RFK's 80th birthday
Submitted by Phoebe_in_Sydney on November 19, 2005 - 7:51pm.
I know many Clarkies, like me, are Bobby Kennedy admirers. This thread is for us! Today in Australia it's 20 November. If Bobby had lived he would've been 80 years old today.
While reading "Robert Kennedy and His Times" by Arthur Schlesinger Jr recently I was struck by the many vivid examples of RFK's dark sense of humour. I'd so often seen references over the year to RFK's "gallows humour", but rarely seen quotes illustrating it. The beautiful poetic quotes most often associated with RFK are wonderful and I love them but I thought in a birthday celebration mood today I'd share some of the bits from Schlesinger's book that really made me laugh out loud.
RFK was only 35 when he was appointed Attorney General -- amid many claims of nepotism:
... Addressing Justice employees, he sought to inspire them b the example of his own dazzling rise from the ranks: "I started in the Department as a young lawyer in 1950. The salary was only $4000 a year, but I worked hard. (Pause.) I was ambitious. (Pause.) I studied. (Pause.) I applied myself ... And then my brother was elected President of the United States." Rueful jocularity, ordinarily at his own expense, was more than ever a condition reflex. When Angie Novello (his secretary) admonished him in a plaintive memorandum that "it would be extremely helpful if the Attorney General of the United States ... would notify his immediate staff of his whereabouts at all times," Kennedy returned it with a handwritten scrawl, "What if I'm lost. Love."
Around the same time as the Cuban missile crisis was developing RFK was also dealing with the furore surrounding the prospect of the first black student being admitted to the university in Mississippi -- the campus was located in Oxford, Miss.:
The CIA photo-interpreter traced out the missile sites for him. Reverting to his preoccupations of a few days before, Kennedy asked "Can they hit Oxford, Mississippi?"
This next quote is from RFK's own notes about Cold War discussions with his brother John:
"It is my feeling that the Russians feel this, feel strongly that if they can break our will in Berlin that we will never be able to be good for anything else and they will have won the battle in 1961. They speak with one voice -- they do not have to worry about opposition or what other countries think. Their plan is obviously not to be the most popular, but to be the most fearsome and to terrorize the world into submission.
My feeling is they do not want war but they will carry us to the brink ... I remember Chip Bohlen said in the beginning of the year that 1961 was going to be a fatal one on decision. This was the year the Russians were going to come the closest to nuclear war. I don' think there is any question but that that is true.
After the meeting Jack asked me what I thought. I said I wanted to get off. He said "Get off what?" and I said, "Get off the planet."
This is about an incident only a few weeks after JFK was assassinated:
Peter Maas arrived from New York the first day the Attorney General went out publicly -- to a Christmas party arranged by Mary McGrory of the Washington Star for an orphanage.
The moment he walked in the room, all these little children -- screaming and playing -- there was just suddenly silence ... Bob stepped into the middle of the room and just then a little [black] boy -- I don't suppose he was more than six or seven years old -- suddenly darted forward, and stopped in front of him, and said. "Your brother's dead! Your brother's dead!" ... The adults, all of us, we just kind of turned away ... The little boy knew he had done something wrong, but he didn't know what; so he started to cry. Bobby stepped forward and picked him up, in kind of one motion, and held him very close for a moment, and then he said, "That's all right. I have another brother."
These funny moments from RFK's trip to Poland are gorgeous.
Once Kennedy arrived, the government did its best to keep his presence secret. But word got out. When the Kennedys went to mass the day after their arrival a crowd surged around the Cabot (Ambassador John Moors Cabot) limousine. After a moment, Kennedy lifted Ethel to the car's roof, climbed up himself and began waving. The ambassador, an able diplomat of the old school, called to a Kennedy aide: 'I say there, would you tell the Attorney General that the roof is caving in". "We had an awful time fixing it," he said afterward. "This is the way we always come home from mass," said Kennedy.
.... the next morning they went to Cracow, where another throng beseiged their car in the Cloth Market Square. The Poles sang "Sto Lat" -- "May you live a hundred years" -- and the Kennedys sang back in hurried improvisation "When Polish Eyes are Smiling." Asked at a press conference if he planned to run for President, he said, "No ... I think I'll run for mayor of Cracow." An hour late in getting back for an embassy dinner, Kennedy climbed on the cartop and spoke to still another crowd in front of Cabot's residence. Finally he said "I have to go into dinner now. Would you like to come in with me?" When they shouted yes, he pretended to consult with Cabot over the wall and then said, "The ambassador says you can't come" --- a lighthearted moment that amused Kennedy more than it did Cabot
When he ran for the Senate in New York, RFK was accused of carpetbagging.
