American Values

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062097705
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito politico

With rich detail, compelling honesty, and a storyteller's gift, RFK Jr. describes his life growing up Kennedy in a tumultuous time in history that eerily echoes the issues of nuclear confrontation, religion, race, and inequality that we confront today.

"With emotion and striking detail, RFK Jr. recalls both the private joys and very public pain of his childhood."— Independent Catholic News In this powerful book that combines the best aspects of memoir and political history, the third child of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and nephew of JFK takes us on an intimate journey through his life, including watershed moments in the history of our nation. Stories of his grandparents Joseph and Rose set the stage for their nine remarkable children, among them three U.S. senators—Teddy, Bobby, and Jack—one of whom went on to become attorney general, and the other, the president of the United States.

We meet Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover, two men whose agencies posed the principal threats to American democracy and values. We live through the Cuban Missile Crisis, when insubordinate spies and belligerent generals in the Pentagon and Moscow brought the world to the cliff edge of nuclear war. At Hickory Hill in Virginia, where RFK Jr. grew up, we encounter the celebrities who gathered at the second most famous address in Washington, members of what would later become known as America's Camelot. Through his father's role as attorney general we get an insider's look as growing tensions over civil rights led to pitched battles in the streets and 16, 000 federal troops were called in to enforce desegregation at Ole Miss. We see growing pressure to fight wars in Southeast Asia to stop communism. We relive the assassination of JFK, RFK's run for the presidency that was cut short by his own death, and the aftermath of those murders on the Kennedy family.

RFK Jr. also shares his own experiences, not just with historical events and the movers who shaped them but also with his mother and father, with his own struggles with addiction, and with the ways he eventually made peace with both his Kennedy legacy and his own demons. A lyrically written book that provides insight, hope, and steady wisdom for Americans as they wrestle, as never before, with questions about America's role in history and the world and what it means to be American.

Chapter 1

Grandpa

FROM MY YOUNGEST DAYS I ALWAYS HAD THE FEELING THAT WE WERE all involved in some great crusade, that the world was a battleground for good and evil, and that our lives would be consumed in that conflict. It would be my good fortune if I could play an important or heroic role. And from the very beginning this conviction was rooted in my family’s fervent Catholicism, and deeply intertwined with the politics of the country.

There had been Irish politicians on both sides of my family for generations, so it was no surprise that we children talked politics from the day we could speak. Such passion came naturally to a people for whom the distinction between political and religious martyrdom had blurred during eight hundred years of British occupation. From their arrival in America, the Irish took to politics as the starving take to food, having been stifled for centuries by rules that forbade them from participating in the political destiny of their nation. As early as 1691, Irish law prohibited Catholics from voting, serving on juries, attending university, practicing law, working for government, or marrying a Protestant. In Dunganstown, near the port of Wexford, my Kennedy ancestors learned to read and write in an illegal “hedge school”; the priest who taught them was found out and hanged for the offense.

My progenitors were still in Ireland during that black February of 1847, when the announcement in England’s House of Commons that fifteen thousand Irish were starving to death every day so moved Queen Victoria that she donated five pounds to the Society for Irish Relief. Britain produced, stored, and exported thousands of tons of grain and livestock from Ireland during the five-year famine—more than enough to feed the population—but the Crown refused to divert these money crops, so Ireland lost a quarter of her people. Skeletal corpses littered the countryside, their mouths green from eating grass like cattle. A million sons and daughters of Eire, including my great-great-grandparents, boarded the coffin ships sailing west, and the Atlantic became, in James Joyce’s words, “a bowl of bitter tears.”

Even in America the Irish encountered the familiar barriers of prejudice. Anti-Catholic sentiment would eventually drive my father’s parents, Joe and Rose Kennedy, from their beloved Boston. Grandma would sometimes show us clippings from old Boston newspapers, where the acronym NINA (No Irish Need Apply) followed all the best employment listings. Still, wherever they landed, the Irish flourished. Fecund Irish mothers with little opportunity for personal fulfillment beyond childbearing produced an invading force that triumphed at law, politics, sports, literature, and business. No people were ever prouder than the prosperous Irish-Americans who returned to the Old World a generation later with heads high. During his triumphant tour of the British Isles in 1887, boxing champion John L. Sullivan, the apogee of New World cockiness, cordially greeted the Prince of Wales, “If ever you come to Boston, be sure to look me up. I’ll see that you’re treated right.” My grandfather must have felt every bit as jubilant when he recrossed the Atlantic to attend the Court of St. James’s as FDR’s newly appointed ambassador to England.

