by Larry Tye
Thus was born the Bedford-Stuyvesant experiment, which aimed to recast America’s biggest ghetto into its most ambitious proving ground for slum busting. If change could happen in this 653-block neighborhood—known in Brooklyn as Bed-Stuy and invisible to the world beyond—it might work anywhere, or so the senator had reason to believe. Bed-Stuy had rioted alongside Harlem in the overheated summer of 1964, but it lacked that neighborhood’s finances, clout, and renowned cultural ambassadors like Langston Hughes and Billie Holliday. Eighty-four percent of Bed-Stuy’s 450,000 residents were black, another 12 percent were Puerto Rican, and nearly a third of its families subsisted on $3,000 or less a year. No place in America had as high a rate of infants dying or toddlers being poisoned by lead. Whites, who fifteen years before had composed half the community, had fled in fright, with legend having it that one family on Hart Street was in such a hurry that they left their furniture behind. By the time the senator discovered it, said writer and activist Michael Harrington, “Bedford-Stuyvesant was on the well-greased road to economic and sociological hell.”
To Bobby, Bed-Stuy represented more than the sum of its afflictions. This son of Irish Boston hadn’t forgotten how an impoverished neighborhood known as Eastie had provided a launching pad for a onetime stevedore named Patrick Joseph Kennedy. In college, Bobby had collected rents at tenements owned by his father’s bank, and he came home with wide-eyed tales of how big families lived in four cramped rooms and slept on the fire escapes on hot nights. Bobby knew that in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the brownstones generally were solid and could be made elegant again, and that with one in five of them owner-occupied, residents had a stake in the community. Its history of neglect by federal, state, and local governments was to him another irrefutable argument for equalization.
Any doubts that this was the greenhouse where he should plant his seeds were erased when he walked the neighborhood’s streets one freezing afternoon in mid-February 1966. Neon signs offered loans and liquor. Forsaken cars rusted in front of boarded-up houses crawling with roaches, rats, and human squatters. Out-of-work fathers congregated on street corners while their children played outdoors in winter without coats. The journalist Jack Newfield, a Bed-Stuy native whose family left with the rest of the whites, remembered Bobby asking, “Show me the house where you grew up.” The structure was abandoned by then, the block drug-infested. Newfield: “What would have happened if you grew up on this block, Senator?” Kennedy: “I either would have been a juvenile delinquent or a revolutionary.” As for Newfield’s roots in the rundown neighborhood, Bobby said, “I’m jealous of the fact you grew up in a ghetto. I wish I did. I wish I had that experience.”
His ideas for attacking poverty weren’t revolutionary, but no other politician was so willing to contravene political orthodoxies. Washington would pay for training unemployed adults, constructing a cultural complex, and other classic liberal initiatives. Tax breaks would lure big business to build industrial plants and shopping centers, an idea that drew raves from the conservative standard-bearer William F. Buckley, Jr. And borrowing an approach from the New Left protest movement, local residents would exercise unprecedented self-governance. “We must combine the best of community action with the best of the private enterprise system,” Kennedy said. “We are striking out in new directions, on new courses, sometimes perhaps without map or compass to guide us.”
Integration remained the long-term goal, but Bobby knew that getting white businessmen to work with black activists was a nonstarter for now. So he set up side-by-side bureaucracies—an all-black corporation to run the jobs and cultural enterprises, and an all-white one to raise cash and recruit industry. The dual structures, the head of the blacks-only group later said, ensured “that at the first meeting of the board, if somebody said motherfucker, the white guys wouldn’t all get up and run.” It worked, with Bobby cajoling and charming onto his business board such titans of commerce as IBM chairman Thomas Watson and CBS chief William Paley. He put the community group in the hands of one of the city’s most promising black leaders, Franklin Thomas, who’d grown up in Bed-Stuy, served as New York City’s deputy police commissioner, and would later run the Ford Foundation. Bobby gave political credit to John Lindsay, the new Republican mayor of New York, whom Bobby despised but knew could undermine the enterprise. He let another Republican, Senator Jacob Javits, claim more credit than was deserved. And he devoted more time to this project than to any other in his adopted state, visiting three times a week and biting his tongue when Bed-Stuy leaders gave him a hard time. “We’ve been studied to death,” Elsie Richardson, a community activist, told him at the first neighborhood meeting in February. “The writers of sociology books have milked us of all the information.” Rather than getting defensive, as he had with Baldwin and Belafonte in 1963, Bobby sat quietly as he was harangued, then asked for a chance to prove himself. He agreed that too many studies had been done already, adding, “The fact is, there has to be coordination, direction and leadership.” Richardson, his most vocal critic, left the meeting saying she’d been won over by Kennedy’s “good intentions.”