On January 4, 1965, Robert Kennedy was sworn in as the junior Senator from New York.... That evening the Women's National Press Club threw its annual soiree for the new senators. "First of all," said Robert Kennedy, when presented to the audience, "I want to say how delighted I am to be here representing the great state of ... ah... ah" -- a long wait while he made a show of searching through his notes. Having ascertained the name of the state, he concluded: "I have absolutely no presidential ambitions, and neither does my wife -- Ethel Bird."
The relationship between RFK and President Lyndon Johnson was ugly and it was no secret:
He took the usual Kennedy refuge and made jokes. "It isn't true that President Johnson and I didn't get along during the time I was Attorney General and he was Vice President," he would say. "We began the Kennedy Administration with the best of relations, close, friendly, cordial -- and then, as we were leaving the inaugural stand ...". Or: "President Johnson and I are very courteous and correct in our correspondence these days. I address my letters to him at the White House and he writs to me at the Senate Office Building. Sometimes he only uses the initials."
....Speaking in March at the Gridiron banquet he offered his own version of the session with Johnson: "We had a long serious talk about the possibilities of a cease-fire, the dangers of escalation and the prospects for negotiations. And he promised me the next time we are going to talk about Vietnam."
the man had boundless energy, mentally and physically and forced himself to overcome his own fears:
... physical danger almost seemed a compulsion. After Dallas the Canadian government named the tallest unclimbed peak in North America, 14,000 feet high, in honor of his brother. The National Geographic Society proposed that the remaining Kennedy brothers join in the first assault on Mount Kennedy. The plane crash eliminated Edward. Robert reluctantly -- he hated heights -- decided in the March 1965 that he would climb Mount Kennedy himself....
Kennedy was rash but not reckless. Two veterans of the successful Mount Everest expedition of 1963, James Whittaker and Barry Prather, came with him. Whittaker asked Kennedy what he had been doing to get in shape for the climb. Kennedy said "Running up and down the stairs and hollering 'help'"
OK, now hopefully you've had a laugh, I should end with something serious that maybe you haven't read. This is from his son Maxwell's book "Make Gentle the Life of this World" (given to me by our own CCNer StvyY19) and I like to think of it as a message to the US today. It also explains why RFK (like Wes Clark) has admirers outside as well as within the United States.
"We are protected from tetanus by the work of a Japanese scientist, and from typhoid by the work of a Russian. An Austrian taught up to transfuse blood, and an Italian to protect ourselves from malaria. And Indian and the grandson of a Negro slave taught us to achieve social change without violence.
We all owe our very existence to the knowledge and talent and effort of those who have gone before us. We have a solemn obligation to repay that debt in the coin in which is was given: to work to meet our responsibilities to that greater part of mankind which needs our assistance, to the deprived and the downtrodden, the insulted and the injured. Those men who gave us so much did not ask whether we, their heirs, would be American or South African, white or black. And we must in the same way meet our obligations to all those who need our help, whatever their nationality or the color of their skin...
No longer can a spectator be certain that the blood and mud of the arena will not some day engulf him as well. No longer can any people be oblivious to the fate and future of any other. And no longer can any nation, no matter how wealthy or well-armed, be as free as it once might have been to ignore a far-off war or warning, to shrug off another nation's crisis or criticism, or to defy the concerns or the contempt of mankind."
Well, if you've gotten this far, then you really should know that at 8pm EST there's a C-Span broadcast of RFK 80th Birthday Commemoration Reception according to the RFK.org website.
Happy birthday Bobby. What a different place the US could've been
Yes, I did laugh out loud, and at the end cried... It prompted me to crack open a Harp Lager and drink a toast to what might have been... and then I'll drink another toast to what yet may be our greatest hope!
Thank you for this beautiful post!
Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right. - Hunter/Garcia
blogging and watching the tributes on C-Span.
Cheers, across the oceans, jen.
You'd be taking them to the Better Business Bureau if you bought a washing machine the way we went into the war in Iraq. Wes Clark, CNN Aug 17 2003
Kucinich speaking now. Describes RFK as a poet and philosopher. More than just a politician. Kucinich says he made a decision to step forward based on the life of Robert Kennedy. "His clarion call for social and economic justice resounds still."
"Robert Kennedy's moral challenge is timeless"
His words are relevant now, Perhaps even more than ever:
"Come my friends, it is not too late to seek a newer world"
Surreally enough, Joe Scarbrough was also a speaker a short while ago. Said that Schlesinger's book inspired him. And that RFK's speech to the youth of South Africa is one of the greatest speeches of all time. He says RFK had a message that resonated across the parties.
Hillary is next to speak. Grrrr.
You'd be taking them to the Better Business Bureau if you bought a washing machine the way we went into the war in Iraq. Wes Clark, CNN Aug 17 2003
Kucinich! I just tuned in and it's Kerry...
