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July 15 - August 2, 2023
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
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As late as 1961 he scolded Jack and his youngest daughter, Jean, for being late for lunch. “Get your tails up to the table right now, you’re ten minutes late.” As they jogged up the beach toward the big house, Jack turned to Jean and said, “Do you think he knows I’m president of the United States?”
She routinely instructed her chauffeur to pick up hitchhikers. And when hoodlums accosted her in Central Park to steal her alligator purse she scolded them for smoking cigarettes, leaving them so thoroughly chastised that they neglected to rob her.
Just before she left for the Cape she reminded me how fortunate all of us Kennedys were with the extraordinary lives we’d been given, and of the moral obligation we had to give back. “Never forget that you are a Kennedy. A lot of work went into building that name. Don’t disparage it.” Sometimes I would prove better at that than others.
Today, the CIA has sprawled beyond recognition or control by the democracy it is supposed to serve. Secret budgets now support an astonishing 1,271 additional intelligence agencies that function under CIA control and 1,931 private companies engaged in spying, murder, kidnapping, espionage, sabotage, and torture. Over 30,000 spy agency employees, engaged in eavesdropping, intercept over 1.5 billion telephone conversations daily. The history of CIA activities during the sixties and seventies, when it had relatively insignificant budgets and power, gives us abundant reason to fear the awesome and
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In a departure from such tight-lipped assessments of President Kennedy while Jack lived, Allen Dulles told a young writer in 1965, “That little Kennedy, he thought he was a god.” LBJ would later appoint Dulles to the Warren Commission investigating Jack’s assassination, a curious choice at a time when some Americans, including my father, suspected the CIA’s involvement in JFK’s murder.
a series of deathbed confessions for his sons, E. Howard Hunt admitted to participating in the planning of President Kennedy’s murder in a plot that he said included Morales, Sturgis, Harvey, and David Atlee Phillips.
As long as there is plenty, poverty is evil. Government belongs wherever evil needs an adversary and there are people in distress. —ROBERT F. KENNEDY
On August 28, 1963, a quarter million people flooded the Mall to hear Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., describe his dream: “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.” And in the wake of Jack’s death, in February 1964, the House of Representatives passed the Civil Rights Bill.
Thomas Paine said in the Revolution of 1776 that the cause of America is the cause of all mankind. I think in 1960 the cause of all mankind is the cause of America. If we fail, I think the case of freedom fails, not only in the United States, but every place. —JFK, AT THE STEELWORKERS’ CONVENTION, SEPTEMBER. 19, 1960
If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. —JOHN F. KENNEDY
A Soviet official told Pierre Salinger that Khrushchev wept openly when he learned of Jack’s assassination, then withdrew into a shell. “He just wandered around his office for several days, like he was in a daze.”
My dad immediately suspected that the CIA had killed Uncle Jack. After Hoover’s call, he called a yet-unidentified CIA official and asked point-blank, “Did your outfit have anything to do with this horror?” Then my father invited McCone to take a walk with him in the yard. Out of earshot of my mother, he asked McCone whether the CIA had killed his brother. McCone denied it. According to historian David Talbot, McCone himself later concluded there had been more than one gunman.
Before it became the National Cemetery, Arlington had been the private plantation of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. On our first visit, my mother explained that Lee’s estate had become the National Cemetery after the Battle of Bull Run, when Stonewall Jackson had whipped an overconfident Union Army just south of Hickory Hill. When General McClellan’s brigadier asked Lincoln where to bury the Union dead, the angry president answered, “Bury them at Lee’s feet.” Exactly two weeks before his death, Jack had visited the site for Veterans Day and remarked, as he stood at Lee’s mansion
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Mesmerized, I studied the riderless ebony funeral horse that followed the caisson with empty boots mounted backward in the stirrups—the symbol of a fallen prince looking back over his truncated life.
Sarge distracted us from these anxieties by explaining the history of the government buildings and the equestrian statuary on Pennsylvania Avenue. He told us that a rearing horse in a statue meant the hero had died in battle, and that a single leg raised indicated that the rider was wounded in war. He told us about Lincoln’s funeral, upon which Jack’s was modeled, and how, dating back to the funeral of Genghis Khan, the riderless horse had symbolized a fallen hero who would ride no more.
The desolation evoked by his death was global. In nearly every nation, highways, businesses, factories, schools, and colleges closed. Radio and TV stations worldwide suspended advertising. Airplanes were grounded. Professional sports teams canceled contests. Sixty thousand Germans carrying torches flooded the square beside Rathaus Schöneberg, the former city hall for West Berlin where Jack had given his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. Three days later, the German government renamed it John-F-Kennedy-Platz. In Iran, every school, government office, and business shut down for days as the nation
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To this day it stands as the largest gathering of heads of state and foreign dignitaries in American history. Jackie led 220 dignitaries from ninety-two nations and almost every member of Congress, and nearly every state governor. The Marine Band followed them.
Virtually every American watched the service, along with hundreds of millions around the globe, as it was broadcast worldwide, including behind the Iron Curtain, where the Soviets suspended their customary censorship. The Russian TV commentators said, “The grief of the Soviet peoples mingles with the grief of the American people.” After dousing Jack’s casket with holy water, Cardinal Cushing hugged it with both hands and, abandoning the Latin liturgy, blurted out in agony, “Ah, dear Jack!” That really made me want to cry some more.
William Manchester wrote, “It was ironic that John Kennedy, whom the world knew as a man of peace, and whose proudest achievements had been the Test Ban Treaty and the successful conclusion of the Cuban confrontation without bloodshed, should be buried as a warrior, but there really was no other way: if he must go in glory, and clearly he must, the troops were indispensable. There were no splendid traditions, no magnificent farewells for a hero of peace.”
