The First Amendment; Robert Kennedy

The First Amendment and the Free People Weekly examination of civil liberties in the media in the 1970s produced by WGBH radio Boston in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. The host of the program is the institute's director Dr. Bert it will be. My guest I'm very happy to say is Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. who has just written the outstanding biography called Robert Kennedy and his times which was published this year by Hooten Mifflin Company. Author Schlesinger was born in Columbus Ohio. He has served in a number of government posts including being the assistant to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I knew him first as a student. I read I guess the age of Jackson with the greatest possible interest Professor Schlesinger and learned an awful lot. I accept no criticisms of the age of Jackson's cases. Certainly outstanding. He's a Pulitzer Prize winner for history wrote a thousand days about the Kennedy period in the White House and

he's won the National Institute awards the International Institute of Arts and Letters. It's called Medal for his dream biography. He's also written the age of Roosevelt the vital center general the president and so on. He is currently professor Albert Schweitzer professor of the Humanities at the City University of New York. This is after a long career at Harvard and other places authors last year. Let me first ask you this crucial question. Having read with the greatest admiration your treatment of Robert Kennedy I find that in revealing him so well. You reveal Robert Kennedy to be the most enigmatic of the Kennedy brothers the most driven of the Kennedy brothers. Would you agree with that. Well I think those things are true. I think that he was a driven man but he was driven in a direction which

constantly enlarged his own personal understanding of what America was about. Enlarge his sympathies and enlarge him as as a public personality his whole life was an adventure in growth and self education came to an end only with his with his death. Now when he started out he started in Washington looking for something to do. And his father placed a call or wrote a letter to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy asking that he be made chief counsel was it turned out Joe McCarthy eventually made him sit in council and later became minority counsel for the Democrats. US Chief participated in the era of Joseph McCarthy's escapades as a committee chairman. With all that we remember he was aloof from the writing trade report. How do you account for that phase of his life when we learned later from your own writings that

the admiration of the family especially Joe Kennedy for Joseph R. McCarthy was very great and the Kennedys retained this feeling even though they thought he was a waste drawer and a scoundrel politically. Well it's not it's an odd thing Joe Kennedy was a man of highly ecumenical taste of Arias friendship as it was concerned his two closest friends to his closest friends in Washington in this period where as you say Joe McCarthy he was a great enemy of the Bill of Rights and Justice Douglas of the Supreme Court who was its greatest champion. But that was characteristic of Joseph Kennedy. John Kennedy did not have much use for McCarthy he was not happy that his brother went to work for the McCarthy Committee. Robert Kennedy like Joe McCarthy and continued to like him through his life and attended his funeral. I was among those who was a target of Joe McCarthy so naturally I regarded

Robert Kennedy in this period with considerable skepticism and distaste. But in justice to Robert Kennedy though he was involved with McCarthy personally he was not involved. We have come to know as McCarthyism. That's correct. He did not vote he did not question people's loyalty or smear them or call them communist agents or so on. He as a system counsel he was with had that position for a few months during which he cemented and wrote a report on the trade of allied countries or NATO allies with communist China during the Korean War. By that time he became very much dissatisfied with the investigative methods of the McCarthy committee and warned McCarthy about the direction these careless and hit and run investigations are leading and got out went to work for the Hoover Commission and then later on the Democratic minority got the power to appoint its own counsel he came back and worked with a Democratic minority and wrote the reports of a few of the critical reports of McCarthy after the famous are an

army McCarthy here and he was absolutely scrupulous about that later on in his career. He went on to the conflict with Jimmy Hoffa and the half hour was picked because he felt that the interstate cry was one of the big problems and union manipulations were a great problem. Malevolence in the union he picked or Jimmy Hoffa Hoffer of course was a tough guy. You say you like to tell everybody how tough he was he was. He was also very friendly on a social basis with Robert Kennedy. I found that a little difficult to understand that they could be peering at one another leering at one another contending with one another. And yet there was a certain respect there for the other's abilities. Why did Robert Kennedy pick on Hoffa and stay

with Hoffa was the subject. I found that very interesting because at the time I didn't pay much attention to the hearings of the Senate rackets Committee. I didn't think it very important. It wasn't seen in a kind of a by road there are other issues are more fundamental. In retrospect I think that the record's kind he was on to something terribly important and I found rereading the hearing is of great importance great interest. I think what they're getting at is a problem that is still perhaps even a more virulent form and that is the power and the unseen power of organized crime in this country and we're beginning to get some of the ramifications of that. Beginning to understand that in recent years candidate when the ruckus Committee began there is the first target of it was Dave back who was head of the Teamsters are they back was a crook he stole money from the union treasury. But he was not involved in organized crime and Hoffa in a sense. His people was he helped the

