Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit - Softcover

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Chris Matthews is the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry that Shaped Postwar America, and Hardball: How Politics Is Played, Told by One Who Knows the Game. Matthews was a presidential speechwriter and top aide to Speaker of the House Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. For a generation he hosted Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, which is now exclusively on Substack.

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Bobby Kennedy

CHAPTER ONE

ALTAR BOY

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

The immense wealth and security of the Kennedy family in twentieth-century America must be measured against the horrid poverty of their immediate ancestors. For those who lived, worked, and died on the subsistence farms of mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, life itself hung on the annual harvest of a single crop—the potato, which was the basic food for much of the country. A family had to survive an entire year on those pulled up the previous fall. If a new crop failed, as it did in what’s known as the Great Famine, the people starved.

Over a period of years beginning in 1845, owing to a spreading blight, a million tenant farmers and their families, making up much of the country’s rural population, died of both hunger and disease. They were not Ireland’s only loss. More than a million others fled across the Atlantic, through what poet John Boyle O’Reilly would call “the bowl of tears.”

The English government—at its head Queen Victoria, who’d assumed the throne eight years before at the untested age of eighteen—gave little sympathy, less help. In February 1847, it was announced in the House of Commons that fifteen thousand people a day were dying in Ireland. The young monarch “was so moved” by the ongoing tragedy, as a sarcastic Robert Kennedy would remark more than a century later, “that she offered five pounds to the society for Irish relief.” All official assistance issuing from London came, in fact, with a terrible condition: any family accepting it must forfeit its land.

The occasion on which Bobby recalled that history was St. Patrick’s Day 1964, in the Hotel Casey’s ballroom in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The hundreds seated before Bobby, all wearing formal attire, were proud members of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick of Lackawanna County. It was a significant appearance, the first speech Bobby had agreed to give in the shocked, grieving months after the killing of his brother in Dallas. Many listening were soon weeping openly.

What Bobby wanted was for the crowd, so close to him in heritage, to hear him explain his and his lost brother’s commitment to ending another injustice. He wanted to engage them on an emotional level, connecting their shared past to that of another disadvantaged people: the African Americans. He reminded them how the Irish once had poured into America, escaping the heartlessness of their historic British rulers only to be confronted by the New World’s dismissal of their basic humanity.

In Boston, for example, there were NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs everywhere to greet those seeking jobs. “Our forefathers,” he pointed out, “were subject to every discrimination found wherever discrimination is known.” Now, with Congress engaged in landmark legislation aimed at ending segregation in its Southern strongholds, Bobby was raising the well-known specter of Irish servitude and English disregard to enlist support for it.

It was not the Kennedys’ only experience with victimhood. Throughout his life, a very different sort of Irish legacy—one he would never speak of yet would invoke in ways stronger than words—had been carried across the Atlantic by his forebears. This, too, had long been haunting the third son of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. In much of Ireland, tradition had dictated that a farmer, facing retirement, would divide his land among his sons. In County Wexford, on Ireland’s southeast coast, where the economy was better off, such rural inheritance was handled differently. There, the father kept his farm intact, awarding it when the time came to the son born first. It was this rule of primogeniture, carried on by Joseph Kennedy—already two generations settled in America—in this country that would leave its invisible stain on the young Robert. He was the Irish son who would not get the land.

Bobby’s great-grandfather Patrick Kennedy, a third son himself, had arrived in Boston’s North End in 1848. In this city the Kennedys stayed and prospered until 1927 when Patrick’s grandson Joseph P. Kennedy moved his young family to New York. Again, the reasons had to do with rejection, though now upon a rarefied level.

Joe Kennedy was, by almost every measure, an American success story. A graduate of the prestigious Boston Latin School, he’d gone on to Harvard, class of 1912, where he majored in economics. At age twenty-five, having maneuvered his way to control of a bank, one of whose major shareholders was his father, it was his boast that he was the youngest bank president in the country. Socially, he advanced rapidly amid the Boston Irish elite, marrying the daughter of Boston’s mayor, a colorful pol known as John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald. From there, Joe proceeded to new heights, reaching past Boston, wheeling and dealing his way in Wall Street, Hollywood, and beyond. Yet there was a Gatsby quality to him—his rise so meteoric—that his success always carried in equal measure awe and suspicion.

What separated Joe Kennedy from the other Irish around him were the high ambitions deep inside him, ones that couldn’t be satisfied by the usual scoreboard. He saw his destiny as grander than a law degree allowing him to put “Esq.” after his name, with an income just enough to secure a cottage on the Cape. “The castle or the outhouse,” he declared, “nothing in between.” What drove him in those early climbing years was what he was prevented from achieving—namely, social acceptance by the gatekeepers of the old New England order.

The doors shut to the Kennedy family had to do with their very name—such an obvious giveaway—and the background it proclaimed. Joe’s children—smart, lively, prosperous, attractive, well-schooled—were no different in their own eyes from their Protestant neighbors. They suffered from the basic handicap of their birth. Even if the rejections they faced were not those of employment opportunities slammed in the face of Irish immigrants seeking jobs, the reason was the same. The social gates closed to them were those through which the well-off if newly rich Kennedys believed they had a right to pass. It was not that they’d been given less in the new country; they wanted more.

So it was, in 1927, that the Kennedy family left Boston to settle eventually in leafy, moneyed Bronxville, a short drive from Manhattan. The move south from Massachusetts was hardly of the sort to earn sympathy from onlookers. The travails of the lace-curtain Irish clearly lacked the fearful drama of the exodus across the ocean. But that didn’t stop the Kennedys from their refrain. Joe Kennedy and his children would, for the rest of their lives, continue to recount the saga of being forced from their hometown to seek social refuge elsewhere, even if sympathy from listeners was in short supply. As a friendly skeptic, a fellow Irish American, later would put it, Joseph Kennedy was the only person driven out of Boston “in his own railway car.”

“Yes, but it was symbolic,” his son Robert...