Grandpa was the dominant figure during my childhood summers on Cape Cod. He made his home “The Big House,” purchased in 1920 in Hyannisport on the shores of Nantucket Sound, where our house, John Kennedy’s, and Jean Kennedy Smith’s formed a tight compound surrounding it, and the Shrivers’ and Teddy Kennedy’s houses lay in a slightly more scattered orbit around the tiny seaside village. Grandpa bought the home when the Brahmins of brown-shoed Cohasset rejected his application to their golf club on account of his religion. Although the Protestant swamp Yankees who dominated Hyannisport were similarly bigoted, Grandpa’s fellow Irishman Larry Newman, who owned the golf course, welcomed him.

During the first eighteen years of their marriage, Grandpa and Grandma produced nine children. God gave their firstborn, my Uncle Joe Jr., every gift but gray hair. He was born in 1915 and died in a secret Navy mission while flying a “drone” Liberator bomber that exploded over the English Channel in 1944, at age twenty-nine. Jack was born in 1917, Rosemary in 1918, and Kick, who married into Britain’s greatest house, lost her husband in the war—and would herself perish in an airplane crash at age twenty-six—was born in 1920. Eunice was born in ’21, Pat in ’24, my father, Bobby, in ’25, and the babies, Jean and Teddy, in ’28 and ’32. Our generation called them, collectively, “the grown-ups.” We all spent each summer on Cape Cod at the family compound, where the twenty-nine cousins were raised communally and subjected to a daily regimen of athletic training supervised by a stout former Olympic diver, Sandy Eiler.

Three times a week we took riding lessons at my grandfather’s farm in Osterville, or made long trots through the scrub pine forests and sandy marshlands with Grandpa astride his tall chestnut hunter, Shaleighleigh, whom he had imported from Ireland. Grandpa spoke soothingly to Shaleighleigh as he rode, calming the high-spirited gelding with his latest thoughts on politics and the economy, prompting the grown-ups to joke that this must be the smartest horse in the world. A posse of grandchildren followed behind him on horseback down the rough sandy trails across Barnstable County woodlands. Sometimes we children stopped to swim with our ponies in an expansive kettle pond on the northern fringe of Grandpa’s farm, holding their tails to drag us, while he watched atop Shaleighleigh from a towering knoll along the wooded banks.

Every day we spent time on the ocean. My mother and father took us on the Victura, a twenty-six-foot wooden day sailor, for a picnic lunch on one of the nearby islands, where we fished for sand sharks, scup, flounder, puffers, and sea robins, gathered hermit crabs, periwinkles, and scallops, or dug for tasty steamers that betrayed their location on the tidal flats by squirting. With Captain Frank at the helm, we also took lunch outings on Grandpa’s wooden cabin cruiser, the Marlin, crossing the Sound to Monomoy or Cuttyhunk to explore the Elizabeth Islands and gorge from picnic baskets of Grandpa’s favorite foods—lobsters with hot butter and lemon, corn on the cob, strawberry shortcake, Boston cream pie, baked beans, and clam chowder. We children talked and caroused on the bow while Grandpa sat astern with the grown-ups—Uncle Jack, my father, Teddy, my mother, Aunt Eunice and Sarge Shriver, Jean and Steve Smith, and Pat and Peter Lawford. One day while cruising in Nantucket Sound, Uncle Jack and his closest friend, LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, assembled us on the green canvas cushions in the stern of the Marlin, where they sang “Heart of My Heart.” Dave Powers and Jack sang “The Wearing of the Green” and taught us to whistle “The Boys of Wexford.” It was Jack’s favorite song and he knew all the words.

We are the boys of Wexford

Who fought with heart and hand

To burst in twain

The galling chain

And free our native land.

After returning from sailing, we played baseball on the field behind Uncle Jack’s house, or touch football on the broad expanse below Grandpa’s veranda. In the afternoons Grandpa sat in his chair on the great white porch, often holding hands with Grandma. They had fallen in love as teenagers, married seven years later, and remained hitched for half a century until his death in 1969. They were always open and demonstrative in their admiration and affection for each other. Typical of their tender expressions for each other is a letter from September 1960 just before Jack’s election. She wrote him from Paris:

Joe dearest,

How can I have all this and you—

And still have Heaven, too!

Home for Christmas.

Love to all,

Rosa

Together they watched their children and grandchildren play on the sprawling green lawn bordered by sawgrass stretching into the sparkling sea.

