CHAPTER NINETEEN
1980-1988
One of my first encounters with President Ronald Reagan was on St. Patrick's Day in 1981 during a small luncheon at the Irish embassy. We were seated at the same table. He was warm and friendly, full of laughter and small talk.
He told us of his recent meetings with Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whom he described as a rather lonely man; and Mexican president Jose Lopez Portillo, who showed Reagan his detailed doodlings of horses while expressing a desire to become a painter after his term ended.
When he was asked about British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan said, "I hope Senator Kennedy will excuse me here." Then the new president proceeded to tell us how Thatcher had advised him to enact his entire program at once; otherwise, opponents would nibble away at it. So, he told us, that was what he was going to do.
Toward the end of the meal, Reagan was asked whether he planned to travel much for the next three years, or whether he would host visitors. "You know, I just don't know the answer to that question," Reagan said. "I never get my schedule until five o'clock in the afternoon about what I'm going to do the next day. Here I am, the most powerful man in the country, and my wife has to tell me to take my coat off. But to tell you the honest to gospel truth, I really don't know what I'm doing the next day until I get my schedule at night."
Someone at our table said, "Well, you must have some idea."
Reagan responded, "Oh, I'm sure they've all got ideas about where to send me traveling or who I'm supposed to see; but, you know..." And then he just smiled and laughed. "To tell you the truth, they just come up and tell me about the trips."
The questioner at our table persisted. "Well, does this continue for the next three years?"
Reagan said, "Well, to tell you the truth, I don't even know the answer to that. I don't know if they do it more in the first year, or more in the third year. I'll have to find out more about that."
I realized at the outset that Reagan's ascendancy would require a fundamental adjustment of my role in the Senate. For the first time in my career I found myself in the minority party. More challenging still, many colleagues whom I'd counted as reliably liberal began to move rightward from the issues we had championed together over the years.
The action commenced almost at once. In February 1981, Reagan, laying the groundwork for his assault upon the tax code, announced his wish to consolidate eighty-eight federal programs into seven block grants targeted to states and communities. At the same time, he presented a plan to trim federal spending by 15 percent. He said he wanted to "reduce waste" and "give local governments more flexibility and control."
I thought this was nonsense, and came out on the attack. At a glance, it was clear that the powerful petroleum companies were going to be shielded from sacrifice, while the "flexibility and control" of individual families would shrivel, as states would continue their long-standing habits of spurning the poor, the helpless, and the hungry--especially hungry children.
I called on such allies as the liberal Republican Lowell Weicker on the Labor Committee to help me in opposing Reagan's block-grant proposals, and we were able to rescue a good deal of federal aid for health and education programs from dilution into block grants, though as in most other areas, we couldn't prevent slashes in spending.
Nor could we really stem the full onslaught of the Reagan revolution, though we fought on every battleground that opened up.
The administration's long-anticipated first full-scale offensive commenced in July, with the unveiling and swift enactment of the largest taxcut program in American history. Reagan's Economic Tax Recovery Act of 1981 called for $150 billion in tax reductions over the ensuing three years, and the president made clear that he would comb the federal budget for corresponding cuts in social (if not military) programs. I voted against this bill, one of a handful of senators to do so, and immediately launched out on a series of speeches and position papers excoriating its likely social effects. It was "scorched-earth economics," and would vitiate job training, elementary school education, unemployment compensation, cancer research, and science research in general, as it would cripple the National Science Foundation. Several months later, when these programs had indeed begun to achieve these effects, I groused to a meeting of Democratic loyalists that "Ronald Reagan must love the poor; he is making so many of them."
My objections to President Reagan's policies are far too vast to enumerate, but one of them seemed to me to be based more on science fiction than reality--and it required us to spend enormous sums of money that might otherwise have gone to addressing our domestic needs.
On March 23, 1983, the president took to the prime-time airwaves, raised the terrible specter of the Soviet Union launching a nuclear attack on America, and then asked, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack; that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?"
This was the world's introduction to Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, on which, a few weeks later, I hung the nickname by which it would be known: "Star Wars." (I admit it, I had gone to see the movie. At the time, I'd seen the evening as an escape from reality.) The idea was that "the scientific community" would "turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace" and "give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." Then we could change the course of human history.
I will avoid a long recitation of what the scientific community was expected to create--the extended-range interceptors and exoatmospheric reentry-vehicle interception systems and X-ray lasers and chemical lasers and neutral particle beams and the rest. Suffice it to say that although some of the technologies developed in the pursuit of this notion proved useful in other antiballistic missile applications, Star Wars never quite got off the ground. In 1993 President Clinton significantly trimmed back its scope and budget and renamed it the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (it's now known as the Missile Defense Agency). One legacy of the budget-trimming Reagan's vision is a continuation of space-based defense research that has totaled well in excess of one hundred billion dollars. But unlike the movie its nickname evokes, Reagan's Star Wars never really had a successful sequel.
On the question of American diplomacy in Northern Ireland, Reagan and I found a reason for some agreement. Reagan traced his ancestry to the village of Ballyporeen in County Tipperary, and visited there in the summer of his reelection campaign.
