Quote of the Day (Robert Kennedy, on ‘Common Qualities of Conscience and Indignation’)

"There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve to death in the streets of India; a former Prime Minister is summarily executed in the Congo; intellectuals go to jail in Russia; and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world. These are different evils; but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings throughout the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.”— U.S. Attorney General, Senator from New York, and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), “Speech at the University of Capetown, South Africa, Day of Affirmation,” June 6, 1966

In his eulogy two years after this address, Ted Kennedy told the mourners in St. Patrick’s Cathedral that his murdered brother “need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life.” 

At least to some extent, the documentary record about Camelot and the cries of scandal-mongers alike ensured for our skeptical age that Robert Kennedy would indeed escape this fate. He could be the most complicated mixture imaginable of idealism and steely-eyed, brass-knuckle determination in pursuit of a goal.

Even so, and despite realizing that a yawning gap frequently exists between words and performance, I couldn’t read the above excerpt from his Capetown address (also known as the “Ripple of Hope” speech) without feeling that something immense was lost when he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet in Los Angeles after winning the 1968 California primary for President.

At some level, the words of politicians do matter. Even when using talented speechwriters, what they choose to say (or not) conveys what they regard as important and indicates some measure of their character.

Kennedy’s words in particular reflect an elevated tone befitting the magnitude of worldwide issues, a responsibility for alleviating “the imperfections of human justice.”

That gravitas, I’m sorry to say, is missing in today’s discourse. You can call this diminished rhetoric a casualty of a Sixties decade that didn’t achieve its lofty goals, of more than a half century of advertising sound bites that left listeners unable to absorb sustained arguments, or of the countless casual cruelties and callousness of Donald Trump.

But it was gone at both parties’ conventions this summer. Forget about that “When they go low, we go high” cry of the Democrats eight years ago. Just think of Barack Obama’s hand gesture to simulate Trump’s obsession with crowd size.

My sadness increased when I heard today that Robert Kennedy Jr. would be suspending his independent campaign and backing Trump for President. It would take a psychiatrist to plumb all the depths and traumas that led the son of the martyred Democratic candidate of the late Sixties to this decisive point in his own misbegotten Presidential race.

But it only takes an ordinary moral sensibility to know that the candidate who won his endorsement not only did not measure up to the job that Robert Sr. sought and Jack Kennedy achieved, but that he corroded the dignity of the Oval Office, widened the gap between rich and poor, and encouraged the forces of evil at home and abroad.

Robert Sr.’s Capetown address—one of the most famous in his short career—inspired inhabitants of Africa—a continent that Trump has dubbed, together with Haiti and El Salvador, as “s—thole countries.”

It is even more astonishing to realize that the crusade that Robert Jr. conducted so fervently these last couple of decades—conservation—was abandoned and utterly forgotten in his support for a former President whose administration took 74 actions that weakened environmental protection, according to an August 2020 Brookings Institution study.

Twenty years ago this month, Robert Jr. published Crimes Against Nature, a polemic with the most pointed of subtitles: “How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy.” If he felt this way about Dubya, then what on earth did he think Trump was doing in his term in office?

In bowing out, he noted that Trump had “asked to enlist me in his administration.” Assume that he does get tapped for such a position. How long do you think before, like so many others who agreed to serve the Former Guy, he awakens one morning to find via X that he’s been fired?

Robert Kennedy Sr. brought conscience with his indignation to the problems of the world and his country. His namesake forgot the conscience part.

His latest choice has dismayed members of his immediate family, who issued a statement rightly denouncing his endorsement as “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.” They understood better than their brother that their father appealed to the best instincts of humanity in general and his countrymen in particular, while Trump has never missed a chance to call forth the ugliest of both. 

But RFK Jr. has also disappointed the millions of Americans who like Robert Sr. have hoped to “wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.” Those sufferings will only increase because of the side with which he's thrown in his lot.

Indomitable Eyewitness: Gotham Bard Pete Hamill, RIP

Pete Hamill had witnessed and written about many of the deadliest events in his country’s history, and after a New Year’s Eve celebration nearly 50 years ago he feared so much that his own alcoholism might lead him to an early grave that he never picked up a drink again.