Hyannisport was a magical paradise for me. I loved the endless palette of colors—the vivid blue of sea and sky, separated by rich green landscapes, peppered with ubiquitous roses, hydrangeas, and daffodils, each in their season, the gleaming white houses, and offshore a panoply of brightly hued spinnakers running downwind. The ocean was always changing, from blue to every shade of green, to gray and almost black, to match the moods of the wind and sky. Here, surrounded by my family, I could indulge my obsession with the natural world.

My cousin Bobby Shriver and I rode our bikes to the tidal inlets at Kalmus Beach to crab, or to the salt marshes at Squaw Island to catch fiddlers, killifish, and mummichogs in a wire trap. We went dip-netting for painted turtles and baby catfish from a dinghy on Anderson’s Pond, or beach seining for eels, shiners, skipjacks, and Atlantic needlefish that hid in the floating sargasso weed and in the meadows of eelgrass that bracketed the harbor. We snorkeled for scallops, confining them in an underwater cage anchored in the harbor until we had enough to feed the whole family, a formidable task despite those bivalves’ abundance.

When I was eleven my father gave me a motorized aqualung, a two-horsepower compressor wedged in a Styrofoam ring that bobbed at the ocean’s surface, pumping air down a fifteen-foot umbilical hose into a mask, the perfect contraption for exploring the shallow waters off Hyannisport. I filled its tank with gasoline from the private gas pump adjacent to Grandpa’s garage, and, wearing this apparatus, I swam with my little spear gun into dark caverns in the wrinkled rocks below the mile-long Hyannisport jetty. Pushing my way gingerly past keen-edged barnacles, I stalked giant tautog, considered a delicacy by the Portuguese fishermen who flocked around the jetty lighthouse each weekend from New Bedford and Fall River to cast for scup and flounder. Their fishing rigs, baited with sea worms and squid and anchored with pyramid sinkers, could not tempt the tautog, who preferred barnacles and crabs. So I sold the Azore men fish for comic-book money.

During the years when the Kennedy family compound served as the summer White House, the faint sucking thwuck, thwuck, thwuck each Friday afternoon summoned everyone to assemble for the landing of my father’s and Uncle Jack’s green-and-white Marine Corps helicopters on the big lawn between Grandpa’s house and the ocean. Grandpa’s gardener, Wilbur, hoisted the presidential flag up the pole and we cheered and waved as my dad and my uncles Teddy, Steve Smith, and Sarge Shriver climbed off the choppers. Leaving his own helicopter last, Uncle Jack would go kiss Grandpa and Grandma on the front porch of the Big House, then all the cousins would pile onto the golf cart as Jack took the wheel for a spin. A waiting fleet of limousines would whisk away Jack’s special assistants, Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers, the “Irish Mafia” pols who hitched rides on Marine One for weekend visits with their own families. Police boats and a Coast Guard cutter bobbed just offshore, and fire engines stood poised among the flood of a hundred reporters at the end of the driveway, adding to the excitement.

On Saturday evenings my cousins and the older generations, their weekend guests, and the household staff gathered to watch movies in Grandpa’s basement theater. An ardent film buff, Grandpa—who owned RKO Pictures, founded Pathé Studios, and presented and produced around a hundred features—could get first-run films, and wanted everyone to enjoy them. Grandpa also loved sports, and excelled at baseball, swimming, riding, and golf. A six-handicap with a fiendish putt, he often played with Boston Red Sox pitcher Eddie Gallagher, boxing champ Gene Tunney, and with my mother, who also had an excellent game. Shortly after his appointment as ambassador to England, Grandpa delighted his golf-loving British hosts and made headlines across Europe when he scored a hole-in-one with a 120-yard drive at Stoke Poges Golf Club west of London. “Where was Houghton when the ball got into the cup?” his sons Jack and Joe inquired mischievously in a congratulatory cable—Arthur Houghton being Grandpa’s roguish protégé and golfing companion who had accompanied him that day.

Grandpa was just over six feet tall, and I remember him always smiling. He had big, white, perfect teeth of which Grandma was immensely proud, and bright blue eyes. He was gentle and affectionate, and loved to tell stories and roar with laughter. He read Latin and Greek, and fancied classical music. He relished the company of children, and always took time to play or to take us to the kitchen to visit his beloved cook Nellie and sample her famous angel food cake.

Yet even with his grandchildren, Grandpa had no tolerance for self-pity. A whining child would get him to clapping his hands rhythmically—“I don’t want any sourpusses around here.” He wanted us to understand that we should be grateful for our good fortune; it was spoiled to mope or complain. Grandpa also led the Kennedy adult chorus in its constant demand for industry: we children were to fill all the interstitial spaces of our lives with some useful activity. If he busted us watching television other than the news, he turned the set off and sent us outside to play, rain or shine; he considered the TV a catastrophic waste of time.