There was continued violence in Northern Ireland and, in my view, an underappreciation of the need to stop the violence on both sides of the conflict. We drafted a series of statements and got them out to Senate and House members of both parties, to keep their awareness high. Tip O'Neill was very strong. He began a series of Speaker's lunches, and invited President Reagan to attend. At the same time, a number of us persuaded the taoiseach (the Irish head of state) and other key officials that this was the time for them to come to the United States. One incentive was that they would have an opportunity to talk with President Reagan about policy, most likely at the Speaker's lunch. And so they began coming.
Reagan did not discuss policy at these lunches. That clearly was not his intention. The first few times he came, his aides told all of us very clearly that we were simply there to tell funny stories. Reagan would lead off by telling a couple of tales, and then Tip would call on people around the room. At first the president called only on the Americans at the table--our Irish guests must have wondered what they were doing there--but gradually as time went on, he would call on some of the Irish. They would dutifully tell their stories, but they'd also manage to sneak in some comments about the situation in the North.
Eventually those lunches evolved into occasions for serious talk about substantive issues. They became an important and significant framework for dialogue, and continue today. Just as important, the luncheons helped motivate Reagan to prevail on his close friend Margaret Thatcher to somewhat soften her stance toward the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. Thatcher had coldly responded to the Hunger Strike of 1981, but in1985, she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gave the Republic of Ireland a role in the affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time.
Tip O'Neill privately joked with me that he doubted Reagan was really Irish because he could never take any of his kidding. Once, Tip ran into the president at a party to celebrate the launch of USA Today. Tip said to him, "Why don't you give me a call sometime, Mr. President, and have me come on down? I'll straighten out all those mistakes that you've made in the past two years." Tip was just joking, but he could see Reagan's fists getting clenched.
On a personal level, I found myself among the countless people who enjoyed Reagan's company. In November 1981, I accompanied my mother and Ethel Kennedy to a White House visit with President and Nancy Reagan to express appreciation for a medal given to Ethel in memory of Bobby. In the car on the way over to the White House, I showed Mother a gift I intended to give to the Reagans, some of Jack's handwritten notes about football and politics. Mother was more concerned with knowing the whereabouts of the medal, in case she was asked any questions about it.
When we entered the Oval Office, the president said to Mother, "I'm sure you recognize the desk over there."
Mother said, "What about it?"
"That's President Kennedy's desk," Reagan said, "with the little doors where John played."
The president seemed genuinely interested in Jack's handwritten notes as I read parts to him. Then he said he had a gift for us too, but that it wasn't nearly as nice or personal.
He presented us with a jar of jelly beans, noting the improvements in the quality of the candy in recent years. They used to taste a little bit differently according to the colors, he told us, but now there were jelly beans that tasted like steak and peas and other sophisticated flavors. "You can reach into a jar and pick up a whole meal," he joked.
Mrs. Reagan added, "I wish we had bought stock in the company."
He lit up a room, and he could summon laughter, intentionally or otherwise. In fact, sometimes it was hard to tell whether his whimsical side was intentional. The best examples of this were the times we met in the Oval Office to discuss whether to protect the American shoe industry from imports, and ended up discussing... shoes.
The question of import quotas on consumer products was a critical issue in the 1980s. Massachusetts was among the states whose industries were struggling the hardest to compete with the flow of cheap foreign goods. Our shoe and textile industries especially were hurting.
I was involved in drawing up legislation to curb imports on these products. My bill, like the two-hundred-odd similar bills floating around Congress, was strongly opposed by the White House. Reagan in fact vetoed two quota bills during his presidency, even as shoe imports soared toward a 90 percent penetration of the market.
Several senators and I asked to speak with the president to press our cases, and he agreed to a meeting. About ten of us were on hand. John Danforth, the Missouri Republican whose state was hemorrhaging its small shoe plants and who favored some quotas, was present, as was the Missouri governor, Kit Bond. Strom Thurmond sat glowering as a defender of free enterprise to the bitter end. The president's response to our various presentations, everyone felt, could go far in determining the future of his administration's policy. And so we were all steeped in preparation.
The president strode briskly into the Oval Office with his famous armswinging gait after we'd all arrived, and took a seat right next to me. His aides told us that we would have half an hour, total, to present our cases. John Danforth was chosen to go first. He got only as far as, "Good morning, Mr. President." Reagan was looking me over. He said, "Ted, you've got shoes on, haven't you?" I replied, truthfully, "Yes, I do, Mr. President." He studied them and said, "They look like Bostonians." I glanced down at the shoes on my feet. Bostonians? I wasn't sure. Why hadn't I checked the label on my shoes before I put them on that morning? But the president was moving on ahead.
"Bostonians," he repeated. "That's incredible. Do they still make the Bostonian shoes around here?"
I had no idea, but I ventured, "I believe so, Mr. President."
Reagan seemed to want hard facts. "Does anybody know where the Bostonian shoes are made?" he demanded of the gathering at large.
Kit Bond cleared his throat and said, "I know they produce shoes just like them down in Missouri."
Someone else said, "You know, you can get the best shoes, shoes that are better than those shoes, if you come on up to Maine. They've got good shoes up there."
Reagan said, "They do have good shoes up there, don't they? Do they give them a real good polish?"
