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February 24 - March 16, 2020
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.
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.
Grandpa’s relatively mild isolationism was rooted in his cynicism about war, that it was as a political strategy benefiting monarchs and industrialists, at a cost, in blood and treasure, borne by the common man.
my dad wrote about Grandpa, “My father has believed we could think and decide things for ourselves. . . . There were disagreements, sometimes violent, on politics, economics, the future of the country, the world.”
the first Earth Day in 1970. I marched that day in New York: it was the largest public demonstration, to date, in American history.
Between 1947 and 1989, the CIA would initiate seventy-two coup d’états—the equivalent of one-third of the world’s governments.
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.
The Kennedys did not believe that the United States should be in the business of overthrowing governments.
Halpern was one of journalist Seymour Hersh’s key sources for much of the misinformation about my family in Hersh’s 1997 Kennedy hatchet job, The Dark Side of Camelot.
Jimmy Hoffa’s cagey attorney, Edward Bennett Williams,
Williams became co-owner of her beloved Washington Redskins.
Hoffa enjoyed a close friendship with Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon,
We had to read an hour each day and record in our daybooks three current events from the newspaper. Sundays were poetry nights, and we spent the hour before dinner memorizing our stanzas.
my father despised partisanship, which he regarded as intellectually dishonest.
our daily prebreakfast ride. We rode most days if it wasn’t pouring rain. Our mother raised us on horses
“He loved debating the most anti-American students, particularly the most radical Marxists. He admired them for the idealism that had radicalized them.” My father sought out the marginalized people, whom every other politician wanted to avoid, ignore, arrest, or kill. Said Seigenthaler: “Bobby thought he could engage them, and even win them over!
very few blacks in the sea of white faces and ordered the department integrated. My father’s Justice Department hired more African American lawyers than at any other time in its history.
Among his first calls was a suit forcing the Washington Redskins to integrate.
By the end of that year he was so furious that it displaced organized crime as his principal concern.
By 1962, my dad had decided that the most important domestic issue facing the nation was civil rights.
My father helped Medgar’s family cut through bureaucratic red tape to get him buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Charles Evers, who was more radical and less patient than his brother, called my father day and night, and remained a lifelong ally and family friend.
In 1965 he toured the Mississippi Delta with my dad; he was with him the day my father died, and rode with us in the funeral train. I often visit Charles and James Meredith in Mississippi, where Charles is a revered hero and a prickly but popular radio host.
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.”
in the wake of Jack’s death, in February 1964, the House of Representatives passed the Civil Rights Bill.
my father turned the Justice Department toward addressing what he called the disparities in access to justice that made our legal system favor “the rich man over the poor.”
He made Hickory Hill and the Justice Department regular party venues. Inner-city kids flooded our home on weekends and holidays, splashing in the pool and playing on the obstacle course in the yard.
my father transformed the Justice Department. He shared his brother’s driving conviction that government was owned by the people, and so it should work for them.
“He has guided more important legislation through Congress than did any of his predecessors in the past thirty years. He has made the Federal Government, for the first time, a vigorous enemy of organized crime. He has pushed equal rights for all Americans.”
If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. —JOHN F. KENNEDY
“All wars start from stupidity,” Jack told Kenny O’Donnell.
gift for Caroline, a puppy of indeterminate pedigree whose mother was the famous cosmo-canine, Laika, whose ride on Sputnik 2 made her the first dog in space.
On October 11, 1963, five weeks before his death, JFK bypassed his own National Security Council and issued National Security Action Memorandum 263, making official the withdrawal
from Vietnam of “1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963” and “the bulk of U.S. personnel by the end of 1965.”
“After I come back from Texas, that’s going to change. There’s no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life.”
On November 24, 1963, two days after Jack died, Lyndon Johnson
500,000 Americans, including many of my friends, entered the paddies of Vietnam, and 58,000 never returned.
French histories of Vietnam and began plodding his way through them using his own high school French and the help of a beautiful young reporter he had recently met who was fluent in the language. It was during this project that Jaqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s romance with my uncle first blossomed, a fact reported by none of her biographers.
Jack went to Dallas in order to condemn the right-wing notion that “peace is a sign of weakness.”
When I first met Fidel Castro, in 1999, nearly four decades after the Cuban Missile Crisis, he acknowledged his own recklessness in inviting Soviet nukes into Cuba. “It was a mistake,” he told me,
in 1999, Castro told me, “If your uncle had lived, the relationship between our countries would have been very different. He was a great president, an unusual man with love for children and a powerful understanding of the military and large corporations that run your country. We were on a road to peace.”
Jack had made an unusual spontaneous trip to Palm Beach to say goodbye to his father.
Jack told her. When she expressed anguish about his safety in Dallas he said, “But, Jackie, if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it. So why worry about it?”
dead.” My father later told historian William Manchester that Hoover’s tone was “not quite as excited as if he were reporting the fact that he’d found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University.” Hoover never expressed his condolences.
My dad immediately suspected that the CIA had killed Uncle Jack.
My father had no trust in the FBI or CIA and little faith in the Secret Service, which he’d tried to move from Treasury to the Justice Department. But he loved the U.S. marshals.
Exactly two weeks before his death, Jack had visited the site for Veterans Day and remarked, as he stood at Lee’s mansion overlooking the Potomac and all the marble monuments of the American democracy, “I could stay here forever.”
Jack had created the Navy SEALs in 1962
They took a lock of Jack’s hair, which my dad would keep until he died. He slipped a cutting of his own hair, a PT boat tie clip, and my mother’s silver rosary into Jack’s hands.