Even in the past couple of years, with his body failing, his mind remained filled with purpose and projects. That’s why the news of his death this past week at age 85 makes it all the harder to think that we won’t get to hear what he thinks anymore.

Hamill was a throwback to a time when newspapers really mattered. In his later years, he turned his hand increasingly to fiction. But newsrooms proved an addiction he never wanted to shake.

Two brief stints editing The New York Post and The Daily News led him to concentrate on what ailed his profession. The answer was not surprising for someone who made his reputation as a columnist: papers required a voice to distinguish them not just from hometown rivals, but also counterparts across the country:

“Somehow the experience of being in Chicago seems unfocused since the death of Mike Royko,” Hamill observed in News is a Verb:Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century. “San Francisco certainly is not the same since the death of Herb Caen. Big, swaggering voices and intensely passionate voices are giving way to bland, interchangeable voices that wouldn’t frighten a rabbit. Almost all daily newspapers seem to resemble all other newspapers in the way they choose the news, the way they cover it, and the way they present it. Newspapers are more and more like television, where all local news shows resemble all other local news shows.”

A “swaggering” voice? No. “Intensely passionate”? Absolutely. Alternately angry, streetwise, open to the possibilities of all he encountered, Hamill blended a Whitmanesque love of a bursting city with an Irish-American kid’s intense bond with the Brooklyn where he grew up and died.

A collection of his columns was titled Irrational Ravings, taking its name from Spiro Agnew's description of his writing. Readers have their own favorites in the vast amount of material he produced over the years. Two that sprang to mind for me in the immediate aftermath of his death: the Grammy-winning liner notes for Dylan's Blood on the Tracks and a 1977 column lamenting M. Donald Grant’s exile of the great Tom Seaver from the Mets.

But that was before I had a chance to read some of Hamill’s eyewitness accounts of the defining cataclysms of his—our—time. For instance, few have narrated the terror of 9/11 as grippingly as he did:

“Above us, at 9.55, the first of the towers began to collapse. We heard snapping sounds, pops, little explosions, and then the walls bulged out, and we heard a sound like an avalanche. Everything then happened in fragments. I yell to my wife, "Run!" And we start together, and this immense cloud is rolling at us. Bodies come smashing together in the doorway of 25 Vesey Street and I can't see my wife, and when I push to get out, I'm driven into the lobby. I keep calling her name, and saying, "I've got to get out of here, please, my wife..." We're deep in the lobby, behind walls, and the glass doors are locked tight. We look for a back door. There is none. A half-dozen of us go down narrow stairs.

“I'm desperate now to get out, to find my wife, to be sure she's alive, to hug her in the horror. But I'm sealed with these others inside the tomblike basement of an office building. Then there's a sound of splintering glass. One of the emergency workers has smashed open the glass doors. I feel as if I've been there for an hour; only 14 minutes have passed.”

Or this, on the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the friend he had urged to run for President:

“I saw Kennedy lurch against the ice machine, and then sag, and then fall forward slowly, to be grabbed by someone, and I knew then that he was dead. He might linger a few hours, or a few days; but his face reminded me somehow of Benny Paret the night Emile Griffith hammered him into unconsciousness. Kennedy’s face had a kind of sweet acceptance to it, the eyes understanding that it had come to him, the way it had come to so many others before him. The price of the attempt at excellence was death. You saw a flicker of that understanding on his face, as his life seeped out of a hole in the back of his skull, to spread like spilled wine across the scummy concrete floor.”

The decline of the newspaper world that Hamill loved could be marked by the nemeses at the dawn and end of his career, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump.

Hamill regarded Nixon with fear, seeing him in 1977 as “the Bela Lugosi of American politics, lying out there in the crypt of San Clemente, and rising into the darkness at night.”