"Yes, Mr. President, they give them a good polish."
Reagan said, "You know, my father owned a shoe store, and I used to sell shoes. So I know all about them. To measure the length of the foot, you go across the top, like this." He began to demonstrate how to measure people's feet for shoes. "You can also put them in the foot measurer, and you turn the knob like this until you know exactly what size shoe will fit. And then to break them in, you take the heel in one hand, and the toe in the other, and you push toward the middle. That gets the leather to soften and bend, you see."
He went on in this vein for twenty minutes. Several of us began conspicuously to glance at our watches. At some point, I tried politely to intervene: "Uh, Mr. President, we've only got, uh--I mean, while you're here, we'd like a chance to--"
"Well, Ted, it's been a wonderful meeting. And I hope we can continue this discussion at another time. I really enjoyed it. Thank you and do come again."
And it was over! No one ever got a word in about shoe or textile quota legislation. The ten of us got up and walked out of the White House like goofballs to face the thirty or so TV reporters who wanted to know what sort of progress we'd made on the issue.
A larger assemblage met in the Cabinet Room to address the same topic on June 15, 1981. This time the gathering was about equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. Vice President Bush was present, and also Secretary of State James Baker, Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan, and several others.
This time the focus was on the Orderly Markets Agreement put into place three years earlier to limit shoe imports by Taiwan and Korea. The Trade Commission had indicated that the limits should continue on Taiwan, but not Korea, because the imports of the latter were no longer a serious competitive threat to the United States. When my turn to speak came I told the president that what we were arguing for, essentially, was a continuation of the status quo. We felt that the status quo, combined with the administration's new tax program, would motivate the American shoe industry to invest in expansion, which would provide more employment. I also stressed that we were not looking for long-term arrangements, just temporary measures to stabilize the shoe industry over the short haul.
Senator William Cohen of Maine began his presentation in a way that might connect with Reagan's sense of humor. He said he remembered the time when Nikita Khrushchev banged a shoe on the podium at the United Nations to emphasize a point. We want to make sure, Cohen went on, that Americans were going to keep on having shoes in case they ever wanted to follow a similar procedure. Turning serious for a moment, Cohen emphasized the importance of the shoe industry to Maine, and said he'd just received word of two additional shoe plants shutting down in the state.
Paul Tsongas and Robert Byrd followed with closely reasoned, emphatic arguments. A couple of others spoke. And then we sat back and awaited Ronald Reagan's response.
He said--well, the fact is that he asked about cowboy boots. He wanted to know whether cowboy boots would be protected. Then, after getting some assurance on this point, Reagan told all of us that he was particularly interested in this issue. He was interested because his father had owned a shoe store. And so he, President Reagan, had always thought when he was a young man that the sign of really having made it in the world was wearing a pair of Bostonians. He wondered whether there was still a Bostonian company going. This time I'd done my homework. I told him there was.
On those occasions when one did manage to get Reagan to focus on the issue at hand, the net results could be about the same: just a little bit maddening. In that same month of June I secured another meeting with the president, to discuss gun control. I began by assuring him that I just wanted to make a few points very quickly, because I knew his time was limited.
I told him that I'd grown up in a family that did not own guns, but I respected families that do, and I respected the gun tradition in rural America. I hoped, I said, that we could make some progress on gun control with respect to the types of weapons that really had no sporting purpose whatsoever. I wanted to work with his administration, I told Reagan, to eliminate some of the terrible gun problems in this country. Sentencing for gun crimes was one issue of interest to me; another was one that had worked well in the president's home state of California: a twenty-oneday waiting period, to allow background checks on a firearm purchaser that would help keep guns out of the hands of psychopaths. To put a waiting period into federal law might make some sense. And it would amount to a compromise, if gun opponents in return would be willing to put less emphasis on the manufacture and distribution of certain weapons.
President Reagan nodded and looked thoughtful. He said that he had thought about the gun issue for some time. Yes, it was true. In California they had a good law: mandatory sentencing. But those legislators in California had written into the law an exception for "extraordinary circumstances" that could mean everything under the sun. They'd just taken the heart out of that law. Yes, something more has to be done out in California.
I said that that was interesting. This waiting period, I went on carefully. That might help.
Well, Reagan replied, what would happen? Suppose we passed a national law that required the states to have a waiting period? I don't like mandating the states to have this waiting period. But if we did, then what would we do in the twenty-one days? Will we have to ask Washington to set up a whole new bureaucracy to review all these gun applications? If someone wants to buy a handgun in Mississippi, does that mean Washington is going to make the judgment whether that person can or cannot make the purchase?
I said: What about running these matters through local law enforcement, and let them make the judgment?
Well, Reagan said, then we're still mandating it at the federal level. I think that setting up a whole new kind of process and whole new regulations is not wise. It would be very good if the states did that on their own, of course, and we ought to encourage them to.
Then Reagan reflected some more and went on: But, you know, there have never really been definitive studies linking the availability of guns and deaths. And I'm just not sure that, if we banned "Saturday night specials," we'd be doing very much about the problem. There's a study being done by a foundation out on the West Coast that shows that it isn't just Saturday night specials; it's handguns in general.
