The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [177]
“I can’t do that,” Davis insisted.
“You have to,” he insisted. “I’m Bob Kennedy.” That was the ultimate argument and it showed Mary’s gaucheness that he should even have to mention his name when it was so plainly obvious. The secretary still refused to type the paper and Bobby kept repeating his arguments. The woman still wouldn’t give in.
Bobby was a man trying to open a door with a key that had always worked before. But as much as he turned it in the lock, he was left standing in the cold. In the end, Mary called in Jack as the arbiter, who told his brother forcefully that his secretary had other matters to attend to besides typing his term paper.
Most of the papers that Bobby wrote during law school gave no scope to his mind and emotions, but in one major essay on the Yalta conference he wrote with the moral certainty of a man whose palette contained only two colors, black and white. “What is the rationalization of this most amoral of acts whose potential disaster has long since become for us present day catastrophe,” he asked rhetorically. “The God Mars smiled and rubbed his hands.” Bobby believed that staying “friendly toward Russia” was “a philosophy that spelled disaster and death for the world.” Even if Soviet armed might had allowed the Russians to march into Central Europe, “there would have been a great difference between Soviet stooge regimes set up by the Red Army and those strengthened by the acquisence [sic] and endorsement of the western powers. The former would have enjoyed no shred of moral authority.”
Bobby cared about politics, not law, and he took the Student Legal Forum at Virginia and turned it into a lecture series that brought in a number of important speakers, including his own father. Joe could have been a memorable teacher. He was so provocative, so perverse in his thinking, that he would have forced his students to reflect and to defend themselves.
Speaking in December 1950 during the middle of the Korean War, when a narrow patriotism had quelled most voices of discontent, he daringly said that the United States should pack up and leave Korea and all of Asia. He asked bluntly what business we had supporting “Mr. Syngman Rhee’s concept of democracy in Korea.” He seethed at the way the United States supported the French colonial regime in Indochina. And he didn’t care if all Europe became Communist. “The more peoples that are under its yoke, the greater are the possibilities of revolt.”
Bobby loved this father who spoke such unparsed words and struck down conventional wisdom with a flick of his rhetoric. Bobby mimicked his father’s bluntness and copied his verbal flourishes, but the two men did not see the world the same way. Joe sought to pull America back from all the sordid complexities of the rest of the world to live in a sanctuary of peace and civility. Bobby wanted to move aggressively forward. Unlike his big brothers, Bobby had not seen war. Despite Joe Jr.’s death, Bobby did not fully understand the wages of heroism. He saw politics in part as a venue for courage, where men stood up and proved the worth of themselves and their nations.
Hypocrisy is the grease of politics, but Bobby used this lubricant only sparingly. When he invited the distinguished black diplomat Ralph Bunche to speak, Bunche replied that he would not speak before a segregated audience, a stipulation that Bobby surely must have expected. Bobby knew, then, that he would be confronting a Virginia law that prohibited blacks and whites from sitting together in public meetings. Bobby called together representatives of student government and asked them not simply to put forth a resolution calling for an integrated audience but to sign the document.
The students were all for integrating the speech, but they blanched at putting their names on a document that might be widely publicized, bringing rebuke down on their families.