In contrast, Hamill could only view Trump with cold contempt as a prime example of the “celebrity virus” affecting journalism, underscoring the mogul’s “jowly megalomania” two decades ago, in News is a Verb:

“Trump flies to the spotlight, even demands it. His motto seems to be ‘I'm written about, therefore I exist.’ He personally telephones gossip columnists and reporters to present them with stories about the wonders of himself, his great love life, his brusque divorces. In the spirit of true collaboration, the newspapers quote ‘sources close to Trump’ as their authority, a code known to other editors and reporters but not revealed to the readers. In a way, Trump has his own brilliance. He has a genius for self-inflation, for presenting an illusion of accomplishment that often becomes the accomplishment itself. A tiny solar system now revolves around Trump's own self-created persona: his ex-wives, Ivana Trump and Marla Maples Trump, followed by his poor teenage daughter, Ivanka Trump, who as I write is being hurled into the world of fashion models under the benevolent gaze of Daddy. This vulgar saga threatens to go on and on.”

At the same time, as far back as 1969, Hamill detected a major crack in the former New Deal coalition that led to stunning victories for Nixon, Ronald Reagan and, eventually, Trump. In "The Revolt of the Lower Middle Class," he listened to and reported on the discontent of blue-collar ethnic Catholics on racial issues--and, more disturbingly, their susceptibility to television's "politics of theatre" that helped thrust a shameless real estate huckster into the Oval Office.

I met Hamill on a couple of occasions. Once was in the mid-'70s, at the apex of journalism’s glamour in the wake of Watergate, when he spoke in Bergen County, NJ, on a panel about investigative reporting with Gabe Pressman, Nick Pileggi, and Jack Newfield. I remember him saying that by "investigative journalism," most people probably had in mind muckraking. But the way he thought of it, all journalism was "investigative" if it told people something they may not have known already.

At a time when I was seriously thinking of becoming a journalist, that observation made a great impression on me. Even now, some 45 years later, when I have pursued more general fact-based writing, I have found it enormously useful to keep in mind. Nonfiction lives so long as both writer and reader learn something new in the course of encountering the reality behind the material.

I’m sorry I didn’t seize the chance to talk to Hamill afterward. Several friends who did get to know him have mentioned how his warmth, generosity and personal example inspired them in the newsroom.

That approachability and equanimity, I think, differentiated him from a friend and colleague who also rose to fame in the 1960s: Jimmy Breslin. A 2018 HBO documentary on these “deadline artists” have led many viewers to see the two in a similar light: largely self-taught Irish-Americans, onetime habitues of smoky saloons, and liberal lions in a newsroom age that might as well be ancient Rome compared with today.

But, with an irascibility that could flare into downright pugnacity, Breslin, for all his gifts as a writer (enough to earn him a Pulitzer for commentary), would never have been named an editor of a tabloid, as Hamill was twice in the 1990s, at the New York Post and the Daily News. 

Hamill had the charisma to motivate staffers with his mission of a tabloid that would reach out to striving immigrant communities. Unfortunately, his vision diverged from those papers’ owners, and he was terminated before his innovations could take hold.

That second stage in Hamill’s career was only possible because, at a critical moment, he freed himself from the “stoic ethic” and “liquid alchemy” connecting his Brooklyn upbringing and the world of Ernest Hemingway.

Hamill owned up to all his mistakes made while under the influence in his evocative 1994 memoir, A Drinking Life. He got out at the right time, before he hit rock bottom and could have been robbed of the memory necessary for writing. In the end, he came away with a multitude of friends and just as many stories, all narrated in a rich whiskey baritone that left listeners craving every word.

About two decades ago, Hamill was interviewed on TV about the impact of drinking on Ernest Hemingway, a crucial early influence on his own work. The quality of Hemingway's work fell off so much toward the end of his life, Hamill observed, because drinking affected his judgment, so he could never finish his work as easily as he once did. I couldn't help feeling that Hamill had been looking at what could have easily happened to himself, and that he was so grateful he avoided it.

Nobody with blunt opinions expressed through a mass medium is without detractors, and Hamill was no exception. They did not come exclusively from the right wing (and, in light of later events, his placement on Nixon's "enemies list" was surely a source of envy to his friends). 