Interesting about Scar. I saw a brief bit of his show the other night and he was actually making sense! Course I was only there for a couple minutes! LOL!! I was marveling at his "new" hairstyle. LOL!!
Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right. - Hunter/Garcia
She seems too young. What am I missing here?
Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right. - Hunter/Garcia
so I don't know. And on my sad little dialup connection the pictures are so blurry I can't even tell who's old and who's not.
You'd be taking them to the Better Business Bureau if you bought a washing machine the way we went into the war in Iraq. Wes Clark, CNN Aug 17 2003
'Eight of the 10 surviving children – David Kennedy died of a drug overdose in 1984 – granted interviews for this article: Kathleen, 45, Joseph, 44, Robert, 43, Courtney, 40, Kerry, 37, Christopher, 33, Max, 32, and Rory, 28. Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, 39, and Douglas Harriman Kennedy, 30, declined to be interviewed.'
I can reveal:
... Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, who ran the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights, and then the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center, for nearly a decade. She was known to be perpetually bursting with detailed information about a broad ranges of causes, cornering one congressman on juvenile justice one minute, and another on child labor in India the next.
Because of her work at the memorial that bears his name, she was the sibling most directly linked professionally to her father, keeping alive "the spirit," as she said, and the mythology.
But she said: "There was no sense of burden, like 'I now must carry on Robert Kennedy's unfinished work.' Absolutely not." ..."
So yes, she is the daughter. The article that ellen has linked, btw, is full of detail I didn't know about the RFK children. Well worth a read.
You'd be taking them to the Better Business Bureau if you bought a washing machine the way we went into the war in Iraq. Wes Clark, CNN Aug 17 2003
I posted a blog on RFK, then screwed that up..and had to do it again...so will post here!
What would Robert Kennedy say about 2005?
PLANET'S MORAL LEADERSHIP IS AT STAKE, AGAIN
By Joseph A. Palermo
On Nov. 20, 1967, when Robert Francis Kennedy celebrated his 42nd birthday, the country was enflamed in a costly war in Vietnam; the riots of the previous summer had exposed the depth of poverty in America's cities; and the Democratic Party, like the country itself, was bitterly divided.
Today, on the eve of what would have been Robert F. Kennedy's 80th birthday, we find the nation facing a similar set of problems. The war in Iraq is growing more violent each day with no foreseeable finish; Hurricane Katrina laid bare the poverty that afflicts 36 million of our citizens, (while the federal government's lackadaisical response exposed latent racism); and the Democratic Party, like the country as a whole, is polarized over the fundamental issues of the United States' role in the world, and the government's responsibility to alleviate the suffering of the poor.
In June 1967, Kennedy had visited several European capitals; he sensed ``a decline'' in U.S. ``leadership around the world because of the war in Vietnam.'' Later, when he announced his candidacy for president, Kennedy said that ``the moral leadership of this planet'' was at stake.
The current rise of anti-Americanism internationally -- the result of the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, the torture of detainees, and the violations of the Geneva Conventions in the prisons of Guantánamo -- have dishonored the United States, and shows the moral leadership that was so important to Kennedy has been diminished.
On Feb. 8, 1968, Kennedy said of South Vietnam: ``We have an ally in name only. We support a government without supporters. Without the efforts of American arms, that government would not last a day.''
Does anyone today truly believe that the current government in Iraq could exist without the buttressing of American troops?
Kennedy's infusion of truth into the war debate followed three years of lies and misinformation from the Johnson administration. Kennedy had the courage to admit he had been wrong about the prospects for success in Vietnam.
The Democrats who initially backed the Iraq war should concede their past mistakes and dedicate themselves, as Kennedy once did, to ending what is clearly a misguided and debilitating foreign adventure.
In the mid-1960s, the riots in Los Angeles, Detroit and elsewhere exposed the poverty and racism of the inner cities. Kennedy recognized the underlying social conditions that produced the violence, and he called for vigorous anti-poverty efforts at the federal level.
``I do not believe our nation can survive,'' he said, ``unless we are able to accomplish a change which brings with it an acceptable way of life for all. If one segment of our society is impoverished, it impoverishes us all.''
Last month, in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina exposed many of these same social conditions that necessitate federal action, not only for reconstruction, but to address the underlying causes of poverty.
In 1968, Kennedy was the chief foil to Richard Nixon's Southern strategy of fueling white backlash and dividing African-Americans and low-income whites. Since 2000, George W. Bush and Karl Rove have deliberately divided the country for short-term political gain. Kennedy tried to create a counterweight to the politics of polarization that now dominate our political discourse.
Perhaps the most useful lesson we can learn from Kennedy is the value he placed on the role of each individual in shaping a better world.
``Few will have the greatness to bend history itself,'' he told a mixed-race audience in South Africa, ``but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. . . . Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples can build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.''
The progressive forces in our country are only as strong as the citizen-activists who form their ranks.
