Tag: Robert F. Kennedy

But underlying these tributes to the former attorney general, U.S. senator, Democratic presidential candidate and father of 11, also is an unmistakable connection to his Catholic faith. Inevitable references to Kennedy’s faith come up when mentioning his Irish Catholic family or his funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, but there also are plenty of anecdotes in biographies mentioning that he was an altar server or wore a St. Christopher medal. And then there are his speeches, which often echo Catholic social teaching without coming right out and saying it. Larry Tye, author of Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon in 2016, said Kennedy’s faith helped him as he grieved the 1963 assassination of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, noting that he kept a missal beside him in the car and thumbed through it to prayers he found consoling. And instead of just attending Sunday Mass, Tye said, Kennedy was “in the pew nearly every day. He described Kennedy as “assiduous in his practice of his Catholicism” and said his “values and work were certainly based significantly in his faith.” When asked to explain this more, he told Catholic News Service that when he and Kennedy were in New York City, Kennedy often stopped for a few minutes to go into a church to pray while Edelman said he stayed outside because he is Jewish. “Robert was the Kennedy who took his Catholicism most seriously. He attended Mass regularly, and prayed with his family before meals and bed,” said Jerald Podair, a history and American studies professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. As he put it in an email to CNS, Kennedy viewed his faith “as a summons to heal the world, making it a more equal and just place. An example was his strong support for Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers movement, one that itself was steeped in Catholic liturgy and morals.” Podair said Kennedy was drawn to the farmworkers’ cause - when few other mainstream politicians were - “largely because of its links to Catholicism.” He noted that when Kennedy sat with Chavez as he took Communion at an outdoor Mass after the end of his March 1968 hunger strike, it was a public expression of Kennedy’s firmly believed Catholic view that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.

Among those who opposed him politically but mourned him personally was one man who had recently crossed paths with him, Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s words to Ethel Kennedy were simple and heartfelt: “I know there is little anyone can say at such a time but if there is anything we can do to be of help in any way, please let us know. By that time, Reagan was governor of California and Kennedy was the U.S. senator from New York. He knew that Reagan had bested him. Reagan wrote that letter as Kennedy lay dying, he lost any zeal he had for making a presidential run that year. Fast-forward to another June 5, 13 years later in 1981. Ronald Reagan is president of the United States. Ronald Reagan reflecting on Bobby Kennedy: “I’ll tell you one thing. Goldwater asked Reagan if he thought Robert Kennedy could have been elected. He’d have made one helluva president.” And 23 years after that ceremony and conversation, President Reagan himself died at the age of 93 after a struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.

There was great shock at my house, because someone had shot Robert F. Kennedy. My father had put his career on hold to work as one of the New York senator’s presidential campaign aides, traveling to far-flung locales such as Nebraska and California for the primaries. By June 5, he was back home in the D.C. suburbs, watching the news from Los Angeles on our black-and-white television and, according to my memory, crying. RFK lingered about 24 hours before he died. I recall the sun was shining, incongruously, but I do not remember what we kids hoped to accomplish. It is likely but by no means certain RFK would have won the Democratic nomination against Johnson’s vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, the favorite of a still-powerful party establishment. A President Robert F. Kennedy might have exited Vietnam sooner than Nixon did; or, as a liberal more vulnerable to criticism from the anti-communist right than Nixon, he might not. Even if RFK had lost the 1968 nomination, he probably would have run again; at the very least Bobby, not his younger brother Ted, would have led the forces of Kennedy-style liberalism through the 1970s, 1980s and beyond. To ponder the contingency of these events is to trace them all, perhaps, to the moment 70 years ago when Arab nations refused to accept the partition of Palestine, fighting erupted between the new state of Israel and its neighbors, and a Palestinian Christian family, the Sirhans, fled war-torn Jerusalem to Jordan. In 1956, the United States admitted them as refugees, sponsored by American church groups.

Fifty years ago, on the day before St. Patrick’s Day, Robert F. Kennedy announced that he was running for the presidency of the United States. “I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies,” said Kennedy, who four years earlier had been elected U.S. senator from New York. For a brief period it seemed Bobby was the only one who could bring a deeply divided America together. Assassinations, riots, war, protests. In American Pastoral, his beautiful, chaotic novel about how these events tore apart the seemingly perfect marriage of an Irish American beauty queen and a Jewish American striver, Philip Roth refers to 1968 as the high-water mark of “the indigenous America berserk.” And Irish Americans -- from Bobby Kennedy to blue collar workers - -were central players. On the national stage, two Irish Americans -- Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy -- began the year as political outsiders, challenging the Vietnam War policy of President Lyndon Johnson, who would eventually shock the world by not even running for re-election. But out in the working class ethnic neighborhoods of New York and Boston and Chicago an anger was bubbling. Consider a small moment from Chris Mathews' recent book Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit. Kennedy was campaigning in Manhattan. Just five months after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, it was Richard Nixon who skillfully figured out how to tap into this anger, and move into the White House.