committee. They set it back up and got rid of him and Hoffa became president. Well Hoffa was a very dainty different fellow from Beck who's much abler and also brought organized crime into the union and brought the mob in and he used the mob and of course when the mob eventually disposed of Hoffa. But this Robert Kennedy thought was very sinister. He thought that Hoffa was betraying the union movement. But Bill by misusing funds particularly pension funds and by having his goons beat up Teamsters who are struggling for union democracy ends I'm going to free him free expression was set up for the new union to NewYork up phony unions in order in the song. And he became very much concerned with this and felt this wasn't an anti-Labor thing because in the other hand he in the same period developed a great admiration close relationship with Walter Ruther. But he thought the UAW was an honest Union that was responsive to the workers and the Teamsters had become as we know the

Teamsters to have remained ever since a racket in the sense I mean I don't mean to say the hopper did not do good things for for those members of the Teamsters because he was a very shrewd and effective bargain. But he also lined his own pockets and he also brought in the mob and that was a matter of great concern when he became attorney general he felt obliged to follow on the leads which he had come to his attention during the records committee and there were cases made that have selective prosecution the too much too many of the resources of the Department of Justice brought to bear on the single individual who eventually was convicted in two separate trials in 1064. On the other hand the resources department justices are limited and you have to make some kind of selection and sinew Hoffer was a worthy candidate for the attention to five minutes and then another phase of his career and I hate to skip along like this because the thousand pages of text I

had are amongst the most fascinating reading that I've done all year. I also got involved in a very wide variety of issues they both wrote but I'd like to move now to the social area of the area of civil rights and the thought keeps coming through the book you say in a dozen ways in different parts of the book that the Kennedys in general the three the three Kennedy boys that have been prominent American politics have the discipline to be Brahmans as it were and not to be. Local Boston politicians grown up. We also had the discipline to apply the knowledge of Harvard education and similar education. But when they came up against civil rights they didn't understand its scope or dimensions at first. They were absolutely confused and actually had to learn what other people learned I remember one exchange that you talk about one civil rights leader was complaining

and Kennedy Robert Kennedy came back and said But we came here by by steerage or something. And the answer was we came a long time before you why are you on top why do you care to comment about this learning process of the Kennedys in the civil rights era. Yes you're absolutely right I mean when John Kennedy became president and Robert Kennedy the attorney general. Neither had been exposed to the full force of what was going on. Their views are sort of good standard liberal views I believe in civil rights and so on but they had no sense even of the passion and frustration of the blacks or the intractability of Southern whites on this issue and they learned the hard way. Robert Kennedy had been involved when he was University of Virginia Law School head of the Law School Forum Larry. He invited Ralph Bunche to speak and was outraged to learn that this bunch had to speak in a segregated meeting and complained to the president and finally arranged that the meeting would not be segregated but

that was an individual incident for him he didn't see how deeply interwoven this was in the very fabric of our society. Well he came to understand that he came to understand that when he was faced with the problem of enforcing the laws interpreted by the Supreme Court in these matters and the more deeply involved he became the more he came to understand the anguish of the problem the more he came to see the problem from the point of view of the of the blacks he had put DSL it was called an experiencing nature a capacity to identify with the experience of others. And that and his insatiable intellectual curiosity led him on and changed him. But there are setbacks along the way. He had that famous and violent meeting with black leaders in 1963 and Shirley donnybrook you're a real donnybrook. But he learned from these things and eventually he was the one white politician who after the murder of Martin Luther King could safely walk in

the you know ghettos of northern cities you know he was the one who learned the most and yet there is an enigma in something else you wrote and that is that at the very time that the Kennedys are learning the most of beginning to come to grips with the civil rights problem the March on Washington and the I Have A Dream speech of Martin Luther King you Mark as the very final turn ending the liberals Association on a full time basis with blacks because blacks from that point on were in charge of their own social revolution. So at the beginning is the end is there's not any magic. Yes it is now but I think this is the March on Washington it was the last civil rights but wasn't really the last that would mark the high point of black white cooperation in the civil rights movement. After that the blacks really didn't felt they were on their own. I mean it was. Think in a sense they've done everything anyway but they used white allies if there had been

no black protest we would have made no progress in racial justice but black protests grew and grew and for a period after the middle sixties it became something which the blacks really determining themselves and dominating themselves. This really meant in relation to the civil rights movement yourself. Of course they were very dependent and worked very closely with allies in the federal government like Robert Kennedy the attorney general Lyndon Johnson and has cut some back and Ramsey Clark as attorney you know represented the Kennedy. The ministration White House represented a frustration of the liberal movement did not let the little blue brew movement was based on ideological premises and the black movement was based upon discrimination in the streets which was much more tangible thing. The ideology came out of it rather than spewing forth as a result.