``Don't tell me what you cannot do,'' Robert Kennedy used to tell his staff, ``Tell me what you can do!''
Democrats and Progressives might take up Kennedy's challenge, each of us, working together, to end the divisions and build a more just society; or, as Kennedy used to say, quoting the ancient Greeks, ``to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.''
JOSEPH A. PALERMO (jpalermo@csus.edu) is the author of ``In His Own Right: The Political Odyssey of Senator Robert F. Kennedy'' (Columbia, 2001), and is currently writing a biography of Robert Kennedy for the Library of American Biography (Longman). He is an assistant professor of American history at California State University-Sacramento.
print or license this
you're among friends. Nobody thinks you've screwed up. Thanks for crossposting.
As for the incomplete first post you made I think you can go back and kill it. If you go to your own blog and open the post up there's an edit tab near the top of the page. I think you can delete everything in the post from there if you want. I've not tried doing it before, but I know you others have deleted posts from their own blogs, so it is possible.
You'd be taking them to the Better Business Bureau if you bought a washing machine the way we went into the war in Iraq. Wes Clark, CNN Aug 17 2003
Never killed anything before...hope everyone votes this up. I think RFK's vision for the future is so much like Wes Clark. Hope you read my article I found...Wow...thanks for posting this blog.
Now to get it voted up!!!
Dee! Much was missing from your blog I see now! LOL!! Some of RFK's words quoted in that article remind me of Obama!
Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right. - Hunter/Garcia
Sure reminds me of Wes Clark and his visionary ability for the future. I think RFK and Wes have the same powers. People love them when they truly listen...
It's interesting how similar a situation our country is in now isn't it? The difference now is the media is so consolidated and controlled by corporate power I worry they will once again ignore General Clark... or I should say continue to ignore. But hopefully more and more people will start joining in here and our voices will be heard with or without MSM!!
Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right. - Hunter/Garcia
The Similarity of Irap as it was in the 60's in VN. Hopefully Wes will be our RFK. Ya think!!! I think Wes is flying under the radar, intentionally. He wants to get out to the people. I know he has clout with many on the Hill Now. Just my thoughts. I don't want the media to start on him YET, as they are Hillary. I don't think thats a good! He is doing the right thing, by staying undercover, and getting people to know him and his ideas...! Its too early. And to much going on.
for posting your article here and I had the chance to read it. You read my thoughts and I notice many similarities between RFK and our General in how they feel about our country and people and the energy they both possess and their willingness to listen to others. I celebrate the man, Robert F. Kennedy and his legend and I celebrate the presence of one, Wesley K. Clark, who I hope will become our President in the future and bring us hope and peace once again.
Barb
Thanks for starting this blog. RFK was my first "political hero" even though I didn't even know of his existence until he was gone for years...I've been fascinated with him ever since and have read eveything I possibly could about him. I've always felt cheated that I never got to see or meet him...
I believe my first post on the original Clark blog was about how supporting Wes Clark made me feel how I believed those who supported Bobby must have felt. After I found our General, for the first time, I started to lose a little of that "cheated" feeling.
"The mark of leadership is not to standup when everybody is standing, but rather to actually stand up when no one else is standing" - Pulitzer Prize winning author Samantha Power, introducing Gen Clark
began her political life by stuffing envelopes for Kennedy. It was an inspiring period. I was watching TV when Robert Kennedy was shot. It was such a shock. Two borthers gunned down terminating their service to our country. It was a black time.
And our time now is not so hot. Lisa gives voice to this:
http://ericmassa.clark-post.com/LisaDuckett.html
Noel
about those times Noel, is that we will never ever know what really happened... not a good indication of everything we're seeing happen now and all the unanswered questions, ya know? :(
Once in a while you get shown the light, In the strangest of places if you look at it right. - Hunter/Garcia
and I'm so glad I didn't miss reading this Phoebe. I love everything about him (as you well know) and especially his humor. Thank you for posting this on such a memorable occasion. I am presently watching CSPAN and really enjoying the speeches also. Thanks for the reminder too. I had been watching for news of it. I'm so happy you enjoy that RFK book. :)
Barb
and was thinking about you the whole time! I thought it was a wonderful way to remember a truly great American. I was especially surprised at Joe Scarborough's speech. That guy is like a Jekyll & Hyde. Just when you think you don't want to hear another word he has to say, he turns around and comes out with something that makes you think, "Hmm...."
Kucinich was rather dramatic, wasn't he? That whispering at the end really struck me as poignant.
Anyway, "Bobby, we hardly knew ye......" Happy Brthday, wherever you are!
I too was very surprised at Joe Scarborough's speech last night. I didn't know he had it in him. Thanks Reggiesmom for bringing that to light.
Thank you, Phoebe, this is wonderful. I do stop and think how different this country would be if he had become President.