Reagan cited the example of Great Britain--where, as he told it, they had a presumption that if you were carrying a gun, you were going to use it. They tried you with the presumption that you had the intent to kill somebody. So it was a very strict law over there. The burglars didn't carry guns and you didn't have as many shootings.
That, President Reagan pointed out, is a different concept than we have over here; but that's what happens in Great Britain.
I responded that I knew other countries had other laws. But what I was interested in, I repeated, was reaching some common ground on the gun issue in America.
Well, said Reagan, I think it's difficult to mandate to the states any kind of requirement.
I heard the door to the Oval Office open behind me, and felt the presence of someone who had walked in and was standing behind me. It was a signal that my time with the president was up.
This conversation took place about two months after John Hinckley stepped from a crowd outside a Washington hotel and fired a shot that ricocheted into President Reagan's lung with a German-made "Saturday night special" that was traced to a pawn shop in Dallas. Hinckley struck two others with the shots he fired. The pistol contained six foreign-made explosive cartridges, illegal in the United States. (None of the shells exploded.) Had the bullet struck the president directly, he could easily have been killed.
Reagan could be warmly gracious. He offered an eloquent tribute to Jack's memory in a 1985 fund-raiser to endow the John F. Kennedy Library, held at my home in McLean It was a wonderful evening.
When the president arrived, he took special care to talk to the children in attendance and pose for individual photos with them. There was a joke about where to stand, and Reagan remarked how important such directions were, particularly in the movies, because if you didn't hit your mark it could upset the whole scene. Many times, he said, scenes were ruined because an actor would start off on the left foot instead of the right.
Caroline and Jackie were in attendance. Jackie seemed somewhat surprised when Caroline asked the president whether he had any microphones in the Oval Office. Reagan denied it, but Caroline said she thought she had detected one on a previous visit.
I asked the president about his ranch and whether he was able to get there often. Reagan brightened at the mention of the subject and spoke for about fifteen minutes about how he'd had to give up his old ranch when he was elected governor of California because the taxes on it were half of his salary. Since then, he'd found new property in a mountainous area that he referred to as goat country. Mrs. Reagan said it was full of trees and pastures, terrific for riding.
I have remained a close friend of Nancy Reagan. She was a dedicated ally in lining up support when we both fought in vain during George W. Bush's administration to restore funding for embryonic stem cell research. (Nancy, of course, was motivated partly by her husband's tragic affliction with Alzheimer's disease.) She said, "Give me the names of people you want me to call." I gave her the names, and she called every one of them. She called back and said, "Give me some more names."
On January 21, 1981, Joan and I finally accepted the inevitable and divorced. It was amicable, and we agreed to share the duties of raising the children. Joan moved into the apartment in Boston; I maintained residence in the McLean house.
I faced a reelection bid for the Senate in 1982, and while I did not feel that my seat was in serious trouble, I always took elections seriously. I was mindful that there might be political fallout from my run, and loss, for the nomination in 1980 and that outstanding senators and good friends--John Culver, Birch Bayh, and Frank Church--had just lost their reelections when Reagan swept in to victory. It was also the first time I would be running as an unmarried man. My team produced a number of TV ads for the 1982 election. I trusted the voters of Massachusetts to respond to messages of hope, frankness, and humanity. One ad featured Luella Hennessey Donovan, the beloved nurse and governess from my childhood, who described how I had slept in a chair beside Teddy's hospital bed while he was recuperating from his leg amputation. Another featured Frank Manning, an eighty-three-year-old advocate for senior citizens, who avowed, "He's not a plaster saint. He's not without his faults. But we wouldn't want a plaster saint.... We want an average human being who has feelings and likes people and who is interested in their welfare."
Even these mild excursions into persuasion caused me some personal discomfort. With them, and also with the tireless organizing of a first-time campaign manager named Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, I won my fourth reelection to the Senate that year, defeating the Republican businessman Ray Shamie with 60 percent of the vote.
In the waning months of 1983, I delivered two speeches that have remained dear to me. The circumstances and the audiences for the talks were about as divergent as it was possible to get. The first was to an audience of students and faculty at a famous evangelical college in Virginia. The second was to a far smaller gathering of family and friends at a memorial mass in Washington. And yet on a deeper level they shared a great deal. What unified the two talks was the presence in them of my late brother John F. Kennedy.
I had not eulogized Jack on any of the anniversaries since his death on November 22, 1963, though I quoted him and invoked his vision in nearly every commemorative speech I gave. For several years, the risk of being overcome with emotion dissuaded me. Then, as I began to seriously be mentioned as a presidential candidate, and in fact moved actively into that arena, I held back out of concern that any tribute I paid my brother be misconstrued as a play for voters' sympathies. But in 1983 I was not an active candidate. Moreover, the escalating demolition by the Reagan administration of my brother's accomplishments, and its tacit repudiation of Jack's historic vision, compelled me to remind Americans of the principles Jack had stood for, and how deeply imperiled those principles were.
I sifted through my mail folder on a late summer day in 1983 and found myself staring, with great amusement, at an envelope with an instantly familiar return address. I opened it and withdrew a promotional invitation designed to look like a passport. It was a membership card to the Liberty Baptist College in Lynchburg, Virginia, home base of the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who routinely used me as a whipping boy for his homilies on godless liberalism and immorality. The pitch was sweetened with an invitation for me to join up and help fight "ultraliberals such as Ted Kennedy."