The first initiative involved patching sidewalks, repairing iron gates, and repainting façades to make a difference that people could see. The project provided work for three hundred locals who were unemployed and, with criminal records ranging from drug offenses to murder, unhirable anywhere else. Residents responded warily when, in an effort to give them skin in the game, they were asked to contribute $25 to renovations valued at $325, keep their sidewalks clean, and buy garbage cans marked with a green R for restoration. But the organizers persisted, eventually signing up 98 percent of owners in the eleven-block test area. It spread from there, with twenty-two hundred units of housing built or renovated, twenty thousand people placed in jobs, and the neighborhood becoming more sanguine and stable. “Driving past the brownstones, savoring the calm of the place,” Harrington wrote in New York magazine, “one can see an immense and important fact: The blight of urban decay is not inevitable; there are alternatives. Something is happening in Bedford-Stuyvesant.”
In hindsight, the record looks mixed. The Kennedy initiative did lure an IBM plant that employed five hundred people, but rather than signaling a trend it remained an isolated case of an entrepreneur willing to invest in the ghetto. The Bedford-Stuyvesant mini-model helped spur federal and foundation funding for similar neighborhood-specific revitalization bids, and today thousands of community development projects nationwide can trace their roots to Bed-Stuy and to Bobby Kennedy. But it took half a century and New York’s changed demographics to remake Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the restoration still isn’t complete. The project’s most lasting effect wasn’t in bricks and mortar but in how Bobby and his collaborators helped change America’s thinking about poverty. Jobs mattered even more than education and housing, he said in what then was an avant-garde idea and today is accepted wisdom. So were the notions that control should be vested not in Washington but in communities like Watts and Harlem, with a public-private partnership the best way to draw funding. And he saw sooner than most that America’s racial challenge was no longer Southern segregationists but Northerners who were seldom in conflict with blacks because they almost never encountered them.
The senator understood from the first the limits of what he was trying to do in Bedford-Stuyvesant and other ghettos. “I’m not at all sure this is going to work,” he said days before unveiling his ideas. “Even if we fail, we’ll have learned something. But more important than that, something has to be done. People like myself just can’t go around making nice speeches all the time. We can’t just keep raising expectations. We have to do some damn hard work, too.”
Other politicians called them hopeless causes. But Bobby refused to believe there weren’t remedies, not just for urban poverty but for the problems that for generations had bedeviled the miners who drilled into the Appalachian hills for an increasingly elusive supply of coal; the Indians who were this country’s earliest and most invisib
le inhabitants; and, a group he came to know early in 1966, the migrant workers who picked but didn’t share in the bounty of lettuce, grapes, and other harvests of America’s agribusinesses. In the last instance, especially, he resisted getting involved. He was busy with Bed-Stuy and a hundred other things, and attending a hearing of a committee he didn’t serve on, on an issue he didn’t know anything about involving a strike by farmworkers against California grape growers, would mean another trip across the country. But his friends at the United Auto Workers had said he should go, and Edelman agreed. So Bobby found himself on a plane out West asking his aide, “Why the hell am I dragging my ass all the way out to California?” Shown where the mainly Filipino workers lived and labored—in housing that often lacked running water and heat, without a minimum wage or protection from pesticides, with their children picking beside them in the fields—he quickly sized up the situation. “This,” he told the UAW’s Paul Schrade, “is worse than Mississippi.”