Racism was so deep in penetrating the American character that blacks literally didn't have time for ideology and they did not have time for the political process or at least the political process had been so unresponsive that the only way they could make the political process deliver their constitutional rights was through organizing outside that process. The March on Washington before that the Freedom Riders in the city and after that the black power movement and this whole notion of organizing on the streets that was very threatening to politicians who are used to. Do you containing everything within the political process. But the wiser ones understood the it was inevitable and that it was a means of making the political process more responsive. Every experience of Robert Kennedy that enforced march with Justice Douglas when the Joe Kennedy insisted that he called mountain climbing with Justice Douglas Douglas took him along reluctantly and he made a little bit more of the man there. Every experience seems to have driven him on his very come through as a very introspective person not a

very popular one. Does this account for the fact that the distrust of Robert Kennedy now amongst those who write today is so great that they they actually flail at anybody who says as you do Robert Kennedy was deserving of commendations kudos for what he did in the long run. Yes I think that's part of it. When he burst on the national scene. He was in the role of counsel for congressional committees. And Mike I think in May the records committee he appeared to people in the prosecutorial role and seemed relentless hard driving tough merciless kind of fellow and not very attractive Association of McCarthy did not help. But I think that. And then toward the end of his life the themes of his last years of his life for president of occasion of the cause of the poor and the powerless in this country and

the sense that our system that the disparities in American society disparities of power and disparities of opportunity become intolerable and something ought to be done about it. He conveyed the sense when he said something ought to be done about it. He would do something about it. Well it gave great hope of obviously to the two of those people have been left out. But it also frightened threatened those who are perfectly satisfied with the existing distribution of power and opportunity. So I think that they're coming along. On top of his earlier reputation as as merciless hard driving prosecutor made him a feared figure but I suppose if you look back that the people in politics who are inspired great emotion inspire hate as well as love the most hated politician the sentry's Franklin Roosevelt and of the last and also the best loved Also Lincoln and also Jackson and someone like President Carter. No one hates him and no one loves him. I mean people regard him like him or mildly or

dislike him mildly but these he doesn't arouse intense emotion or Robert Kennedy was like FDR and Lincoln and Jackson. He aroused intense emotion of both love and hate. And it's very hard for a politician to be loved by someone without being hated by those who feel threatened by him. Where was he going at the end when he was killed at the end I got a picture of the labor leaders aside from George Meany. But many labor leaders thought that the Kennedy brothers were the enemy of the labor movement. Many anti-civil rights ors thought that they were the the very worst that it happened to American society was the tragedy of the lives of John and Robert Kennedy that they came upon the scene a decade before the scene was ready for them or perhaps today. Either Or perhaps I came on too late in the sense that the problems would have been more

manageable. A few years earlier I think in 1968 that Robert Kennedy was putting together a coalition of people like Martin Luther King and he lives from all the evidence he would have supported Robert Kennedy while Ruth would have and that he would have gotten the Democratic nomination I'm sure would have beaten Richard Nixon I think had he been elected president we would have gotten out of Vietnam in 1900 rather than 72 it would have meant that a lot of Americans and even more Vietnamese who are now dead would be alive. I think he would have taken much more direct action about the decaying cities and particularly bringing jobs and investment into the ghettos as he already had started to do in the Bedford-Stuyvesant project in New York. And obviously there would have been no Watergate so that the contours of American life would have been so much different had he been elected 60 I'll ask you the same type of question that I would ask if you were here say Swanberg these marvelous biographies of luce and Thomas and so on and so forth.

