Robert Kennedy and His Times

by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Georgia. (Nor was the public record necessarily an indicator. Alexander A. Lawrence of Georgia, appointed in later years, was a segregationist in politics but an integrator on the bench.)

Interesting

Attorney General.... It is a position that should really be removed from politics or as completely as it can be.”88

One was his willingness to listen. “He often had strong immediate reactions; but, if you said, ‘Now, wait Bob...’ and outlined other considerations, he would wait, listen, reconsider.”

“The most important thing about Robert Kennedy then and later was his ability as a listener. He did not pontificate.... The thing I remember most was his anxiousness to learn, his ability to put proper questions so everyone could learn, his conservatism in that he did not believe the federal government could do all things for all people, his belief that... one of the principal functions of the federal government was to support citizen participation at the local level and to build wherever possible from the bottom up rather than from the top down.”

The Kennedys were also exasperated by State’s philosophic attitude toward the travel restrictions that mocked America’s pretense of being a truly open society. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 excluded from the United States past and present members of proscribed organizations, such as the Communist party and Communist-front organizations, and advocates of proscribed doctrines, such as communism. However, it also empowered the Attorney General, when State so recommended, to grant waivers for reasons of compassion or of the national interest. The Eisenhower administration administered the proscriptive sections of the act with enthusiasm. Dulles selected Scott McLeod, a Joe McCarthy protégé, as head of the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs. In the Dulles atmosphere, consuls abroad automatically denied visas to all remotely suspicious persons. The Kennedys thought it all ridiculous. Exchange agreements with Communist countries permitted the entry of party members from behind the Iron Curtain; but artists, writers and scientists from western Europe or Latin America whom someone had charged with committing an offense against American ideas of political propriety were regularly turned away. Their admission, the President and the Attorney General believed, was unlikely to destroy the Republic. Exposure to the United

States might even have a salutary effect. In 1962 President Kennedy appointed Abba Schwartz administrator of the bureau. No greater contrast with McLeod could have been imagined. Schwartz, a liberal, a law partner of James Landis’s, a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt’s, had long experience in refugee and immigration problems. He had served as liaison between Mrs. Roosevelt and the Kennedys in the 1960 campaign. “We’ve lost a good deal of time,” the President told Schwartz, and I’m fed up with the image we have as a police state. I keep seeing reports about excluding visitors because of their political views. We act like a closed society. I want you to change that.... You will be my personal appointee. I expect you to assert your authority and act for me. You know what I want—an Open Society—with the freest possible movement in and out of the country. And a new immigration law. Keep in touch with the Attorney General. I don’t know what you’ll find in the State Department but you’ll just have to work that out.

He criticized the policy of driving “the genuine democrats in the Dominican revolution into association with the Communists by blanket characterizations and condemnations”

He criticized the policy of driving “the genuine democrats in the Dominican revolution into association with the Communists by blanket characterizations and condemnations” like with trump era

‘chickens are coming home to roost’ from Eisenhower’s years and I live in the chicken coop.”

“a stiffer and more quid pro quo political program than the ‘first support him, then help him to reform’ approach of the Taylor-Rostow report.”

The quid pro quo stipulations on reform fell by the wayside.

“It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘Always do what you are afraid to do.’”

Courage, Robert Kennedy wrote, was the virtue John Kennedy “most admired,”63 the virtue that, as Robert often quoted from Churchill, was “rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”

Oregonians were remote from problems but responsive to issues.

Jack Newfield remembered the quotation from Pascal that Camus had used in Resistance, Rebellion and Death:“A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.”