the Wisconsin convent caring for his daughter—the centerpiece of his philanthropy. Rose began going to see Rosemary again after Joe’s stroke in 1961, but she never told him. Eunice was the driving force behind the creation of the Special Olympics, and she took Rosemary in as a regular visitor at her home. Jean resumed contact, too, and founded Very Special Arts, an education program for youths with disabilities. While Bobby was less close to Rosemary than his sisters were, he took to heart as much as they did the lessons of her disability and the failed attempt to treat it. He never blamed his father but attacked with special vengeance programs that didn’t deliver promised care to the mentally ill and retarded. Having a sister who was the ultimate underdog helped him identify with people who faced bias and bullying.
Not all the lessons that Bobby grew up with were ones of tolerance. There has been an ongoing debate over the last seventy years as to whether or not Joe Kennedy was an anti-Semite. Critics point to his habit of slurring Jews as “sheenies” and “kikes”; defenders say (as if it’s a defense) that he was equally unenlightened in calling Italians “wops” and fellow Irish Americans “micks.” In 1938 the new German ambassador to London met with Kennedy, who was then the American ambassador, and reported back to Berlin that Joe had said, “It was not so much the fact that we wanted to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose. He himself understood our Jewish policy completely.” Kennedy insisted that account was distorted and pointed to his record of pushing Britain to open its colonies to Jews fleeing Hitler’s Germany, which had prompted the Arab National League of Boston to brand him a “Zionist Charlie McCarthy.” Joe said his dislike of Jews was not categorical but individual, but the truth was just the opposite: Although he had Jewish friends, and liked to boast that he was “the only Christian member” of a Jewish country club in Palm Beach, his letters and diaries made clear that he stigmatized Jews as vindictive, ambitious, and self-pitying.
Joe was always looking for someone to blame for his failed tenure as ambassador. His favorite culprits were President Roosevelt’s Jewish advisers, as he suggested in this diary entry from 1941: “The four men who followed me to Europe: Hopkins had a Jew wife and 2 Jew children. Harriman a Jew wife. Cohen a Jew. Fahey—lawyer—a Jew mother.”*9 In an unpublished interview in 1944 with a Boston journalist, Joe explained that “whenever I have been asked for a statement condemning anti-Semitism, I have answered: ‘What good would it do?’ If the Jews themselves would pay less attention to advertising their racial problem, and more attention to solving it, the whole thing would recede into its proper perspective. It’s entirely out of focus now, and that is chiefly their fault.” A year later, just after FDR died, Joe wrote in a long letter to his daughter Kathleen: “The Jews are crying that they’ve lost their greatest friend and benefactor. It’s again a clear indication of the serious mistake that the Jews had [made] in spite of their marvelous organizing capacit
y.” He sent someone—who it was is unclear—a copy of that letter with a note at the top reading, “Please destroy this after you’ve read it.”
The most disturbing evidence of anti-Semitism comes from an exchange of letters in 1934 between Joe and Joe Jr., who was just back from Hitler’s recently installed Third Reich. The younger Kennedy expressed regret at the Nazis’ scapegoating of Jews, but quickly added that “this dislike of the Jews, however was well founded. They were at the heads of all big business, in law etc. It is all to their credit for them to get so far, but their methods had been quite unscrupulous….It is extremely sad, that noted professors, scientists, artists etc. so should have to suffer, but as you can see, it would be practically impossible to throw out only a part of them.” The Nazis’ brutality, he added, “was a horrible thing, but in every revolution you have to expect some bloodshed.” He sounded just like his father, which was his intention. Joe responded that he “was very pleased and gratified at your observations of the German situation.”*10
There is no evidence that Bobby shared those feelings, but neither he nor Jack could escape the whispers that they, too, had been influenced by their father’s hostility toward Jews. At times Bobby’s disdain for the liberal establishment, and for The New York Times, seemed to grow out of his belief that both were dominated by Jews. Why, he wondered, were they so quick to denounce anti-Semitism and so untroubled by anti-Catholicism? (He loved the political philosopher Peter Viereck’s musing that “anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals,” and he joked that the Times’s ideal headline would be MORE NUNS LEAVE CHURCH.) But there also were signs that Bobby admired the Jews as a people. In college he went out on a limb to attack the Jew-bashing demagogue Father Leonard Feeney. In a series of stories from the Middle East that he wrote for The Boston Post in 1948, he gushed about the “immensely proud and determined” Jewish race and called the new State of Israel “a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation with the primary ingredients of dignity and self-respect.” With Jews as with blacks, Bobby was a work in progress. He started from a place of little interaction or understanding, but he came to identify with their collective suffering and to earn their trust.
That can’t be said for his feelings about homosexuals. His bias was evident to gays, whether or not he got along with them as individuals. A two-minute confrontation with Gore Vidal at the White House in 1961 would be recounted so often, with such embellishment, that it spawned a lawsuit for libel, a settlement in which the libeler admitted he had lied, and a christening by the acerbic novelist as “the intervention.” Vidal was kneeling next to Jackie Kennedy, whose stepfather had married his mother. “I started to stand. To steady myself, I put my hand on her shoulder,” Vidal recounted. “A hand pulled my hand off her shoulder. I looked up. There was Bobby….I said something like, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’…Bobby looked startled: ‘What’s wrong, buddy boy?’ ” Vidal, who believed all humans are bisexual, was convinced that his “same-sex sex” was off-putting to Bobby.
