True Compass (38 page)

The most important reason I declined to make the race in 1968, aside from my debilitating grief, derived specifically from that refusal to be a surrogate. I knew that if I ran, I wouldn't be running as myself. I was in grief, and I wasn't ready. In 1972, it still felt too soon, and my son's health took precedence.

Heading into 1976, I weighed the actual opportunities it would provide me for advancing my social and political ideals against the sacrifices my family would have to make. Joan and I remained together largely for the children, and I worried about her role in the campaign. I was far from certain that my children, in particular Teddy Jr. as he continued to reshape his life as a cancer survivor and youthful amputee, would not be damaged by my necessary absences. And I was far from certain about my safety as president. I had made my personal peace with the prospect of assassination. Making peace with its effect on my mother, sisters, wife, children, and friends so close that they amounted to family--this was another matter.

Although it was not a determinant in my decision-making, I also knew that it did not help my presidential prospects that Chappaquiddick came spinning back into the nation's consciousness. On July 14, 1974, five days before the fifth anniversary of the accident, the
New York Times Magazine
published a retrospective essay by the journalist Robert Sherrill. Irrespective of its merits, the piece attracted great attention. Though the election was still two years away, my adversaries would almost certainly continue to make an issue of it.

In the late summer, just before Labor Day, I gathered my family for a conference on the Cape to make certain I understood their feelings on the matter, and that they understood mine. What transpired led me, on September 23, to call a press conference in Boston to announce that I would not be a candidate for president in 1976. I made it as unequivocal as words would allow.

My primary responsibilities were at home, I told the reporters and cameras. "It has become quite apparent to me that I would be unable to make a full commitment to a campaign for the presidency. I simply cannot do that to my wife and children and the other members of my family." My decision, I stipulated, was firm, final, and unconditional. I would accept neither the nomination nor a draft.

If I needed any further reminder how deeply my loved ones agonized over the thought of my running for president, I received it a year and a half later, by way of my mother.

Rose Kennedy was eighty-five in January 1976 when she trustingly consented to an interview in Palm Beach with a
National Enquirer
reporter named Charles Van Rensselaer, who'd developed some acquaintanceships among the Kennedys. When I learned of my mother's comments, I realized afresh the anxieties that coursed beneath her resolutely cheerful exterior.

"I feel Teddy may be pressured into running for president this year," Mother was quoted as telling the reporter. "I don't want him to, but the pressures may force him.

"He promised me, he promised me faithfully, that he would not run. I told him I did not want to see him die, too, that I could not stand another tragedy.... But even though he has given me his promise that he will not run, I realize there are considerations that could make him change his mind. He may feel it is something he has to do.... And if that is his decision, I would support him. I'll campaign for him, anywhere he wants me to. You know, I'm quite a campaigner.

"But he shouldn't run, though. Oh, no. No. We've had so many tragedies already. I have prayed so much about this and I have asked God that Teddy will be led to the right decision. But in the end I have put it all in God's hands and I will follow His will, no matter what it is."

With the question of my candidacy resolved, I turned my attention to a matter of much greater importance. Racial tensions had escalated in my home state over the issue of school busing to achieve integration. American schools had been desegregated by law since the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision of 1954. Yet urban housing patterns in which populations remained stubbornly sealed within neighborhoods of their own ethnic and racial identities ensured that true integration would remain an unattainable ideal. Finally, the courts of the nation took it upon themselves to enforce the ideal.

Boston was one of several American cities that had stalled for years in designing a desegregation plan, but it was among the most volatile, as events proved. Francis W. Sargent, a moderate Republican, was governor then. He advocated support of the busing order, but was tarred as an elitist by opponents. Kevin White, the mayor of Boston, also tried to play a constructive role, but there was no groundswell of support. The business community simply did not get involved. In those days, they were essentially isolated from this kind of thing.

The Catholic Church, a potential bulwark for restraint, did not play a constructive role. Richard Cardinal Cushing, my father's old friend, was in the waning days of his life and physically too frail to be a force. Sadly, some local priests actually went on the anti-busing marches.

At that time, Boston didn't have someone like Lenny Zakim, the late civic leader and civil rights activist who was known for building bridges between people. The civic leaders at the time of the busing crisis gave money to support the arts, but they really were not involved in this kind of community healing effort. We were not entirely bereft of people and groups who understood the common good and worked bravely for it. I think of some of the members of the African-American community like the Snowdens, Otto and Muriel, the creators of Freedom House in 1949, who remained vital and active through this era. I think of the great educator and NAACP activist Ruth Batson, who stood up to the Boston School Committee when it counted. Or Ellen Jackson, whose constructive work on behalf of affirmative action earned her tremendous vituperation. A Boston high school now bears her name.

In that same year, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts that the Boston Public Schools showed a lingering pattern of racial discrimination, and mandated busing as the remedy: transferring children out of their community schools by bus to those in distant and racially dissimilar neighborhoods to achieve the balance required by the law.

Civil chaos tore through the city within weeks.

Several anti-busing leaders had been elected to the Boston School Committee, the governing body of the Boston Public Schools. This group successfully had blocked implementation of Garrity's ruling. Towering above them all was the determined Boston lawyer Louise Day Hicks, who, with her severely parted black mane, her mouth set in a thin straight line, and her universally recognized catch line--"
You know where I stand
"--had nearly won the mayor's race in 1967. (She served a term as a Democratic congresswoman from 1971 to 1973, and in 1976 became president of the Boston City Council.) Hicks and her equally confrontational comrade-in-arms, Elvira "Pixie" Palladino, cofounded the aptly named ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights) in 1974. And there was John Kerrigan, the heavy-browed, caustic school committee chairman who spewed patently over-the-top claims and castigations to keep himself on the news and in the limelight.