Two days later, LBJ asked Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act in memory of Jack. His hope was to transform one act of hatred into unity and justice for our country: “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.” He denounced the forces that contributed to the tragic event in
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Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his daybook that “JFK accomplished an Americanization of the world far deeper and subtler than anything JFD [John Foster Dulles] ever dreamed of—not a world Americanized in the sense of adopting the platitudes and pomposities of free enterprise—but a world Americanized in the perceptions and rhythms of life. JFK conquered the [dreams] of [youth]; he penetrated the world as jazz penetrated it, as Bogart and J. D. Salinger and Faulkner penetrated it; not the world of the chancelleries, but the underground world of fantasy and hope.” Schlesinger added ominously, “But
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In the vernacular of the Greeks, Camus was a Stoic. That philosophy argued that, in an absurd world, the acceptance of pain, if accompanied by the commitment to struggle, transforms even the most common men into heroes and provides the most tragic hero peace and contentment. The hero, Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to roll a rock uphill for eternity, only to see it tumble back down, was ultimately a happy man. Even recognizing and accepting the futility of his task, he could find nobility in his struggle. It is neither our position nor our circumstances that define us, according to the
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I understood that all these efforts to imbue us with pluck were boot camp for the ultimate virtue—moral courage. Despite his high regard for physical bravery, my father told us that moral courage is the rarer and more valuable commodity. In 1965, he wrote in Life magazine after reaching the summit of Mt. Kennedy that it was not “blind, inexplicable, meaningless courage” that he admired. “It is courage with ability, brains, and tenacity, and purpose. Winston Churchill called this kind of courage ‘the finest of human qualities’ because it is the quality that guarantees all others.”
On our way home we stopped in England to visit Runnymede, the famous battlefield where the British people forced King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. The document was the precursor to our own Constitution. The British considered it the perfect spot to honor America’s slain president. Queen Elizabeth, the following year, would lay a stone monument at the center of Britain’s most hallowed soil, declaring on a plaque, “This acre of English ground was given to the United States of America by the people of Britain in memory of John F. Kennedy.” The ceremony somehow reminded me of Camelot.
My father often recalled Jack’s love of Thomas Paine’s words, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.”
The Democratic convention in August 1964 fortified Johnson’s worst suspicions. LBJ, the garish Texan, saw a calculated personal slight in my father’s use of a quote from Romeo and Juliet, recommended by Aunt Jackie, to close his tribute to Uncle Jack: “When he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night, / And pay no worship to the garish sun.” The delegates’ twenty-two-minute ovation for my father only rubbed salt in Johnson’s wounded pride.
In Jakarta, confronting a hostile crowd, my father grabbed a bullhorn and spoke extemporaneously for twenty minutes on the meaning of freedom: Let me tell you what the United States stands for. We were born in revolution. We believe that government exists for the individual and the individual is not a tool of the state. We in America believe that we should have a divergence of views. We believe that everyone has a right to express himself. We believe that your people have a right to speak out and give their views and ideas.
Come my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world. —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, ULYSSES
Knowing his thoughts better than anyone, my mom goaded him with a piece written by his friend Jack Newfield in the Village Voice, which she carried in her purse for that purpose. “If Kennedy does not run in 1968, the best side of his character will die. He will kill it every time he butchers his conscience and makes a speech for Johnson next autumn. It will die every time some kid asks him, if he is so much against the Vietnam War, how come he is putting party above principle? It will die every time a stranger quotes his own words back to him on the value of courage.”
‘Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.’ Now, as ever, we do ourselves best justice when we measure ourselves against ancient tests.” Then he invoked his favorite Greek playwright, Aeschylus: “[A] good man yields when he knows his course is wrong and he repairs the evil. The only sin is pride.’”
“And I tell you here in California the same thing I told those in Alabama with whom I talked. The gulf between our people will not be bridged by those who preach violence, or by those who burn or loot.”
Teddy, who had not slept for several days, delivered the eulogy in a breaking voice. “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life,” Teddy said. “He should be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”
Another man at that same event said, “The Kennedys were born with silver spoons in their mouths, and took them right out, and began feeding the poor.”
The great Greek general and statesman Pericles, who ruled Athens in its Golden Age and built both the Parthenon and the Acropolis, observed, “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments but what is woven into the lives of others.” The best tribute to my father’s life is the love he wove through so many people’s lives.
To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required, not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. —JOHN F. KENNEDY
Lem taught me that love is not just an emotion; it is effort, sometimes painful, and always forgiving. That gift has helped me love in my own relationships, and has made me a better spouse, father, and friend. I think of Lem every day and ask his help in making myself a vessel for the love that he gave me, so that it might flow to my children, and to all the children whose lives I touch.
Insight doesn’t cure addiction any more than it does diabetes; an addict needs to attend meetings and be of service. Those actions somehow act as a functional treatment for the disease.
When people ask how she coped with the violent and untimely deaths that claimed both her parents, her three brothers, her husband, and two sons, she says with a smile, “Everyone takes their licks.” As she told me, “We feel like we ought to be able to write our own scripts to our lives, and sometimes we feel disappointed in God when life rewrites the plot. The key is acceptance and gratitude. We need to practice wanting what we’ve got, not what we wish we had.”
Also by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Judge Frank Johnson The Riverkeepers Crimes Against Nature Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak CHILDREN’S BOOKS Robert Smalls: The Boat Thief Joshua Chamberlain and the American Civil War Saint Francis of Assisi: A Life of Joy