Some, for instance, have criticized the columnist for his initial sharp denunciation for the "Central Park 5" in what is now universally seen as a miscarriage of justice. In the past week, Ross Barkan chided him as an "irrepressible sentimentalist."

But DNA was not so common in criminal investigations at the time of the Central Park case, and Hamill demonstrated in A Drinking Life that he was hardly unaware of the dangers of the provincialism in his Brooklyn neighborhood to what Barkan calls "a deeply complex, flawed and inevitably flawed society."

A year and a half ago, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Hamill spoke of the importance of libraries to him, in a way that I, with a similar blue-collar ethnic background, could identify with:

“I come from the white working class, but I was fortunate. I had parents that thought things would be better tomorrow or the day after tomorrow and the way out of poverty was through the library. My mother got me a library card when I was five. I couldn't read yet, and there were mothers like that all over New York.”

I hope that, in the years ahead, future children of the working class will go into their own libraries and look up Hamill’s work, to know how Americans lived and survived in a tumultuous time.

(Photo of Pete Hamill taken in Brooklyn in September 2007 by David Shankbone.)

Quote of the Day (Robert F. Kennedy, on the ‘Problem of Power’)

“The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use—of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public.”—U.S. Senator, Attorney-General, and Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), “I Remember, I Believe,” in The Pursuit of Justice (1964)

This Day in Senate History (Birth of Eugene McCarthy, Democratic Primary Insurgent)

Mar. 29, 1916— Eugene McCarthy, a cool intellectual who, to nearly everyone’s surprise—including his own—ignited voter passion in one of the most turbulent years in American political history, was born in Watkins, Minn.

The recipient of the most rigorous education, McCarthy earned his undergraduate degree at St. John’s University, then was briefly a novice in the Benedictine Abbey His friend Senator Philip Hart of Michigan called him "a man out of his proper time, a man meant for the Age of Faith... when men like Thomas More could make their last defense, beyond the civil law, in religious belief." He was the only politician I can think of who could have argued with James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson at the Constitutional Convention about Thucydides, Aristotle, Locke and Montesquieu, then run rings around them when the conversation turned to Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

The friend of poets such as Robert Lowell, someone who could rattle off with little prompting hundreds of lines from William Butler Yeats, McCarthy also wrote verses that constitute some of the most intriguing of the 16 books he published in his lifetime. They fully vent his contrarian spirit, including these lines from the campaign that earned him a place in American political annals:

I am alone

in the land of the aardvarks.

I am walking west

all the aardvarks are going east.

Opposition to the Vietnam War was a cause he came late to, as he voted for the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson virtually a blank check to escalate the conflict. But once he turned against the war, in 1966, he was all in, in a way that nobody else contemplated being. At a time when no other Democratic politician could be persuaded to test the President and his military policy at the polls, McCarthy took on an incumbent whose power derived in no small measure from vindictiveness against anyone who thwarted his will.

McCarthy did not win the 1968 Democratic primary in New Hampshire. But his 42% of the vote dismayed LBJ so much that the President announced he would not seek another term. The title of McCarthy's memoir of the Presidential campaign, The Year of the People, expressed his conviction that the feelings of the electorate, as reflected in the primaries, needed to be respected at the party’s convention. They weren’t—Hubert Humphrey ended up as the Democratic nominee, despite being too late to enter any primaries—but the need to contain the divisions exposed in these contests and at the convention led to major rule changes in both parties. (Eight years later, Ronald Reagan took his own challenge to a sitting President of his own party, Gerald Ford, all the way to the convention.)

The Minnesota Senator, then, posed the most consequential challenge to a sitting President and party bosses since ex-President Theodore Roosevelt ran against hand-picked successor William Howard Taft in the 1912 GOP primaries. Now, we have been living in a landscape transformed in his wake: instead of the steeplechase primary season of his “year of the people,” a seemingly permanent campaign.

This year, we have been witnessing another stormy, likely transformative primary season. But exactly which candidate fills McCarthy’s role, and how, is a matter of some dispute.