It is significant that Hicks, Palladino, Kerrigan, and others at the forefront of the anti-busing movement were Democrats. Hicks in fact voted for the Equal Rights Amendment as a congresswoman, and Palladino rather creatively tried to frame busing as a women's issue. Activists were holding public rallies all over the city in the early 1970s.

Some of the opponents of busing were focused only on race, and I knew I couldn't have any impact on them. But others were concerned and bewildered, troubled and filled with anxiety about what was happening to their children, and I thought that maybe I could reach these parents. They had legitimate concerns. They were worried that their children would be far away from home if they fell ill at school. And they were upset because they were being denied access to the school in the neighborhood to which, in some cases, they had moved to specifically because of the school district. I understood those concerns.

In August, I made a televised appeal for calm. Others did the same, and we had some success urging support for the courts. The federal courts had been instrumental in helping to break down the walls of discrimination, and I deeply believed that the worst thing we could do was to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the courts' decisions.

But in retrospect, it may have been this very appeal, and others like it, that branded me as an enemy of the outraged dissenters. In their eyes, I had become just one more of those Boston elitists who didn't care about ordinary people and their children.

I issued another plea for restraint shortly before the opening day of public schools. But as that day dawned, September 9, the entire nation seemed focused on South Boston. I went over to see it for myself: television trucks and reporters everywhere, swarms of police, rocks flying at school buses, mobs of red-faced people yelling insults at the African-American children as they walked to their schoolhouse doors, where metal detectors awaited them.

A huge anti-busing rally was forming at City Hall. I debated whether or not to make an appearance there. I had not been invited, and so it would have been easy to stay away. The prospects for violence were enormous. But I felt a responsibility to go. Boston was my city, and busing was
the
issue of the day. Hundreds of good people of both races were putting themselves on the line, trying to find a way through this struggle. There was no choice but for me to face this issue where it counted: at ground zero, on the street. That was when I discovered the price of calling for calm.

When my car pulled up to City Hall, a massive crowd swelled the area between it and the John F. Kennedy Building. People screamed through bullhorns.

I decided to walk to this crowd. I told my aides to stay behind: I did not want it to appear that I was coming with a group to protect me. As I walked alone across the mall toward them, I could hear voices say, "There he is! There he is! There he is!" They began yelling insults. But they did fall back a little and open just enough of a path for me to get to the podium.

As I approached the microphone, a man shouted at me, "What do you want to do, speak? You're not going to speak! You've taken away our rights! We're going to take away your rights! How do you like that?!"

With that, everyone in the crowd turned their backs on me and sang "God Bless America." A busing protester took the podium and gave a five-minute fire-and-brimstone speech. When I walked toward the microphone again after he'd finished, some of his supporters covered the mike with their hands. The crowd turned its back again and sang another song. The hostility level was rising fast. I was catching insults from both the crowd and those on the podium. I started down the stairs at the side of the podium. The crowd opened just a sliver. They raged insults at me that knew no bounds: "YOUR ONE-LEGGED SON! SEND
HIM
OVER HERE!" Eggs and tomatoes were in the air now, and there was pushing and shoving.

I stopped on my way away from the plaza. Crowds such as this one are filled with cowards. If you turn and face them, they're reluctant to close the distance. I stopped a couple times more, and the crowd stopped. But it was showing signs of turning into a full-fledged mob. I was now about thirty yards from the doors of the JFK Building. The mob was still stopping, but it had edged ever closer to me. I turned resolutely and strode toward the doors. As I passed through them, the rocks started hurtling toward me in earnest. Window glass shattered, but police were inside the building, and my pursuers didn't try to enter.

The crisis, for me at least, could have ended there. It almost did. I got into an elevator and started to take it down to the basement garage to get into a car that would whisk me to the airport, from which I would fly to Washington. Then it struck me:
They'll say they ran me out of town
. There was no way I was going to let that happen. I rode the elevator back up to street level and let them see me. Then I took the elevator up to my office on the twenty-fourth floor.

More dangerous still was a situation that developed after a speech I gave in Quincy not long afterward. This time ROAR was an even more aggressive presence among the several hundred demonstrators outside the building. I realized that I would have to move through them on my way to my car. My driver, Jack Crimmins, usually stayed with the car on such occasions, but this time he left it and walked back to the meeting hall to give me and my aide Jimmy King some extra protection.

We made it back to the car with people screaming and spraying spittle in our faces. The car's tires had all been punctured. Dog feces were smeared on the door handles and all over the windshields. The demonstrators had nearly encircled us. There was no security.

Jack and Jimmy and I started to walk. I didn't know where the hell we were walking. It was a neighborhood, but one completely unknown to me. We walked on. The thing was to seem purposeful, resolute. I asked Jack, "Do we have friends around here? Is there a house?" But Jack knew of no one. We didn't even know the name of the street we were on. We kept walking. The mob followed us. It was starting to grow larger. The people in it were getting nastier. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a subway station. I looked at Jimmy and said, "Jimmy, we've got to get in there." But what I was thinking was,
My God, we'll be in the subway and we'll be waiting there for who knows how long for the train to come
. We broke for the entrance. Our pursuers ran after us. There was one gated doorway leading to the tracks. We squeezed through, and Jimmy somehow braced it shut against the mob. We boarded a train and were safe.

Probably the most excruciating encounter of them all, though, was an event that wasn't physically threatening. I'd agreed to meet with some seventy South Boston parents in my office.

They all crowded in and formed a semicircle around me, behind my desk. ROAR was ably represented by my old friend Pixie Palladino. She did not disappoint. But the woman who really burned her name into my memory on that long, long day was an organizer named Rita Graul. She was the toughest cookie I'd ever seen. I remember thinking,
If I were ever to be fighting against the German lines, I'd want Rita Graul to be in that foxhole with me
.