When I was very little I would rest on Grandpa’s lap as he read stories to me in his library, or sit with him on the porch and look at the sea. On his birthdays we children dressed in costumes to perform little plays in his theater and sang ditties we composed for him. During the winter we visited him at Palm Beach, where he fielded phone calls while sunning himself in a poolside wooden bunker called the “bullpen.” He would swim with us in the waves and he took me for long walks, helping me corral crabs. He showed me how to pick up the Portuguese man-of-war without getting stung. On Grandpa’s boat, the Marlin, Captain Frank brought us out on the Atlantic, where, in southeast Florida waters, I caught my first glimpse of flying fish, as well as cormorants, which, along with egrets and ospreys, had been largely extirpated north of the Mason-Dixon line by DDT. During one visit we watched green turtles hatch on Grandpa’s beach.

Against Imperialism

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Grandpa has been much maligned, as powerful men often are, accused of everything from being a German appeaser during World War II to a bootlegging confederate of Al Capone and Frank Costello during Prohibition. Urban legend has it that he conspired with those capos to fix the 1960 election by manipulating the Illinois vote to give Uncle Jack his electoral victory. None of these slanders is remotely true, yet those myths are riveted even more solidly to the American consciousness than the (equally untrue) Muslim affiliation and fabricated birth certificate of Barack Obama.

The topic of bootlegging follows Grandpa like a pilot fish. The notion is largely rooted in Grandpa’s purchase—with the help of the president’s son, Jimmy Roosevelt—of the British company that owned White Horse scotch and Dimple Pinch just as Prohibition was ending. According to historian David Nasaw, who researched the issue exhaustively for his definitive biography, The Patriarch, “Kennedy neither imported nor sold any liquor during his years in Brookline or at any time during Prohibition.” The slander debuted in the mid-1960s as part of a partisan campaign to tarnish John Kennedy’s name, which had become a powerful steroid for progressive politics after his death. Incapacitated by a stroke, Grandpa was unable to defend himself. Of course, if there had been any truth to those rumors, Grandpa’s many enemies would have raised them to wound him in his four Senate confirmations for high-level posts, and Jack’s enemies would have wielded them against him during the 1960 campaign. They didn’t. Nora Ephron, who spent several years of her life researching a book on the liquor industry, came to the same conclusion. “All sorts of biographers and journalists casually insist that Kennedy was a partner of Frank Costello and Al Capone during Prohibition,” she said. “It’s so not true. And I happen to be an expert on the subject. No one seems to care about [the truth] but me. Frankly, I’m not even sure his own family cares.” Well, actually we do—at least I wince every time I hear it. But when I was a child, the grown-ups taught us to ignore malicious gossip, and never to dignify it with a response.

I recall a time when there were so many malevolent libels circulating about our family that several of the cousins considered challenging this family practice. But who wants to waste a lifetime, or even spoil a moment, replying to an endless stream of fictions? As Teddy wrote in his memoir, True Compass, “With exceedingly few exceptions, we have refused to complain against the speculation, gossip, and slander. Some have viewed our refusal as excessive reticence, even as tacit admission of the innuendo at hand. In my view, it is neither. At least for me, it’s the continuing assent to Joseph Kennedy’s dictum: ‘There will be no crying in this house.’” That said, I hope Grandpa will forgive me, in this case, for defending him.

The even more venomous Nazi accusation is equally without merit. Despite his Irish heritage, Grandpa was a shameless Anglophile who urged the strongest support for England against Hitler. He asked FDR to increase shipments of all aid to Britain short of war, breaking with Charles Lindbergh, William Randolph Hearst, and the America Firsters. He abhorred Nazism, which he called “the new paganism.” He condemned the fascist persecution of the Jews as “the most terrible thing I have ever heard of.” His outspoken support for a Jewish homeland led the Arab National League of Boston to brand him a “Zionist Charlie McCarthy,” and he made tireless efforts to rescue Jewish refugees from the Nazis. After a speech I gave in Minneapolis, a young woman approached me, introducing herself as Lisa Brenner. “Your grandfather got my grandmother, Mary, out of Germany before World War II,” she told me. “I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for him.” I can’t count the times I’ve heard similar stories. In his exhaustive biography of my grandfather, historian David Nasaw chronicles how Grandpa’s frantic efforts to find safe havens for German and Austrian Jews after Kristallnacht ruined his relationship with the British government—which lodged an official complaint against him to Secretary of State Cordell...