Is that why you did this to me. To explain just what you just said. This biography. Oh I did it yes and I did it because I thought that among the political leaders of the 50s and 60s the Robert Kennedy was the most responsive to the winds of change they were sweeping this country and if one wanted to understand that very strange turbulent and now very remote decade of the 60s he was one way of getting at it because the winds of change changed him and I think that the main themes of his life and his last years is concerned with the people who are left out. You know our abundant society and the belief that we could do something about it as he used to say these conditions are unacceptable. And he was sure that in a rich country like ours we could do something to help the poor and the powerless. You have a better break in America these themes are not of fashionable themes of the moment. You don't hear people

talking about the poor the powerlessness they talk about government. This is to say as Carter said in his last State of the Union message government can't do very much to the consulate It enjoins the general attitude of acquiescence as if these things are there. Our fate. Well General Robert Kennedy believes the individual could make a difference that the individual acts of courage and belief he said are what shapes history. And I think that's a very important part of the American experience in the American tradition. And they were at the moment a weary and exhausted nation. And I believe that we will get back to that new course. What what other politician in American history do you think had a similar tragedy with absolutely different circumstances of course. Who who was ready and participated but got off before he got off in the midst of a raging fight like hell. You know I can't think offhand of any other presidents like Lincoln who

were and who were killed but they were killed after they had a chance for a major achievement. And Robert Kennedy did. Hell of a lot in very many areas in this short life. But he was denied the chance to try to carry out these policies from me for all the criticisms there are. There were men like Cesar Chavez and Eskimo leaders and black leaders who all he's described on one one side of the spectrum you have you called one that hard tough face that street fighter face that I saw in front of me and the other side. The picture used on the back of the book of him strolling along very intense obviously a brooding kind of man and there was something that people like Chavez who are not stupid. So I was being very basic He managed to convey to these leaders a

sense that no other American has brought extraordinary capacity to identify with the fate of unfortunate people. Now other political leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy were very much moved by the fate of the poor and the powerless. But they did not. In a sense they were external to it whereas Robert Kennedy was you know the Indians regarded him as an Indian in effect. Cesar Chavez regarded him as a brother. He could go in the ghettos in the inner cities as I was saying but no other white political leader could. Because somehow he he had that intensity of conviction and that this conveyed too for Lauren and desolate people that he really understood their predicament and was going to do something about it. Was he the kind of man in your view you knew him personally and so on who would go home at night and say What did I do wrong. Would he argue with his wife I thought.

And say gee I've got to solve this problem because it's all messed up. Is he was he that kind of a man who used to go home with his homework and try to straighten out the notes and come back again with a better answer. You know I think you know I think that John Kennedy was a man who was quite successful in compartmentalizing as well. His life he worked hard during the day but in the evening he liked to do something else and think about something else. And. Robert Kennedy very rarely escapes from his where he was not given due recrimination about the past I mean if something had been done it had been there was no point worrying about it. But the thing to do is to see if he made a mistake how to repair it and what to do tomorrow. But I think that the problems were with him night and day in the sense that John Kennedy or Franklin Roosevelt had a capacity to worry about the problems and put them aside. If I have a feeling that I would not. I have envied him

his role in that. He seems to have been on the one hand desperately trying to please his father and the family. And at the other hand desperately trying to please himself and his self chosen constituencies and I find that this is too much for any one soul to do to go across that driven range except in sort of half way sort of evolved. If you're going to make a play about Robert Kennedy you have a pro-law good little boy. From all accounts was a very gentle sweet nice kid. And the first act would be his father's son. I mean you know which I already do. When his father's love and approval he developed a kind of exterior of compass combativeness toughness but NASS of a hardness and that was the exterior that people saw when he first burst on the national attention in these congressional committees and the second act would be as fathers.

It would be John's brother because he came from an Irish-Catholic family and where the younger siblings assumed the most natural thing in the world to do was to support the the head of the clan Protestant families are much more individualistic families all the brothers would go off on their own this is different. So the repressed part of himself to win his father's approval. So he repressed part of himself to serve his brother and but then his father was disabled by a stroke. 961 his brother was murdered in 1963. That first devastated Robert Kennedy's same time paradox of the liberated. So the third act would be Robert Kennedy finally on his own and all the qualities of his character which he repressed in the service of his father and of his brother were able to come into coming to fruition. I think what you've done is establish the basic scenario guidelines for an extraordinary play perhaps you should do it.

I must say that within the constraints of time I don't know when I've enjoyed a conversation more and I've had more direct answers. I I think that that the the controversy raised by your book is not so much about the book. I think the book's absolutely splendid. But by our times and the fact that we are raged against the demons all of us trying to figure out our own lives in our own times. And so I thank you Arthur M. Schlesinger for talking about your book Robert Kennedy and his Times published by Mifflin Company for this edition. Bernard Rubin thank you very much. You're welcome. The First Amendment and a free people weekly examination of civil liberties and the media he denied himself and the program is produced in cooperation with the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University. Why didn't you GBH radio Boston which is solely responsible for its content.

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