The mailing had reached me via a computer error so sublimely improbable that as a practicing Christian, I could hardly help wondering whether it was divinely inspired. I passed it along to a reporter friend who wrote a whimsical item about it. The item came to the attention of Cal Thomas, then a vice president of Falwell's Moral Majority. Thomas wrote me an equally whimsical invitation to come and visit the campus sometime. I wrote him back, cordially but not at all whimsically, that I'd be delighted to come; and that I wanted to speak as well. Thomas forwarded my suggestion to Falwell.
Thus it was that on the evening of October 3, 1983, I stood behind a microphone in the auditorium of Liberty Baptist College and made ready to speak to five thousand expectant young evangelicals and their teachers. Falwell himself looked on with the tightly composed smile of a genial host. It was easy to imagine that a fractious hour lay ahead. Boos, hisses, people filing out of the hall--any of this would have played into popular stereotype. But as I looked into the young faces, I saw no hatred, no defiance--only the opaque but attentive stares of intelligent young people that are well known to any college professor at the outset of a lecture.
I began with a gentle joke: "They seem to think that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a Kennedy to come to the campus of Liberty Baptist College." This received a gratifying ripple of laughter. I built on it: "In honor of our meeting, I have asked Dr. Falwell, as your chancellor, to permit all the students an extra hour next Saturday night before curfew. And in return, I have promised to watch The Old-Time Gospel Hour next Sunday morning." More laughter, and I sensed some relaxation in the auditorium, certainly in myself. I moved ahead into the heart of my message.
I'd come, I told them, to discuss my beliefs about faith and country, tolerance and truth in America. I knew we had certain disagreements; but I hoped that tonight and in the years ahead, we would always respect the right of others to differ, and never lose sight of our own fallibility, that we would view ourselves with a sense of perspective and a sense of humor.
I mentioned the bane of intolerance, citing Dr. Falwell himself as a victim of it for advocating the ecumenical church. Then I moved quickly to the more pressing question of whether and how religion should influence government. "A generation ago, a presidential candidate had to prove his independence of undue religious influence in public life, and he had to do so partly at the insistence of evangelical Protestants. John Kennedy said at that time, 'I believe in an America where there is no religious bloc voting of any kind.'" I contrasted Jack's stance with that of one of the students' idols. "Only twenty years later, another candidate was appealing to an evangelical meeting as a religious bloc. Ronald Reagan said to fifteen thousand evangelicals at the Roundtable in Dallas, 'I know that you can't endorse me. I want you to know I endorse you and what you are doing.'"
To many, I said, that pledge was a sign of a dangerous breakdown in the separation of church and state. Our challenge was to recall the origin of the principle, to define its purpose, and refine its application to the politics of the present. I recounted our nation's long history of religious intolerance: "In colonial Maryland, Catholics paid a double land tax, and in Pennsylvania they had to list their names on a public roll--an ominous precursor of the first Nazi laws against the Jews."
The real transgression occurs when religion wants government to tell citizens how to live uniquely personal parts of their lives. In cases such as Prohibition and abortion, the proper role of religion is to appeal to the conscience of the individual, not the coercive power of the state.
"But there are other questions which are inherently public in nature, which we must decide together as a nation, and where religion and religious values can and should speak to our common conscience.... The issue of nuclear war is a compelling example. To take a stand... when a question is both properly public and truly moral is to stand in a long and honored tradition." I cited the evangelists of the 1800s who were in the forefront of the abolitionist movement; the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, who challenged the morality of the war in Vietnam; Pope John XXIII, who renewed the Gospel's call to social justice.
"And Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was the greatest prophet of this century, awakened our nation and its conscience to the evil of racial segregation."
I was gratified to note that the students and faculty had begun interrupting my speech--not with jeers but with applause.
The end of my speech was approaching, and I drew once again upon the words of Jack. I cited a talk he had given in November 1963 to the Protestant Council of New York City to reaffirm what he regarded as some fundamental truths. "On that occasion, John Kennedy said, 'The family of man is not limited to a single race or religion, to a single city, or country... the family of man is nearly three billion strong. Most of its members are not white and most of them are not Christian.' And as President Kennedy reflected on that reality, he restated an ideal for which he had lived his life--that 'the members of this family should be at peace with one another.'
"That ideal," I concluded, "shines across all the generations of our history... as the Apostle Paul wrote long ago in Romans, 'If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.' I believe it is possible. As fellow citizens, let us live peaceably with each other; as fellow human beings, let us strive to live peaceably with men and women everywhere. Let that be our purpose and our prayer, yours and mine--for ourselves, for our country, and for all the world."
In the months and years that followed, Jerry Falwell's public references to me softened. For what that said about living peaceably with each other, I've always felt grateful.
The second meaningful talk of that autumn, my twentieth anniversary eulogy of Jack, came in Washington after I had spent a quiet evening at the Cape house with my mother and Jackie. We flew together to Washington and were driven to Holy Trinity, where my brother had worshipped on the morning of his inauguration. President and Mrs. Reagan sat in the front pew at the mass.