Then it was a matter of how to help. These were the days before college students and suburban liberals had begun to rally support for the farmworkers. Political friends were hard to come by, particularly among elected officials who lined up on the side of the wealthy growers. Bobby showed whose side he was on at the March hearing in the grape-growing town of Delano, California, held by the Senate’s Migratory Labor Subcommittee. The local sheriff, who was the migrants’ archfoe, testified that he had arrested forty-four picketing workers to protect them from strikebreakers who were threatening violence, which the sheriff thought could touch off a riot. It didn’t take long for the senator from New York to read the situation and revert to his familiar form as an outraged prosecutor. Bobby: “How can you go arrest somebody if they haven’t violated the law?” Sheriff: “They’re ready to violate the law.” Bobby: “I suggest during the luncheon period that the sheriff and the district attorney read the Constitution of the United States.”
That alone made him a hero to the farmworkers, who had never seen anyone question the arbitrariness of local law enforcement. But he also forged a connection that day with Cesar Chavez, the farmworkers’ leader. “They’re standing in a parking lot and they just start talking to each other,” remembers Edelman. “There starts to be this circle of people around them, and then it’s two deep and three deep….Neither one of them was somebody who used words extensively. It just took a five-minute conversation and they were friends for life.” For Bobby, that friendship meant helping Chavez raise money, supporting laws that gave the nascent union a chance, and standing behind his friend’s hunger strikes and La Causa. Migrant workers had supported JFK in 1960, “but with Bobby it was like an entirely different thing,” Chavez recalled. “It was like he was ours.” This Kennedy brother related to the poor—and to migrants in particular—the way the novelist John Steinbeck had in The Grapes of Wrath, trying to see the world through their eyes. “Robert didn’t come to us and tell us what was good for us,” said Chavez deputy Dolores Huerta. “He came to us and asked us two questions. All he said was, ‘What do you want? And how can I help?’ That’s why we loved him.”
He didn’t have to travel across the country to witness the abuse of farmworkers. It was happening just outside Rochester, New York, at a fruit farm that he and Senator Javits visited as part of a Senate investigation in the fall of 1967. A sign there warned, ANYONE ENTERING OR TRESPASSING WITHOUT MY PERMISSION WILL BE SHOT IF CAUGHT. That stopped most of the government, press, and union entourage. But Bobby proceeded to an abandoned bus that was home to three migrant families, including six children under ten years old. Like those he had met in Mississippi, all were black and covered with running scabs. The parents looked older than their ages and, as one woman told Bobby, they earned a dollar an hour picking celery. The bus seats had been replaced with filthy mattresses, the windows with cardboard and wood. Bobby trembled with rage as he confronted the owner of the camp, Jay DeBadts, who was carrying a gun and looked as if he meant what his sign said. “You had no right to go in there,” DeBadts yelled at the senator. “You’re just a do-gooder trying to make some headlines.” Bobby looked back in disbelief, then raged in a near-whisper: “You are something out of the nineteenth century. I wouldn’t put an animal in those buses.”
Bobby never forgot what he saw at the fruit farm, and he added to his list of causes afflicting Neanderthals like DeBadts and uprooting the abuses at migrant camps. While that was the kind of politics he relished, what he hated was the pressure to promote the careers of well-meaning hacks like Francis X. Morrissey. Morrissey, a municipal judge in Boston, was for decades Joe Kennedy’s friend, factotum, and informer. He helped Jack in his early runs for Congress and oversaw JFK’s Boston office, then steered a politically naïve Ted through Massachusetts’s legal and political rites of passage. Joe had wanted Jack to name Morrissey to the federal bench—the only favor of that kind he ever sought—but the president held off as long as he could, and the events of Dallas intervened before he could act. Two years later a conscience-ridden Ted resurrected the idea, to the delight of his infirm father and with the assistance of the new president. Bobby knew Morrissey’s limits and realized that some of the blackest marks on his record as attorney general were the archsegregationists and other politically expedient judges he had named to the bench. But he felt boxed in by his familiar fealty to his father and brother, which was reinforced rather than relieved by his new role as chief of the tribe. That was just how LBJ had hoped it would play out, delighting at making Bobby squirm and perhaps denting his credentials as a reformer. Just in case, the president ordered J. Edgar Hoover to go all out in digging up dirt on Morrissey, saying, “I don’t want him to get that judgeship.”
