True Compass (45 page)

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.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Family Business

1988-1990

As 1988 dawned and the Reagan administration entered its final year, I looked forward to a fascinating fall election season. Reagan's vice president, George H. W. Bush, was viewed as an early favorite in the crowded Republican primaries that also featured Congressman Jack Kemp of New York, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, and former cabinet members Alexander Haig and Donald Rumsfeld. The Democratic primary field crackled with talent: Congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri; Senator Paul Simon and the Reverend Jesse Jackson of Illinois; Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts; Senators Al Gore of Tennessee and Joe Biden of Delaware; former senator Gary Hart of Colorado; and former governor Bruce Babbitt of Arizona. Hopes ran high among Democrats that one of these men would lead the nation past eight years of "Reaganomics" that had tripled the national debt, from $900 billion when he took office to more than $2.8 trillion at the end of his term.

I faced a reelection test of my own that year. But even as I prepared for it with the diligence that any campaign for the Senate deserves, my highest hopes were keyed to a race that involved neither the presidency nor the Congress, but a relatively obscure state-level district in Rhode Island, and a fellow just barely old enough to vote, let alone stand for office. In April, my son Patrick had decided to toss his hat into the political ring.

He was a sophomore at Providence College that spring. He would not turn twenty-one until July. Yet his call to politics was serious and mature, and his passion for it ran deep. And that passion was his own. Patrick was not a carbon copy of me, in his views or in his style. Though our beliefs are similar on most issues, I've never tried to tell him how to think. Nor has he needed me to. Patrick lived politics his whole young life. His friendly face beneath his shock of red hair instantly draws people to him. Patrick returns the warmth. Then too, he had and maintains a zest for campaigning, despite the fact that he had grown up reserved and rather shy. He quickly learned to love getting out there. He knew that people liked to see their representatives; needed to see them out there, working hard.

Patrick gave his political impulses a test run in early March, when he ran for and was elected a Rhode Island delegate to the Democratic convention, committed to Michael Dukakis. He liked the feel of that, and set his sights on the Rhode Island House of Representatives. A few months later, he threw himself into the fray like a veteran. Since no Republican was running, the Democratic primary would produce the overall winner. His opponent was the incumbent, Jack Skeffington, a veteran of the state's ward politics who, despite his good nature, was none too pleased to be going up against a youngster whom he considered no more than an upstart with a famous name who ought to be waiting his turn. Skeffington's fellow Rhode Island Democrats, an understandably close-knit group, felt the same way. And so my son found his welcome to electoral politics delivered with a bare knuckle or two.

Patrick fought back with energy and good cheer. He campaigned hard and shrewdly, but fairly, against Skeffington and his supporters. Patrick argued that Skeffington had grown out of touch with the people he represented. Still underweight and a little weakened from recent surgery on a benign spinal tumor, and packing an inhalator to combat his chronic asthma, Patrick bounded about the district, practicing retail politics in his neat blue blazer and white shirt with endless handshakes and knocks on doors. His strategy worked--reinforced somewhat by many voters' perception that Skeffington's people were coming down too hard on the young man. Patrick later admitted that he'd been anxious and nervous through much of the campaign. Yet he won in September with 1,324 votes, against 1,009 for his rival. He was off on a political career that six years later would take him to the United States House of Representatives.

One incident that has become part of our family lore is the one we call the "go back the way you came" story. When Patrick first became interested in running, I took him to meet the legendary pol John Pastore. John was eighty-one then and retired from political life. He'd served Rhode Island as both governor and senator, the first Italian American from the state to have held either office. He was a great Democrat. I remember those big soulful dark eyes of his, and the little mustache that he always kept trimmed. My brother Jack had thought the world of him and believed him the most electable figure in the history of Rhode Island. John had a great heart, and the people loved him.

Patrick and I drove to Pastore's house one day in the early spring. It was in a neighborhood that John had never left. He was a fellow who
literally
never forgot where he came from. No one else was at home, so it was just the retired senator, entertaining Patrick and me. John served us cookies and tea and talked politics. We were there for almost an hour. When we finally said goodbye and returned to the car, it was getting dark and we weren't sure how to get back to where we were going. Patrick got out, went back, and rang the bell. I could see him talking with Pastore, who was gesturing while Patrick nodded. Patrick returned and got back in the car, but didn't say anything. I asked, "What did he say?" And Patrick, in a perfect imitation of John Pastore, barked, "'Go back the way you came, Patrick, go back the way you came!'"

As I've noted, my son was challenging an incumbent, and within the close-knit Rhode Island Democratic establishment it was a rarity for anyone to support a challenger. Not long after his announcement, Patrick hosted a big kickoff breakfast, where lots of politicians made lots of speeches. It had gone on for quite a while, and it was time to wind it up. Half the room had emptied and the rest were walking out.

Then Patrick spotted Senator Pell.

Claiborne Pell was one of the most splendid and civilized public servants I had ever been privileged to call a colleague. ("He was a gentleman and a gentle man," I said at his funeral in January 2009, after he died at age ninety.) He counted a political lineage that stretched well back into the nineteenth century. He'd served on a convoy in the treacherous North Atlantic in World War II after receiving a master's degree in history at Columbia University. Claiborne's self-effacing wit and his humane vision carried him through a thirty-six-year Senate career distinguished by his creation of the Pell grants for college students in 1973, his sponsorship of legislation for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Endowment for the Humanities, and his effective support for the environmentally critical United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

I watched as Patrick walked over to Claiborne and asked him whether he would speak for just a minute. I thought: poor Claiborne! What an impossible situation for any politician. People want to go. They
are
going. And now he's supposed to keep their attention.