I began with some memories of Jack from my childhood: "Walking along the beach at home, he said to me when I was very young, 'On a clear day you can see all the way to Ireland.'" I recalled the gentle, natural ways in which he would look after Rosemary--always including her in the sailing expeditions with the rest of us. "Compassion was at the center of his soul," I said, "but he never wore it on his sleeve."
I evoked his wit, which I said "marks our love for him with laughter." I recalled how after he'd talked Bobby into accepting the attorney general post, he made a simple request: "Please, Bobby, just comb your hair."
I summed up, as succinctly as I could, the list of his great achievements: championing the American landing on the moon; building the political foundations of the Civil Rights Act; standing firm in Berlin and during the Cuban Missile Crisis; creating the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps; bringing us, in his last months, the test ban treaty and the beginning of an end to the cold war.
Let me acknowledge here that a loyal and loving brother cannot provide a dispassionate view of John Kennedy's presidency. Much has been written about his personal life. A lot of it is bullshit. All of it is beyond the scope of my direct experience.
There were conversational boundaries in our family and we respected them. For example, I had no idea of how serious Jack's health problems were while he was alive. It would never have occurred to us to discuss such private things with each other.
Historians will come to their own judgments about President Kennedy. Here is how I choose to remember him:
He was an heir to wealth who felt the anguish of the poor. He was an orator of excellence who spoke for the voiceless.
He was a son of Harvard who reached out to the sons and daughters of Appalachia.
He was a man of special grace who had a special care for the retarded and handicapped.
He was a hero of war who fought hardest for peace.
He said and proved in word and deed that one man can make a difference.
I did not want to see a second Reagan administration, yet I could find no Democratic figure on the horizon who convinced me that he or she was capable of unseating the force of nature who was our president. And so in 1982 I asked my aide Larry Horowitz to explore the feasibility of another run. My explorations did not last long. The decisive forces were my three children. Actually they were no longer "children" now, but young adults--Kara was twenty-two, Teddy not quite twenty-one, and Patrick fifteen. And yet of course they were still my children.
Over the late summer and early autumn of 1982, I sounded them out in several searching conversations about their feelings on another presidential campaign. I will never forget this series of talks with them. What they had to say made all the difference.
Our first occurred as we sailed to Nantucket from Hyannis Port on September 26, Teddy's twenty-first birthday. The water was quiet and peaceful, and the sun shone on their faces. Teddy spoke up first. He had reservations, he admitted. He felt that in my 1980 run I had stood for and expressed all the things I believed in, and that now my place was in the Senate. Then he got to the heart of the matter: another campaign would put the family through a great deal of turmoil. He did not say so specifically, but I sensed that the turmoil would center on my safety. Of course, he said, as Kara and Patrick nodded, if I made the decision to run, all of them would support me. But--did it really make sense?
We all kept on probing the topic, in a relaxed way, for more than an hour, as the boat cruised gently toward Nantucket. Kara was somewhat more open-minded to the prospect than Teddy, but Patrick agreed rather strongly with his brother. I thanked all of them at the end, and asked them to give it some more thought.
I learned a good deal more about the depth of Patrick's feelings when the two of us went to the Cape house by ourselves for one of those delicious late fall weekends, of the kind that Bobby and I spent together so many years ago, walking on the beach and building campfires and sleeping in the chilly garage. My son and I enjoyed a good meal and some talk about what was happening at his school, and then it was late and I decided to turn in. I said good night to Patrick and went to my father's room to sleep. I was dozing off when I became aware of a presence in the room. Patrick had come in silently, and when he knew I'd seen him, he sat on a chair, but remained quiet. It was easy to see that he was troubled.
"Are you concerned about the future?" I asked him. He nodded, and murmured that he was. He really did not want me to run, he said, and his voice grew husky. If I were elected president, he said, I would not have as much time to spend with him as he wanted--as it was, he didn't see enough of me. It would create an absence in his life that would be hard to fill. He became rather teary-eyed, very sweet about it, and then went to bed.
On the last week of my Senate reelection campaign, Patrick and I were driving over from Hyannis to Oyster Harbor. I asked him whether he had changed his mind at all. He said he had not.
The next time we broached the subject was on November 2, the night of my Senate reelection. I told my children honestly that I was giving serious consideration to the run, and that I wanted to have one more intense conversation with them about it--perhaps on Thanksgiving weekend, when we would all be together for a few days. I could tell by their faces this time that each was deeply troubled by the prospect, more troubled than I had realized.
On that weekend I asked Larry Horowitz to come to the Cape and brief the children and other family members as to where we stood politically. Over two and a half hours at Jackie's house, Larry reviewed the various polling data and how it reflected the positive view that people had of me after watching those TV spots in focus group sessions in New Hampshire. This was an encouraging and even rather significant trend, given that at the same time, Reagan's poll numbers were rising while those of his likely challenger, Walter Mondale, were slipping down.