Truman Capote, another gay writer and public intellectual, had the same sense. “I always felt that [Bobby] was asking himself, ‘Well, what is this all about?’ ” Capote shared an apartment building in New York with Bobby and the two would have drinks together, or chat when they walked their dogs. But Capote was sure “there was something exotic about me that he couldn’t entirely accept.” In later years, when he was a senator, Bobby worked on a book with “a copy editor who was a drunken homosexual”—and he “absolutely could not deal with this,” recalled Peter Edelman, his aide and friend. “The Kennedys are male chauvinists and Robert Kennedy could not understand why anybody would want to be a homosexual, and it made him extremely uncomfortable.”
Bobby was ahead of the tolerance curve in so many areas that it was surprising how conservative he was, especially in his younger years, in other realms of propriety and morality as taught by his church and family. All the Kennedy men publicly shied away from anything perceived as womanly and proudly asserted their machismo on the athletic field and everywhere else. Trying to explain JFK’s dislike of Adlai Stevenson, Bobby said it was because he “acted like a girl, looked like a girl, complained like a girl, cried like a girl, moaned, groaned, whined like a girl.” Later, when LBJ was president, he told Bobby that FBI director Hoover had told him you could tell a homosexual by the way he walked. “What does that mean, that you’ll watch the cabinet carefully as they walk into the cabinet meeting?” Bobby asked. He added, “Well, one thing I can assure you of, Mr. President, it isn’t me.”*11
If the Kennedy boys were held to a clear standard when it came to gender roles, so were the girls. They benefited from Joe’s trust funds like their brothers, but they were subject to tighter restrictions that presumed they would be taken care of by their husbands. Joe encouraged his daughters to give back to society, as he had the boys, but he presumed their primary role would be minding their families, as Rose’s had been. “I think women should stay at home and raise children,” Bobby once half-joked to his colleague Nicholas Katzenbach when they were discussing a presidential statement on equal rights for women.
There were different assumptions, too, about extramarital relationships. Joe’s sons had free rein, while his daughters had to hew to a far more puritanical standard and to atone if they transgressed. When Bobby’s sister Jean reportedly was romantically involved with the lyricist Alan Jay Lerner,*12 a man Lerner was convinced was Bobby telephoned to warn him off. The threat—“we’ll fix your gondola”—scared Lerner, and he and Jean eventually broke it off, according to Lerner’s assistant. It was just the sort of sexual policing that might have benefited the country as well as the family if Bobby had done it with Jack.
And while civil rights wasn’t much discussed in Joe and Rose’s household when the children were young, the patriarch let slip his attitude in sideways comments like one in his diary referring to black Pullman porters as “nigger porters.” He also was averse to interracial marriages, including Sammy Davis, Jr.’s. That sensitivity was shared not just by many whites and blacks of the day, but by President Kennedy, who refused to be photographed with Davis and his white wife at a Lincoln’s birthday celebration at the White House in 1963. Bobby hinted at a similar intolerance after his meeting, three months later, with Lena Horne and other friends of James Baldwin who were married to whites. But he showed how much he had changed several years later, when Peter Edelman, who is white, said he planned to marry Marian Wright, who is black. Not only had Bobby encouraged the romance, but when Peter mentioned some flak he was getting, Bobby understood immediately and said to his young aide, “ ‘Let me just tell you, the first time somebody in my family married somebody who wasn’t Irish, it was just terrible. And then somebody married someone who wasn’t Catholic, and that was just terrible again.’ And [Bobby] said, ‘You know what? It all worked out.’ ”
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THE RIOTS IN Montgomery and Oxford had stirred a small voice within Bobby that would amplify over the second half of his tenure as attorney general. He offered a hint of that evolution in his first public speech after Ole Miss. Civil rights had always been one of too many domestic issues competing for his attention, but now he was beginning to see it in a different context. “James Meredith,” he told his audience that October 1962 evening in Milwaukee, “brought to a head and lent his name to another chapter in the mightiest internal struggle of our time.”
The next chapter in that struggle played out back in Alabama, at the state university’s main campus in Tuscaloosa. The new governor, George Wallace, had made two seminal vows on his long road to election. First, back in 1958, when he ran as a racial moderate and was beaten by the tougher-talking John Patterson, he promised, “I’ll never be out-niggered again.”*13 Second, he vowed in the heat of his successful 1962 campaign that he would block with his own body the door to any segregated schoolhouse that was ordered to enroll black students. Lest anyone still doubt his intent, he made hims
elf even clearer in his inaugural address. Noting that he was standing on the sacred ground where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederate States of America, Wallace paraphrased a secret KKK pledge: “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”
The way to fulfill all three promises, Wallace decided, was to go head-to-head with Bobby Kennedy over a federal judge’s order to admit two black students—Vivian Malone and James Hood—to the university’s summer session in 1963. Wallace’s neighbor Ross Barnett had done that in Mississippi and seen his poll numbers soar. But the Alabama governor underestimated Bobby’s capacity to learn from his mistakes in Oxford. Before the court in Alabama even issued its opinion, Bobby traveled there to demonstrate his interest and take the measure of his adversary. Greeting him at the state capitol were forty riot-trained state troopers—Confederate flags were painted on their helmets, while a real Navy Jack had been hoisted above the building—one of whom poked Bobby in the stomach with his stick, while another refused to shake his hand. The governor, the attorney general said, was using his lawmen to make a point: “that my life was in danger in coming to Alabama because people hated me so much.” Bobby took away a different message: that Wallace was “acting like a raving maniac” because he was “scared” by a judge’s threat to toss him in jail if he blocked the students’ enrollment. That impression was reinforced when Kennedy and Wallace met face-to-face in a session that lasted an hour and twenty minutes and, with the governor taping it, was aimed at trapping Bobby into saying something shocking and letting Wallace play to public opinion. Typical was this exchange:
