Robert F. Kennedy
| Robert F. Kennedy | |
Senator, New York
| |
| In office January 1965–June 1968 | |
| Preceded by | Kenneth Keating |
|---|---|
| Succeeded by | Charles Goodell |
| Born | November 20, 1925 Brookline, Massachusetts |
| Died | June 6, 1968 Los Angeles, California |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse | Ethel Skakel Kennedy |
| Religion | Roman Catholic |
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- "RFK" redirects here.
Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy (November 20, 1925 – June 6, 1968), also called "RFK", was one of two younger brothers of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and was appointed by his brother as Attorney General for his administration. As one of President Kennedy's most trusted advisors, RFK worked closely with the President during the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis. In 1964, after his brother's death, Kennedy was elected to the US Senate from the state of New York. He was assassinated shortly after delivering a speech celebrating his victory in the 1968 presidential primary of California at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California.
RFK's resounding legacy is in the domain of civil rights. Along with JFK he brought the first sense of justice for minorities to the White House - though, like many of their generation, the brothers were slow to grasp the monumental injustice of racism in America. "I won't say I stayed awake nights worrying about civil rights before I became Attorney General," he admitted, but "my fundamental belief is that all people are created equal." [1]
In the mid-1960s "Bobby" became the voice of a socially-conscious young America as he embraced the causes not just of black America, but of all minorities, as well as that of the impoverished in America and throughout the world.
Childhood and Education
Robert Kennedy was born Nov. 20, 1925, in Brookline, Massachusetts, the seventh of nine children, to Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. His father, the son of poor South Boston parents, was then already amassing a fortune in the stock market and associated speculative enterprises.
Home only at intervals, Joe Kennedy left the day-to-day management of the family to his capable wife, who was the daughter of John F. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, who served three terms in the House of Representatives and was Mayor of Boston.[2]
The year after Bobby's birth, the family moved to New York, first to Riverdale, then to Bronxville.
RFK graduated from Milton Academy in Massachusetts, then served in the United States Navy Reserve from 1944 through 1946, having completed officer training (V-12) at Bates College. He went on to attend Harvard, where he became a three-year letterman for the Harvard College football team, graduating in 1948. He then enrolled at the University of Virginia School of Law, and earned his degree in 1951. [3]Following law school, Kennedy managed his brother John's successful 1952 Senate campaign.
Career until 1960
Kennedy started his career working for Senator Joseph McCarthy, with whom he shared hardline anti-Communist views. [4] He served as Counsel with Roy Cohn to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations during the McCarthy Hearings of 1953-54. He resigned from this committee however, in March 1953, due to dissatisfaction with the basis of many of the investigations. As he stated, "I thought it was headed for disaster...Most of the investigations were instituted on the basis of some preconceived notion by the chief counsel or his staff members and not on the basis of information that had been developed....I thought McCarthy made a mistake in allowing the Committee to operate in such a fashion, told him so and resigned." [5] When the Committee's Democratic senators offered Kennedy a seat on the Committee as minority counsel, he promptly accepted, over McCarthy's objections. Ultimately, McCarthy was censured by the Senate in December, 1954.
RFK soon made a name for himself as the chief counsel of the Senate Labor Rackets Committee hearings, which began in 1956. In a dramatic scene, Kennedy squared off against Jimmy Hoffa during the antagonistic argument that marked Hoffa's testimony. Kennedy left the Rackets Committee in 1959 in order to run his brother John's successful Presidential campaign.
Attorney General
After the 1960 election, RFK was appointed Attorney General by President Kennedy. As Attorney General, he continued his crusade against organized crime, often at the resistance of FBI head J. Edgar Hoover. Though organized crime as we know it had existed in America at least since Prohibition, Hoover claimed it was merely a figment of the collective imagination. He was forced into an about-face in 1962, when Kennedy, now US Attorney General, exposed the existence of a national crime syndicate and began ardently prosecuting its members.[6] Convictions against organized crime figures rose by 800% during his term. His book The Enemy Within presented the results of his initial investigations.
Kennedy also began to seriously enforce civil rights and equal opportunity for African-Americans. He expressed the Administration's commitment to civil rights during a 1961 speech at the University of Georgia Law School: "We will not stand by or be aloof. We will move. I happen to believe that the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision was right. But my belief does not matter. It is the law. Some of you may believe the decision was wrong. That does not matter. It is the law."
In September 1962, he sent U.S. Marshals and troops to Oxford, Mississippi to enforce a Federal court order admitting the first African American student, James Meredith, to the University of Mississippi. The Office of Civil Rights also hired its first African American lawyer, Thelton Henderson and began to work cautiously with leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Robert Kennedy saw voting as the key to racial justice and collaborated with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to create the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which helped bring an end to Jim Crow.
He also played a crucial role as a facilitator and as an unquestioned confidante of the President in the strategy to avert war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Through his far-sightedness, the United States decided to blockade Cuba instead of initiating a military air strike that might have led to nuclear war. His second major contribution during this crisis was his contact with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and subsequent negotiations with the Soviet Union to remove the missiles. [7]
The Assassination of JFK
The assassination of President Kennedy, which happened two days after Robert Kennedy's 38th birthday, was a brutal shock to the world, the whole nation, the Kennedy family, but especially to Robert. The assassination plunged him into a deep grief that amounted virtually to melancholy. His face was a mask; sadness enveloped his eyes; he seemed to have shrunk physically, and he often walked alone, his hands dug into his jacket pockets.[8] He mourned John's death and the fact that so much of the Kennedy vision and promise was left tragically and ultimately unfulfilled.
For the remainder of his life he seemed to live with thoughts of his brother never far from the surface of his mind. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4 1968, Senator Kennedy had just arrived in Indianapolis during a campaing stop. Spurning his advisors' recommendation to forego the speech, he informed a shocked crowd about the killing and offered the family his condolences, saying that he could understand their feeling of sudden loss because he himself had undergone a similar shock over his brother. He then spoke extemporaneously about King, appealed for hope and faith, and called for a reconciliation between the races. He concluded his speech with the words "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people." The audience, and the city itself, heeded Kennedy's wish.[9] It is an interesting note that in the aftermath of King's assassination, thousands of people were injured and 43 were killed in riots throughout the United States, but Indianapolis remained quiet.
At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Bobby was due to give a speech prior to the showing of a memorial film dedicated to the late President. As he was introduced, tens of thousands of delegates, party workers, young members, observing journalists and others broke into thunderous applause and an outroar of support for the nervous and emotionally fragile Robert, standing at the podium. He broke down and began to cry. Despite repeated appeals by him and the chairman of the convention, the audience did not stop their display of support for Robert. The applause continued for 22 minutes.
Robert mustered enough strength to deliver the speech, but broke down into tears backstage. He would remain personally devastated for many months. His elder brother's death meant that he was now the eldest living son of Joseph Kennedy, and the head not only of his own large family, but of his sisters, of the children of his brothers and sisters, and even of his younger brother, Ted Kennedy. Robert was now the young leader of the Kennedy family, which had been wracked by tragedies.
Senator from New York
Soon after President John F. Kennedy's assassination, Robert Kennedy left the Cabinet to run for a seat in the United States Senate representing New York. Though he was accused by the incumbent Kenneth Keating to be an arrogant carpetbagger, he emerged victorious in the November 1964 election.
During his three and a half years as a US Senator, he visited apartheid-ruled South Africa, war-ravaged Southeast Asia and he actively worked within America's gates.