The children inferred from this session that my aides and I were gearing up seriously to make a run, and I must say that they were right. Everyone in the room could see the likelihood of my gaining the nomination, and also that the election campaign would be hard-fought and probably be decided by the television debates. Yet the Reagan administration was showing some signs of missteps--they'd been talking lately about taxing unemployment insurance, which would outrage many of their moderate supporters. I really felt that this was the race for me. All of the other times I had taken a pass on running were because it wasn't my time. Those earlier races wouldn't have been about me; they would have been about my being a surrogate for my brothers. And in 1980, as much as I had wanted to win, I felt almost forced into the decision by what I saw as Carter's dragging down of the country and the party. But 1984 would be my race on my terms. And I thought I had a good chance.
I did not ask for reactions from the family at that meeting. My nephew Joe wished me luck, but went on to say that from what he'd heard, the family anticipated a great deal of anguish and anxiety, and that I should give that prospect very serious consideration. My sister Pat seemed to be leaning toward a run; Jean was against it. Steve Smith thought it would be an extremely difficult battle.
The Sunday after Thanksgiving, my children and I went to the Squaw Island house. I told them how much I respected their grasp of the political realities of a run, and of what a campaign would entail. Then I asked them whether they'd formed a final judgment.
Once again, Teddy was the spokesman. He told me that he and Patrick had been having many serious discussions between themselves, and that they both felt strongly that I should not run. I would continue to be a force in the Democratic Party, he pointed out, and in the Senate. People would continue to pay attention to my views. He, Patrick, and Kara were not asking me to step out of public life, he stressed. But given the existing turmoil resulting from Joan's and my divorce, and the change and uncertainty for all of them that that entailed, a run for the presidency might amount to unbearable strain.
I looked at Patrick, who was obviously uncomfortable: he did not want the brunt of my decision placed upon his shoulders. He assured me that he would support any decision that I made. Should the decision be to go, he said he was quite prepared for it--but he just thought the family would be happier if I didn't make that decision to go. There was plenty of time in the future...
I shifted my gaze to Kara. She agreed totally with Patrick: if I felt there was a moral imperative to run, they were prepared to sign on and be part of the team. But quite clearly their choice and recommendation were not to go forward with a campaign.
The meeting lasted about two hours, and by the end of it, as far as I was concerned, the decision had been made. If the children felt that strongly about my not running, then I would not run. They all came back to the Big House with me and we had dinner with my mother. I could clearly detect the relief in their minds and in their attitudes and their general dispositions.
A couple of days later I announced that I would not be a candidate for the presidency in 1984. After the press conference, I had a chance for quiet moments with each of the children and asked whether they thought they made the right decision. The response was so uniform, so complete, so overwhelming--it was the right decision. But it was fifteen-year-old Patrick who really brought it home for me. When Patrick and I were sitting together after the announcement, just the two of us, I looked at his face and his smile. He was so happy and obviously so enormously relieved. If I ever harbored any second thoughts about the decision, they vanished at that moment.
I braced for new battles on even more hostile terrain when Reagan, at seventy-three, won reelection in November 1984. The oldest elected president in American history rolled up the highest electoral vote in American history, 525 to 13, against Walter Mondale.
Reagan had made a laudable choice in his first high court appointment, in 1981. Honoring a campaign promise to nominate a qualified woman, he chose the Arizona Republican Sandra Day O'Connor, who replaced the retiring Potter Stewart. She did not become the predictably conservative vote that the Republican right might have hoped. She became famous for avoiding predictability, as the Court's leading "swing vote" on politically charged cases, including upholding Roe v. Wade. Reagan's next high court appointment was to nominate William Rehnquist to be elevated from associate justice of the Supreme Court to chief justice of the United States.
As an associate justice, Rehnquist had staked out a position on the Court's far right and held it unwaveringly. I was opposed to his elevation to chief justice for the same reasons that I had opposed his nomination to the Court in the first place. But I understood that the odds were strongly in favor of his confirmation. In the Judiciary Committee on July 29, 1986, I bore in strongly on Rehnquist's string of lone dissents as an associate justice. "The framers of the Constitution envisioned a major role for the Senate in the appointment of judges," I declared. "It is historical nonsense to suggest that all the Senate has to do is check the nominee's IQ, make sure he has a law degree and no arrests, and rubber-stamp the president's choice."
Along with Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, I resurrected the two damaging pieces of evidence that Rehnquist had shown racial bias in his past. These were the charges that he had harassed black voters at the polls in Arizona in the 1950s and '60s, and the memo he'd written in 1971 maintaining that "separate but equal" should be reaffirmed.
None of it mattered. Rehnquist sailed past the committee by a vote of thirteen to five, and he was confirmed by a vote of sixty-five to thirtythree. Still, he received the most "no" votes ever cast against a chief justice nominee up to that time.
Lewis Powell announced his retirement that same year. Powell was a true moderate on the bench and was often a swing vote, sometimes bridging differences between his more liberal and conservative colleagues. I had a strong sense that Reagan's nominee to replace Powell would not share his qualities of moderation.
By the time Powell resigned, on June 26, 1987, I had prepared myself to seize the initiative against the likely replacement nominee: Robert Bork.
I'd had my eye on Bork since he fired Archibald Cox during Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre." I'd watched him closely and believed his legal theories were totally out of the mainstream. And he had a written record that set forth his extreme views for all the country to see. On July 1, within forty-five minutes of Reagan's announcement that Bork was in fact his nominee, I arose on the Senate floor and spoke out against Bork and his vision of America.
