The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [170]
Bobby did not struggle over the transcendent question of ends and means that bedeviled the majority of Zionists, who, as much as they wanted a Jewish state, disapproved of the terrorism of some of their brethren. “Met officers in the Irgun who were responsible for blowing up the train and killing 50 British soldiers as well as the blasting of King David Hotel,” he wrote in his diary, disclosing not an iota of disapproval. “They’ll fight any soldiers no matter what uniform they are wearing if they attempt to administer their homeland.”
In the series that Bobby wrote for the Boston Post, he portrayed the conflict as a tragic struggle between two peoples fighting for what they believed was right. They were voting with their own blood. He had a far lower opinion of American Jewish leaders who spoke from a sanctuary of safety.
“Many of the leading Jewish spokesmen for the Zionist cause in the U.S. are doing immeasurable harm for that cause because they have not spent any or sufficient time with their people to absorb their spirit,” he wrote in a passage cut from the published article. Bobby might admire the intrepid spirit of Israeli Jews, but he still shared some of his father’s stereotypical views toward American Jews.
Bobby concluded his series with a call to arms for the rest of the world. “I do not think the freedom-loving nations of the world can stand by and see ‘the sweet water of the River Jordan stained red with the blood of Jews and Arabs.’ The United States through the United Nations must take the lead in bringing about peace in the Holy Land.”
Bobby was not deeply versed in the terrible ironies of history. He looked at the world not to understand it as much as to change it, and as a young man at times he did not see that understanding is the beginning of change. He took dangerous and simple pleasure in the profession of rhetoric.
In the struggle against communism, he considered dispassion a pallid and dishonorable excuse, a pathetic sheathing of swords. He called for the protection of Cardinal Mindszenty, the imprisoned Hungarian priest, for “all eyes will now be turned our way to see if he will be betrayed, or if resistance to evil can expect support…. For if we fail, the fault as with Julius Caesar’s Romans will be ‘not in our stars but in ourselves.’ LET US NOT FAIL!”
Bobby’s rhetoric may have sounded strangely overwrought, but as a deeply religious, conservative Catholic, his sentiments were honest. These were largely Catholic countries, and American Catholics felt deeply about their religious brethren being unable to worship God as they chose. At mass on Sunday, priests conveyed an image of Eastern Europe as a gigantic Communist prison in which millions of people lived on their knees but could not pray on their knees.
For Bobby, as for most Catholics, Mindszenty was a symbol and martyr, a fearless, saintly priest who would not kneel down before the alien Marxist faith. That he was so tortured and debased that, emaciated and broken, he finally confessed to crimes against the Hungarian state did not diminish his martyrdom in the slightest, but only enhanced it. For Bobby, as for millions of his co-religionists, issues of faith and politics came together in their unyielding anticommunism, to them the transcendent issue of their time.
Those who stood stalwartly against evil deserved at least the wreaths of memory and Bobby traveled to Heppen, Belgium, where Kathleen’s husband, Billy Hartington, had fallen. Like Bobby, Billy had been a man who felt that he had to prove himself worthy of his heritage, yet however much he did was not quite enough. On the day