By bringing white-owned businesses into partnerships with minority communities, Kennedy helped revitalize poverty stricken Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City with new housing and physical renovation, jobs and social services. But when he offered 'Bed-Stuy' as a model for nationwide action, he met with resistance not only from conservatives - who often agreed with him ideologically but were afraid of alienating white constituents - but also from liberal Democrats who seemed more comfortable throwing money at problems than working hand in hand with local residents to solve them. [10]
To provoke action, he undertook fact-finding missions to some of the most impoverished areas in the United States, many of which seemed more akin to the Third World than to the America most of us know. One such trip took him to the poorest slums of Mississippi, accompanied by NAACP lawyer-activist Marian Wright. Wright initially believed Kennedy a mere publicity-seeker, but soon enough changed her mind. "He did things I wouldn't do," she reported. "He went into the dirtiest, filthiest, poorest black homes...and he would sit with a baby who had open sores and whose belly was bloated from malnutrition, and he'd sit and touch and hold those babies...I wouldn't do that! I didn't do that! But he did." [11]
As Senator, Robert endeared himself to African Americans and other minorities, such as Native Americans and immigrant groups. He spoke forcefully, aligned himself with leaders of the civil rights struggle, and led the Democratic party to pursue a more aggressive agenda to eliminate discrimination on all levels. Kennedy supported busing, integration of all public facilities, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and anti-poverty social programs to increase education, offer opportunities for employment and provide health care for millions of disenfranchised and despairing African-Americans.
After visiting Southeast Asia in 1967, he reversed his prior stance and called for a halt in further escalation of the Vietnam War. Making this decision was difficult for him, for he knew that President Kennedy had increased military support for South Vietnam, and had envisioned a major U.S. commitment to defending South East Asia and the Indochina region from Communist aggression.
Presidential candidacy and assassination
Kennedy's presidential campaign was powered by an aggressive vision for civil freedom and justice, the expansion of social development programs beyond Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society programs, active minority participation in American politics and outright opposition to the conservative attitudes of the American South and the aloof attitude of many Americans to serious social problems like poverty and racism.
Originally Kennedy had denied speculation that he was going to run for the Democratic nomination in 1968 against President Lyndon Johnson, who was qualified to run for a third term by the 22nd Amendment due to the fact that he served less than half of JFK's four-year term. After Johnson won only a very narrow victory in the New Hampshire primary on March 12, 1968 against Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, an anti-war candidate, Kennedy too declared his candidacy for the Presidency on March 16. On March 31, Johnson appeared on television to state that he was no longer a candidate for re-election.
Kennedy had gained immense popularity among American youth as he reached out to the disadvantaged and downtrodden. His campaign relied largely on his ability to run an emotional and intensely personal campaign. He challenged students on the "hypocrisy" of draft deferments, visited numerous small towns, and made himself available to the masses by participating in long motorcades and street-corner stump speeches, often in troubled inner-cities. He made urban poverty a chief concern of his campaign, which in part lead to enormous crowds that would attend his events in poor urban areas or rural parts of Appalachia.
Kennedy won the Indiana and Nebraska Democratic primaries, but lost the Oregon primary.
On June 4, 1968 he scored a major victory in his drive toward the Democratic presidential nomination when he won primaries in South Dakota and in California. After he addressed his supporters in the early morning hours of June 5 in a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he left the ballroom through a service area to greet supporters working in the hotel's kitchen. In a crowded kitchen passageway, Sirhan B. Sirhan, a 24-year-old Los Angeles resident, fired a .22 caliber revolver directly into the crowd surrounding Kennedy. Six people were wounded, including Kennedy, who was shot in the head at close range. Kennedy never regained consciousness and died in the early morning hours of June 6, 1968 at the age of 42.
A funeral mass was held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City on June 8, during which his brother, U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), famously eulogized him with the words, "My brother need not be idolized, nor enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to 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. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us, and what he wished for others, will someday come to pass for all the world."