For instance, when I typed “Eugene McCarthy” AND Trump into Google, I came up with more hits on McCarthy and …Bernie Sanders. The high-toned style of Sanders does have more personality traits in common with McCarthy, another Senator critical of his party’s incumbent President, than the boorish Donald Trump does. But there, the similarities end.

When all is said and done, in the likelihood that Hillary Clinton beats Sanders, she will probably gain the support, however reluctantly granted, of his base. The same cannot be said of Trumpeters, however, who, if they walk out on the GOP convention in Cleveland, will sit out the general election, as many McCarthy supporters did in 1968.

At another level, there are some intriguing parallels between the McCarthy and Trump campaigns:

*Each candidate did not realistically expect to win their party’s nomination. Stephanie Cegielski, a strategist for the Make America Great Again super PAC, has claimed that Trump did not originally think he would win, but would have simply been satisfied to place second in the delegate count, virtually guaranteeing what he wasn’t granted at the 2012 GOP convention: a prominent speaking role. Similarly, McCarthy had unsuccessfully urged Bobby Kennedy to yield to the entreaties of the “Dump Johnson” movement by running, and even as he announced his candidacy he expressed the hope that RFK would eventually enter the race.

*Each man emerged as a protest candidate. While McCarthy’s insurgency was fueled by anger over Vietnam, Trump’s has occurred with a GOP electorate that has largely upended conservative orthodoxy on free trade, entitlements and immigration.

*Each was transformed by encounters with rivals, becoming far more bitter than expected. The current nastiness between Trump and Ted Cruz is all the more striking considering their bromance in the early season of the primaries. And once Kennedy did jump into the race after New Hampshire, now knowing he could not be accused of splitting the party, McCarthy regarded the move as an act of opportunism that would only divide the anti-war vote.To the end of his days, he spoke more bitterly about his assassinated rival for the antiwar vote than about the President the two were trying to replace, according to a retrospective by NPR's Ken Rudin after McCarthy's death in 2005 . (See my account of their final, fierce faceoff in the winner-take-all California primary.)

*Each rewrote the rules of campaigning by introducing new players into their party’s coalition. Ominously for Hillary Clinton, Trump has done well in crossover primaries that allow Democrats to vote Republican, especially with angry white males. These might be termed “Falling Down” ex-Democrats, after the Michael Douglas movie of that name. In 1968, thousands of young people went “clear for Gene”—trimming their long hair and appearing presenting—in stumping door to door for the candidate.

*The tensions of the campaigns found explosive release in violence. Although neither McCarthy nor Kennedy encouraged this, it seemed a constant specter hanging over the campaigns. We are already seeing something of a repetition of that today. Fights have been breaking out at Trump appearances, with his own campaign manager arrested for interfering with a female reporter. Trump has warned darkly of “riots” if he is denied the Republican nomination, and his expressed willingness to allow delegates to carry weapons at the convention not only creates a security nightmare, but also a threat to democratic procedures.

*In both campaigns, candidates’ wives were collateral damage from the combustible energies unleashed by the campaigns. The current fracas involving Heidi Cruz and Melania Trump might be more public, but McCarthy’s family suffered as well. Abigail McCarthy—every bit as intellectually formidable as her husband, and an ardent backer of what appeared initially to be a quixotic campaign—ended up being hospitalized three times while her husband was on the hustings—and, within a year of the campaign’s end, the two had separated as a result of Eugene’s affair with a journalist.

Stylistically, of course, McCarthy can be considered the antithesis of Trump: far more intellectual, less willing to pander shamelessly.

And, although it’s been said that Trump has hurled “insults” at opponents, he is really only peddling puny epithets that any eight-year-old can toss in a schoolyard. For a real insult, one that could have come from the 19^th-century golden age of American political invective, consider McCarthy's elegant jibe at George Romney, a prospective GOP world-beater forced from the race because of his gaffe that he had been “brainwashed" by the military on a trip to Vietnam. In the case of Romney, widely regarded as an intellectual lightweight, McCarthy observed that “a light rinse would have been sufficient." Similar remarks to Capitol Hill colleagues over the years led them to nickname him "The Needler."