I knew my speech was red-hot even before I delivered it. I wanted it that way--immediate and fiery--because I wanted to frame the debate. I knew I was making myself a target by being so heated in my rhetoric, but it was a price I was willing to pay to keep this man off the court.
In what came to be known as the "Robert Bork's America" speech, I urged Bork's rejection on several grounds: that he stood for an extremist view of the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court; that he'd opposed the Public Accommodations Civil Rights Act as well as the Supreme Court's "one man, one vote" ruling in 1964; that he saw the First Amendment as protecting only political speech, and not literature or works of art or scientific expression.
"Robert Bork's America," I continued, "is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is--and is often the only--protector of the individual rights that are at the heart of our democracy." I closed with the declaration that President Reagan "should not be able to... reach into the muck of Watergate, and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and on the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice."
On summer weekends, I turned the house at Hyannis Port into a command center, from where I invited or telephoned dozens of legal scholars, my fellow senators, advocates for African Americans and women--anyone I could locate who had an informed opinion as to issues at stake. I listened, debated, researched, synthesized, and finally began to draft the input into an argument.
An early head count by the Democratic whip Alan Cranston in mid-July showed a tilt toward Bork's chances for confirmation. By mid-August, the mobilization against him was accelerating. I helped it along by sending out briefing books on the nominee's positions to senators, and a personal letter to sixty-two hundred black elected officials across America alerting them to Bork's threat to civil rights. I telephoned many leaders of national civil rights organizations. I urged Archibald Cox himself to speak out on his views of the "Saturday Night Massacre."
The hearings began on September 15, led by Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Joe Biden. Fortified by preparation that was even more exhaustive than usual--I'd held mock hearing sessions with such constitutional experts as Lawrence Tribe of the Harvard Law School--I was able to get the nominee to admit that at one time he saw no right of privacy in the Constitution, didn't think the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to women, believed the states had the right to levy poll taxes, and that he'd once characterized the 1964 Civil Rights law requiring proprietors to serve African Americans in public places as "a principle of unsurpassed ugliness." These were words from his own testimony. The second two days were more of the same. On September 18, in fact, I played a tape that annihilated Bork's claim that as a justice he would give full weight to judicial precedent. The tape captured him telling a college audience in 1985, "I don't feel that in the field of constitutional law, precedent is all that important.... I think the importance is what the framers were driving at."
It was an onslaught of fact and damaging admission, and it worked dramatically. By late September, opinion polls were showing a 10 percent shift against Bork as a result of the hearings. On October 1, five previously uncommitted southern Democrats and the then Republican from Pennsylvania Arlen Specter announced their opposition to Bork. The full Judiciary Committee voted nine to five against recommending him five days later, and on October 23 his nomination was rejected by a vote of fifty-eight to forty-two, with seventeen Republicans in the majority--the largest margin of defeat in history for a Supreme Court nominee.
My final summation of Ronald Reagan is complicated. I recognize that millions of people will always remember him as a great president. It is too early to really know what history's verdict will be.
I believe that he failed to meet the ultimate criteria of greatness. His economic theories were certainly debatable, to say the least. But more than that was his complacency and even insensitivity regarding civil rights. He opposed the principles of the Voting Rights Act, for example, which he'd described during his campaign as "humiliating to the South," rather than focusing his comments on the practices that led to the need for such a law as humiliating to African Americans.
I feel that Ronald Reagan led the country in the wrong direction, sensing and playing to its worst impulses at a moment in history that called desperately for a higher vision. The term "government" was degraded into a working synonym for "ineptitude" or even "hostile entity." Nearly all the important imprints of his presidency bore features that rebuked or rolled back the hard-earned progress of African Americans dating to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His choice of the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, as the site for his first speech after being nominated was appalling: Philadelphia was the site of one of the most heinous racial crimes of the twentieth century, the murder of three young civil rights workers by white supremacists in 1964. He slashed education and social programs that protected the dispossessed, while scolding the phantom "welfare queens" who used their food stamps to buy steak and whiskey. He denounced the imprisoned Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and supported the apartheid government of South Africa. He vetoed a bill that would have authorized sanctions against that country's racist De Klerk regime. (Congress overrode the veto.)
And yet I cannot help affirming that Ronald Reagan deserves his special niche in the minds of the American people. As an optimist myself, I admire optimists. He made people feel upbeat about the country, a welcome mood shift after the Carter era.
As the nation moved rightward, many pundits suggested that--and many politicians acted as though--we were entering a sweeping and permanent new political climate. I never agreed with that view, harvested mainly from opinion polls and focus groups, nor the repositioning that it spawned. I recognized that some sort of shift was inevitable. My brother Jack used to say that ours was basically a conservative country, but that people wanted progress. So if you talked conservative and voted liberal, you'd win every time. I believe there's a lot to that bit of political wisdom. While I haven't mastered the art of talking conservative, experience has convinced me that genuine, principled leadership can persuade our people that their enlightened self-interest lies to the left. The historic gains of the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society attest to that. I maintained my conviction that the working-class majority forged by Roosevelt remained our best hope for justice and progress.