Following the mass, Kennedy's body was transported by train to Washington, D.C., where he was buried near his brother, John, in Arlington National Cemetery. Senator Robert Kennedy's funeral is the only one ever to take place at night at Arlington National Cemetery. [12]
Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was a Palestinian Christian, born March 19, 1944, in Jerusalem, Palestine (now Israel), the fifth son in his family, which emigrated to the U.S. when Sirhan was 12 years old. The family belonged to the Arab-based society in the divided region, and as a child, Sirhan saw the state in which he lived blistered by upheaval – he saw entire villages dissipated in the Jewish-Arab war. Kennedy's support for Israel is believed to be a motivating factor in the assassination, though Sirhan has often claimed no memory of the incidence.[13]
Sirhan was convicted in a trial in which his guilt was never in question, only his mental state at the time of the shooting, and is currently serving a life sentence at California State Prison, Corcoran, for the crime. It is generally believed, but has never been proven ballistically, that Sirhan fired the shots that hit Kennedy. Unanswered questions in the poorly-run investigation have led many to believe that the official account of RFK's assassination is inconsistent or incomplete and that his death was the result of a conspiracy.
Personal life
In 1950, he married Ethel Skakel, who would eventually give birth to 11 children:
- Kathleen Hartington (b.1951)
- Joseph Patrick II (b.1952)
- Robert Francis, Jr. (b.1954)
- David Anthony (1955-1984)
- Mary Courtney (b.1956)
- Michael LeMoyne (1958-1997)
- Mary Kerry (b.1959)
- Christopher George (b.1963)
- Matthew Maxwell Taylor (b.1965)
- Douglas Harriman (b.1967)
- Rory Elizabeth Katherine (b.1968)
The last child, Rory, was born several months after her father's assassination.
Kennedy was always a loyal son, brother, and family man. Despite the fact that his father's most ambitious dreams centered around his elder brothers, Robert was fiercely loyal to Joseph, Joe Jr. and John. His competitiveness was admired by his father and elder brothers, while his loyalty bound them affectionately closer to each other than most brothers are. Working on the campaigns of John Kennedy, Robert was more involved, passionate and tenacious than the candidate himself, obsessed with every detail, fighting out every battle and taking workers to task.
Kennedy owned a home at the well-known Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts on Cape Cod but spent most of his time at his estate in Virginia, known as Hickory Hill, located just outside Washington, DC. His widow, Ethel, and his children continued to live at Hickory Hill after his death in 1968. Ethel Kennedy now lives full time at the family's vacation home in Hyannis Port.
His pallbearers included Robert McNamara, John Glenn, Averell Harriman, C. Douglas Dillon, Kirk Lemoyne Billings (schoolmate of John F. Kennedy), Stephen Smith (husband to Jean Ann Kennedy), David Hackett, Jim Whittaker, John Seigenthaler Sr., and Lord Harlech.
Honors
A number of honors have been bestowed upon Senator Kennedy since his death, one being renaming the D.C. Stadium in Washington, D.C. to Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in 1969.
In 1998, the United States Mint released a special dollar coin that featured Kennedy on the obverse and the emblems of the United States Department of Justice and the United States Senate on the reverse.
In Washington, DC on November 20, 2001, U.S President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft dedicated the Department of Justice headquarters building as the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, honoring RFK on what would have been his 76th birthday.
During the ceremony, President Bush stated that "Robert Kennedy was not a hard man, but he was a tough man and few have filled their term here with so much energy." "To millions who never knew him," Mr. Bush continued, "he's still an example of kindness and courage".[14]
Attorney General Ashcroft went on to say that the event was much more than a renaming. "We are rededicating the Justice Department to the cause he served." [15] [16]
Numerous roads, public schools and other facilities across the United States were named in memory of Robert F. Kennedy in the months and years after his death.
In an effort to not just remember the late Senator, but continue his work helping the disadvantaged, a small group of private citizens launched the Robert F. Kennedy Children's Action Corps in 1969, which today helps more than 800 abused and neglected children each year.
To keep the vision of RFK alive, his family and friends founded a living memorial in 1968. Today the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial is a nonprofit charitable organization that works to realize his dream of a peaceful and just world through domestic and international programs that work to empower the disadvantaged and oppressed, build our next generation of leaders, and tackle the toughest problems facing our society.
