American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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.”