Everyone should take what they wish from the lives and works of Joseph and Rose's children, all but Jean Kennedy Smith now departed.
Having taken our boys to the JFK Library last week as part of a Boston visit, just days after Eunice's funeral, at which I had numerous friends and my college classmate Maria Shriver, I am imbued with a bit of Kennedy-thought right now, as I suppose most of us are who came of age in the period that followed President Kennedy's service and loss.
As it happened, I was raised in their party -- and indeed saw Jack Kennedy campaigning for President in 1960 at the Yale Bowl. With time and the shift of the party from Jack's centrism to Bobby and Ted's liberalism, I, like millions of others, found more suitable surroundings for myself on the other side of the aisle. But disagreement itself is never cause for disrespect, and if I have disagreed with 98 percent of their liberal vision, I have never disrespected any Kennedys for that.
It is not sanctioned by the family, but to get a sense of President Kennedy's vast talent, I urge "Reckless Youth" by Nigel Hamilton. Certainly it includes accounts of JFK's indiscretions and young adult judgment lapses, and that led to the siblings banning Hamilton from the publicly-supported JFK library, thus causing him to abandon his planned trilogy, in which volume two would have covered his Congressional years and vol. three the presidency, but those elements in fact were neither trumpeted nor overwritten.
Instead, Hamilton shows JFK's native talents steadily developing, with a huge jump after the loss of his big brother, Joseph Jr., on his AAF suicide mission in Europe, and the resulting attention shift by Joe Sr.
Bobby begins to emerge about then, too -- stepping into the "number two" role he would occupy until Dallas.
These three, John, Robert and Edward, were very significant figures, crucial to an understanding of the second half of the 20th century and dedicated to public service. And yet, the memory of each is colored in part by unfulfilled promise. The madmen who shot John and Robert robbed them of their lives and us of their works. Everyone wonders what each would have done had they lived a lengthy life. Ted Kennedy's dissipation after Robert's murder created his limit, which effectively prevented him from achieving the presidency itself. There is no diminishing his Congressional career, even if one disagrees with it, but we will all wonder what would have happened if he had emerged for President in 1972, for instance.
(The 1980 campaign was by any standard a six-month train wreck, acknowledged as such to me several summers ago by a Kennedy law school classmate, who had participated in every phase of it, with the Senator standing only a few feet away. But with that chapter concluded Ted Kennedy finally devoted himself to the U.S. Senate, where his abilities were in fact perfectly suited to legislating. Even then, I think the presidency still crossed his mind, wistfully.)
History teaches these were men in full, who swashbuckled in a way that many find ill-considered or uncomplementary to their public causes and abilities. Here I refer not simply to the womanizing, though there certainly was a surfeit, but also to their political tactics, which, for all of Rose's desire for acceptance by the Boston Brahmins and the "Real Lace" New York Roman Catholic Irish-American society, were, to use a nautical reference appropriate to their love of sailing, unvarnished.
Of these, few compare to Robert Kennedy's 1967 perfidy with fellow Irish-Catholic Democratic liberal Gene McCarthy, a person of truly great character, probity, wit and intelligence. In many respects, McCarthy was the thinking person's version of a Kennedy, and that is no disrespect to the capabilities of the three, least of all John.
It was in the fall of 1967, McCarthy told the WBEZ-FM audience when I interviewed him in 1992, just a year or a year-and-a-half after the moving words Senator Kennedy spoke about courage in South Africa, which are repeated above, that Senator McCarthy went to Senator Kennedy and said, "one of us is going to challenge Johnson in the primary to end this war. I am here to support you." Kennedy said, according to McCarthy, but there are many accounts and to his credit Kennedy never denied it, "I will not run, I will support you." McCarthy pressed. "I do not want to run if you will jump in." Kennedy repeated, "It is not my year, I will not run, I will support you."
As John Kennedy collected a Pulitzer Prize for work done in part by Ted Sorenson, Robert, as you know, several months later, based on the courageous, erudite and remarkably successful challenge campaign of "Clean Gene McCarthy" against a sitting president of his own party, in which Senator McCarthy made Viet Nam the big issue, jumped into the race against President Johnson. Johnson withdrew shortly thereafter, setting the suspense for a race between Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy in the run-up to the Chicago convention.
Of course, it was not to be. Robert Kennedy was martyred for his support of Israel. Humphrey, himself a titan (where have such people gone?), overcame McCarthy and a last-minute boomlet for George McGovern. Wracked by the police riot that overshadowed the convention and portrayed the split in Democrat constituencies, the stout Hubert ran like a four minute miler to November. Most believe that had the election been five or six days later, Hubert Humphrey would have defeated Richard Nixon.
To Robert Kennedy's credit, he spoke in 1968 to Gene McCarthy after breaking his word. McCarthy called Kennedy every imaginable expletive for betraying their pact in a shouting row of a Senatorial tete-a-tete. McCarthy, years later, relived every minute of this exchange vividly on WBEZ.
Whatever good may be said of Robert, and there is considerable, I think his actions of 67-68 did not come close to the ideals he enunciated in South Africa 1966. At his unique and defining moment for courage, he crumbled. Gene McCarthy was sent to suffer the arrows and calumny that the party regulars dished out with vigor. For his legendary and consuming hatred of LBJ, Robert Kennedy had a yellow streak a mile wide when it came time for his own "diverse act of courage," in the words of his South Africa address. Had his courage served him as Jack's did in saving his PT boat crew, perhaps he would have announced for President in January 1968 with Gene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey standing behind him. What might have resulted?
But therein is the Kennedy challenge. "The Kennedys," as portrayed by dimwitted media idolaters, sounded great causes. The actual Kennedys, as people, were just... people. Each of them -- Joe Jr. with his isolationism and naive remarks about Hitler's Germany, John's shrinking from civil rights in 1960, Bobby with Gene, or Ted with Mary Jo -- had human-sized faults and weaknesses. It is no surprise, unless you read the newspapers or the breathless biographies.
Their sisters, by the way, the women of this generation, as is usual in the Kennedy story, are where one finds constant serious accomplishment. Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith is no exception.
The family was special, in a superficial way, but they were neither saints nor superhuman. They achieved an acceptance Rose never imagined and a success that even Joe Sr. probably would have been pleased with, but they could not become their own image. In this way, their enlargement in life may now yield to a view based on what they actually did, both good and bad. That will be honor enough.
Some of my same friends are headed back to Hyannis, just two weeks later. It is very sad for all who loved Senator Kennedy. President Obama is probably calling Ted Sorenson for some thoughts before his speech. The extraordinary lives of the four sons of Joseph and Rose are over. Their history of service, sacrifice, loss and influence is now complete.