Every year, the RFK Memorial recognizes authors, journalists and human rights activists that have exposed injustice, often hidden from the view of mainstream society through the following programs:
The Center for Human Rights of the RFK Memorial partners with human rights activists who, through years of dedication to righting social injustices in over 20 different countries, have made progress toward ending human rights violations.
The annual RFK Human Rights Award honors individuals who, at great risk, creatively and non-violently confront human rights violations. To date, 36 RFK Human Rights Award Laureates have been honored. Nominations are currently closed for the 2005 RFK Human Rights Award.
The Speak Truth to Power program seeks to bring human rights activists and their work into contact with ever-increasing audiences. The program grew out of Kerry Kennedy's book into a moving play, a stirring photographic exhibition, a PBS documentary film, and an educational packet.
Nicknamed the "Poor Man's Pulitzer", the RFK Journalism Award is given annually to honor professional and student journalists, photographers and cartoonists who ?prod our consciousness? and bring attention to the lives of the disadvantaged throughout the world.
The RFK Book Award, is awarded to the book which "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes." [17]
Writing
Considered an eloquent speaker generally, RFK also wrote extensively on politics and issues confronting his generation:
- The Enemy Within: The McClellan Committee's Crusade Against Jimmy Hoffa and Corrupt Labor Unions (1960)
- To Seek a Newer World (1967)
- Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (1969)
Quotes
- "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly"
- "But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?"
- "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation."
- "Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital, quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change."
- "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were and ask why not." (RFK quoting Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw)
- "History has placed us all, black and white, within a comon border and under a common law. All of us, from the wealthiest and most powerful of men to the weakest and hungriest of chidren, share one precious possession: the name "American." It is not easy to know what that means. But in part to be an American means to have been an outcast and a stranger, to have come to the exiles' country, and to know that he who denies the outcast and stranger among us at that moment also denies America." (Hallmark, 1969, 31)
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- DiEugenio, James and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations (2003).
- Hilty, James M. Robert Kennedy: Brother Protector (1997), vol 1 to 1963.
- Schlesinger Jr. Arthur M. Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978).
- Shesol, Jeff. Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade (1997),
- Thomas, Evan. Robert Kennedy: His Life (2002)
- RFK Biography
- RFK (Documentary Film from the Public Broadcasting Service, USA)
- Hallmark Editions Robert F. Kennedy: Promises to Keep, page 31, 1969 Kansas City, Missouri ISBN87529-008-6
External links
- Robert F. Kennedy: Remarks on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
- Robert F. Kennedy Memorial
- Robert F. Kennedy Democrats Albany, New York
- American Experience: RFK — From PBS
- American Experience: RFK People & Events — From PBS
- Reopen the RFK Assassination Case-Sirhan is Not Guilty
- Robert F. Kennedy Commemorative Silver Dollar Fact Sheet — From the United States Mint
- The Presidential Promise of Robert F. Kennedy
- Ron Schuler's Parlour Tricks: Bobby
- IMDB entry on Robert F. Kennedy
- Edward Kennedy eulogy to Robert Kennedy (text and audio)
| Preceded by: William P. Rogers |
Attorney General of the United States 1961–1964 |
Succeeded by: Nicholas Katzenbach |
| Preceded by: Kenneth Keating |
U.S. Senator from New York 1965–1968 |
Succeeded by: Charles E. Goodell |
cs:Robert Kennedy de:Robert F. Kennedy es:Robert Kennedy eo:Robert F. Kennedy fa:رابرت کندی fr:Robert Francis Kennedy ga:Robert F. Kennedy it:Robert Kennedy he:רוברט קנדי nl:Robert F. Kennedy ja:ロバート・ケネディ no:Robert F. Kennedy pl:Robert Kennedy fi:Robert F. Kennedy sv:Robert Kennedy
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