At best unconventional, at worst merely quirky, McCarthy could exasperate observers by his unexpected advances into and retreats from the American political thickets. (Garry Wills: “Eugene McCarthy spent a good deal of his time trying to prove that he was too good for politics. What use was that? Most of us are too good for politics; but we do not make a career of demonstrating it.”) Nowadays, though, most people would die to be represented by someone who doesn’t stick slavishly to an ideology or party line but is interested in something more than politics.

This Day in Crime History (Alcatraz, Federal Prisoner of the Desperate, Closes)

March 21, 1963—Alcatraz, the maximum-security federal prison on an island just outside San Francisco, closed after 29 years of housing some of the most vicious criminals in American history, including Al Capone, Alvin Karpis, “Machine Gun” Kelly, Mickey Cohen, and Robert Stroud, the so-called “Bird Man of Alcatraz.”

The island had an interesting history before its time as a federal prison—including as a Union Army prison in the Civil War—as well as afterward. (Its seizure by the American Indian Movement in the Sixties brought renewed focus to the plight of Native Americans.) But it was as an especially severe penal institution which brought it lasting fame.

Its 1934 opening as a U.S. prison was born of the need to contain a generation of hardened criminals who had arisen during the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. The remoteness of Alaska had caused that territory to be considered for awhile, but the availability of Alcatraz led Franklin Roosevelt’s Attorney-General, Homer Cummings, to press for that site instead. 

This did not sit well with local citizens who were terrified by the chance that any of these criminals might bust loose, but the government's Bureau of Prisons had its way.

Running such an institution required considerable organizational ability. The warden of Alcatraz for its first 14 years, James A. Johnston, possessed that in abundance, along with a reputation early in his career for outlawing corporal punishment and separating hardened prisoners from new inmates at San Quentin.

Johnson’s record at Alcatraz was mixed. The emphasis at the prison was the severe limits on privileges for inmates, and the comparatively small number confined to the island (never more than 260) ensured that guards knew each one by name, personally, and could concentrate their full attention on keeping them in line. Moreover, suicides of several of inmates underscored Johnson’s inability to grasp mental illness. 

On the other hand, despite its soul-destroying isolation, many inmates came to feel that, compared with other prisons, they would not be subjected to arbitrary punishment by guards. So long as they obeyed the rules, it was generally felt, they would be left alone. In time, they might be transferred to another facility.

Some decided they couldn’t wait that long to get off “The Rock.” Fourteen separate escape attempts were made by 36 men (including two who tried to get out twice). Their fate didn’t inspire confidence in the remaining:

*23 were caught;

*6 were shot and killed while escaping;

*2 drowned;

* 5 are presumed drowned or missing.

  

By 1963, the cold, choppy waters of San Francisco Bay--which had inhibited the approximately 1,500 criminals from making a break for it--had begun to work against its further use. The complex began to deteriorate under the effects of the saltwater, and was not helped by severe budget cuts. 

Those factors, along with the high cost-per-prisoner of the structure compared with others around the country, persuaded Attorney-General Robert Kennedy to close Alcatraz.

After the last prisoners were transferred out of Alcatraz, the U.S. prison stood vacant for several years, as proposals were entertained for alternative uses (e.g., a West Coast version of the Statue of Liberty, a shopping center/hotel complex). 

Its seizure by the American Indian Movement twice in the Sixties not only brought renewed focus to the plight of Native Americans, but also led the government to consider anew how to make best use of the site.

The island was opened to the public in the fall of 1973 as a National Park Service unit, and since then has become one of the most popular in the entire Park Service, with more than one million visitors every year from around the world. 

That popularity has been assured by Hollywood films that keep alive the fort's memory as a lonesome, terrifying place, including Bird Man of Alcatraz and Escape From Alcatraz. The island is also considered an ecological preserve, home to one of the largest western gull colonies on the northern California coast.

(Photo shows Alcatraz from Pier 39 in San Francisco.)