I should never have worried. The movement toward the doors ceased as Claiborne moved to the podium. He gave a talk I'll never forget. It was breathtakingly short, but he hit it out of the park. In his quiet voice, he said, "We're going to end, now, for this morning, but before we do I want to say why I'm here to support Patrick Kennedy. I believe that he shares the values of President Kennedy. And every night since we've lost President Kennedy, I've knelt down on my knees and prayed that this nation would live up to the promise of John Kennedy. I believe that Patrick Kennedy will, and that's why I support him."

His election victory made me feel so terribly proud of my son. After all these years, I finally understood how my dad must have felt.

I had won reelection and was in Hawaii with my sisters for a vacation that spanned the 1989 New Year when the representative-elect telephoned me. He wanted me present for his inauguration. He had earlier felt that I shouldn't be there, that he should be sworn in on his own, and I had accepted his judgment. I had seen my own father step into the background for his sons, and I was certainly prepared to do the same for mine. But if my son wanted me to be there after all, I was going to come through for him. So I flew fourteen hours from Honolulu to Providence for the swearing in. I arrived at his apartment late at night. It was cold and dark, and I was exhausted. Patrick greeted me with some interesting news. He said that he was so happy to see me, but his people thought it was best if I didn't go down for the swearing in. I said, "You must be kidding." He wasn't.

I didn't really mind. I was just so proud of him and so happy.

Patrick thus became the second member of the emerging generation of Kennedys to gain political office. Joseph Kennedy II, Bobby's eldest son, had been elected to Congress from Massachusetts the previous year, and would serve until 1999. Kathleen Townsend, Bobby's firstborn, would be elected lieutenant governor of Maryland in 1995. But Patrick became the youngest officeholder of us all.

Not all of the 1988 elections had gone so well. Incumbent vice president George H. W. Bush had defeated Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, which meant another four years of Republican control of the executive branch.

I enjoyed a warm relationship with President Bush, and whenever the talk was about foreign policy, especially Russia, we had productive conversations. On domestic policy, however, he told me, "Relax." He had no plans for new social programs.

Nevertheless, my colleagues and I were able to get some things through Congress. On July 26, 1990, President Bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act, which I'd co-advocated for many years and cosponsored with Senator Bob Dole. It brought some forty-three million disabled Americans into the mainstream via special services and protections, and has been called the most sweeping civil rights act since the original back in 1964.

At first, the administration had resisted our efforts. When I started discussing the legislation with John Sununu, Bush's chief of staff, he wanted to know how we were going to deal with a person in a wheelchair on a ski slope, or a blind person in a bookstore. He was looking for problems and putting up a lot of roadblocks. He was always available to talk to, but progress was slow.

Finally, after much negotiating, all of the important issues had been resolved. Key members attended a meeting in a Republican Senate conference room, with Dole presiding, to review everything--one last massage. Sununu was present, and once again, he became obstructive and said something aggressive to a Senate aide, Bobby Silverstein. I'd had it with Sununu's bullying and slammed my hand down on the table. I told him that if he had a problem, he could deal with me. I didn't want him yelling at our staff. At one point, Sununu said that all of the staff should leave so that the principals could finish negotiating. I said, fine, then he should leave, because he was staff. That seemed to quiet things down.

Everyone stayed and the rest of the meeting moved along smoothly.

Around this time, I had the privilege of meeting three great men. Our conversations weren't long, but their influences on me were profound.

In May 1987, at the Vatican, I was received by His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, in his "private workroom." He was sitting in a hard wooden chair near a plain wooden desk. I had just visited Poland, so I told him about an extraordinary religious experience I'd had in Gdansk with Lech Walesa. The pope said he'd been following Poland very closely and had been hearing many things from friends, not all of it good. He said he was concerned about the social and economic conditions, that young people might lose hope. "It's not good that they don't have a real sense of their future." Walesa provided great symbolism, he said. That Walesa continued to live in Poland could be a powerful example for people.

In February 1990, during a dinner at Katharine Graham's home, I met Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former dissident leader who, despite years of imprisonment and government intimidation, had led the 1989 Velvet Revolution against Czechoslovakia's communist regime. He had recently ascended to the presidency of his country and was hailed as a hero on his visit to Washington.

At the dinner table, he told me that when he was in prison, he was permitted to write for only one hour. Every three months, he was permitted a new pencil. He could write one letter, which could express no philosophy or poetry. It had to be factual.

When he mentioned that he hadn't been able to see much of America, because he was in his car constantly, I suggested that he visit the Lincoln Memorial. To my delight, he agreed, and together we made a late-night visit to the memorial, from which I read him the inscriptions on the wall from Lincoln's second inaugural and the Gettysburg Address. He said, "I am not able to understand the language, but I understand the poetry."

That same month, on February 15, I had my first conversation with Nelson Mandela, on the phone. He had been freed four days earlier, after twenty-seven years of imprisonment. While in South Africa in 1985, I had gone to Soweto and visited Bishop Desmond Tutu and Mandela's wife, Winnie. Mandela told me that he knew I'd been outside his prison on that day, and that it had given his friends hope and renewed power.

I invited him to visit the Kennedy Library, and four months later, on June 25, he attended a lunch in his honor, where I could not help but be impressed by his seriousness and honesty. He had not yet been elected president, but he expressed optimism about the integrity of South Africa's leader, F. W. de Klerk, and his intent to bring about substantive change.

I asked him what he thought was the most important thing the United States could do. He said it was very simple: jobs for the sixteen thousand exiled political activists who were returning to the country. Those people would need housing and job opportunities in order to be a source of stability for South Africa's future.

As inspiring as these men were, it would be a woman who changed the course of my life.