It wasn’t the FBI that torpedoed Morrissey, however, but The Boston Globe, which questioned the Horatio Alger narrative the Kennedys had spun for the nominee. It was true that he was one of twelve children who grew up in a house without electricity, but after that the story got muddy. Morrissey had attended not Boston College Law School but its extension school. He got his law degree from a diploma mill in Georgia. His credentials were so weak that the normally compliant American Bar Association withheld support and the Boston Bar branded him “entirely lacking in the qualifications of education and training necessary to carry out the duties of the office of a Federal judge.” The battle won the Globe its first-ever Pulitzer Prize. It gave Ted a lesson in the limits of Senate collegiality, when he was abandoned by his friend and Bobby’s, Senator Joe Tydings of Maryland. As for Bobby, the Morrissey affair made clear that while he still wouldn’t buck his father on something that mattered that much to him, he had the good judgment to let Ted spearhead this drive. Bobby offered support only when pressed, and he told his younger brother when to yield in a fight they couldn’t win. He also managed to get in a last lick, not forewarning anyone of their surrender plans. Ted delivered a long speech in the Senate defending Morrissey, then, in the last paragraph and with Bobby’s prodding, he stunned listeners by raising the white flag. Bobby didn’t want Tydings and the other Morrissey foes “to have the satisfaction of knowing they had won, without at least being surprised,” said Milton Gwirtzman, Ted’s aide. The older senator brother then offered this postmortem on the debacle: “I think we’ve more than fulfilled our commitment to Frank Morrissey.”
If his support for Morrissey placed Bobby back in the role of old-school politician, the next spring he saw an opportunity to seize the grail of reform in New York City. The 1966 race that caught his eye was a primary for the obscurest of offices, Surrogate’s Court, charged with the routine processing of wills and using that authority to hand favored lawyers bloated fees. As if such patronage weren’t egregious enough, Democratic and Republican bosses had quietly agreed that instead of squandering money contesting the election, both parties would endorse the Democrat Arthur Klein in return for the Democrats’ endorsing a Republican for the state trial court. Bobby cried foul and found a candidate of his own, Samuel Silverman, a pasty-faced justice of the st
ate supreme court whom the senator had never met and who ran only because Bobby insisted. It was, as Kennedy in-law and Silverman campaign coordinator Steve Smith said, “two unknowns running against each other for a job nobody understood.” But all that mattered was that Bobby was pulling out all the stops for Silverman and the reform cause. He raised a million dollars, set up a phone bank, and even called in the Kennedy sisters, which is something Jack wouldn’t have done for any candidate not named Kennedy. For the last ten days of the campaign, the Empire State senator with the Boston accent and newfound ease was at Silverman’s side every afternoon. “How many here have heard of Surrogate’s Court?” Bobby asked his school-aged audience as he and Silverman stood atop a station wagon on a hot night at a Lenox Hill housing project. A few hands rise. “How many of you study hard and obey your parents?” More hands. “How many of you are going to go home tonight and tell your mothers and fathers to vote for Judge Silverman for Surrogate?” All arms shoot up as Bobby says, “Silverman, Silverman, remember that name. Now let’s go over it again. What are you going to tell your fathers and mothers?” Kids: “Vote.” Bobby: “Vote for whom?” Children: “Kennedy.”
Win or lose, Bobby knew that just making this fight would generate goodwill with New York liberals. Their image of him as Peck’s Bad Boy had been reinforced the previous fall when he backed the Democratic machine’s candidate, Abe Beame, in his losing race for mayor against the Republican reformer John Lindsay. His support for Silverman put him on the side of widows and orphans against greedy lawyers and, rarer for a Kennedy, allied him with The New York Times. The Times and other papers had cast the race simply as Kennedy versus the Tammany political organization—and they noted the irony that the candidate of the bosses was now taking on those bosses. The race also gave him a chance, as he said, to “stick it to John Lindsay,” who was trying to stay on the sidelines. When Silverman won—by an overwhelming 56 to 38 percent—the Times crowned Bobby a “hero of the Reformers” and said his “prestige as the most influential Democrat in this state has now been considerably enhanced.” As ever, however, the paper insisted on the last word: “This does not mean that he has become a Reformer himself. Senator Kennedy is a very practical politician who in the past has dealt with some pretty distasteful holders of power and will doubtless continue to do so.”
