A Kennedy Flashback: Look to Bobby's Run

As United States Senate hopeful Caroline Kennedy travels the state looking for political support, there is probably one piece of advice that the public relations experts she hired have already given her: it's perfectly acceptable to quote your father, John F. Kennedy, or your uncles Ted and Robert, but whatever you do, do not bring up grandpa Joe Kennedy in any conversation.

If she does happen to mention Joe Kennedy, some cable TV bobblehead may find a juicy quote from 1962, when Ted Kennedy had finally become old enough to run for the Senate in his home state of Massachusetts. The seat had been kept warm by a Kennedy loyalist after Jack Kennedy vacated it to become President, and Joe the Patriarch wanted to give the seat to Ted.

An Endowed Chair

There was some discussion about how it would look, what with Jack in the White House and Bobby serving as U.S. Attorney General. Some Kennedy supporters thought the word "dynasty" might be used against the family. Old Man Kennedy showed little patience with all the folderol and cut off the debate with a classic Kennedy-ism: "Dammit, I paid for that seat and it belongs in the family."

FROM LOW PROFILE TO HIGH OFFICE?: If Caroline Kennedy bigfoots her way into the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Hillary Clinton, she will be following in the footsteps of her uncle Bobby, who angled for the Democratic nomination in 1964 after President Johnson declined to make him his running-mate.

Although Caroline has not made any overt appeals to Camelot in her campaign to succeed Hillary Clinton, the unmistakable sub rosa message is there: forget the gangsterism of Wall Street, don't worry about the $700 billion you just gave to save capitalism, suck up those annoying tax increases proposed by Governor Paterson, dig deeper to pay for your subway fare, live with a Tier 5 pension—which will not save one nickel in this year's budget that Mayor Bloomberg is trying to sneak in the back door of Albany politics—because hope is alive.

"Yes we can" is the implicit Kennedy message. Yes, we can re-live the days of Camelot plus bring back the good old days of Uncle Bobby. That's the good uncle who finally ran for President in March 1968 only after Gene McCarthy paved the way in New Hampshire by showing how vulnerable Lyndon Johnson was—not the bad Bobby who worked for Joe Mc- Carthy and authorized the wiretap on Martin Luther King's phone, hounded that great American labor leader Jimmy Hoffa and muscled John Lewis to tone down his powerful speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

We will be asked to forget the cautious Jack Kennedy, who talked too much about putting things off for the second term.

In many ways, Caroline has an easier task than Uncle Bobby, who decided only in late August 1964 to run for the Senate from his adopted state of New York. His opponent, the incumbent Republican Sen. Kenneth Keat- ing, had one of the best quips of the campaign when he called Kennedy a carpetbagger and said "there are people waiting on line at the World's Fair in Queens who have been in New York longer than Bobby Kennedy."

Brother-in-Law Made Him Do It

Not to be outdone, Bobby had a selfeffacing rejoinder. "I have decided to run in response to a draft from my brother-in-law Steve Smith." The GOP dirty tricksters were busy fieldtesting their slime campaigns that they perfected later by accusing Kennedy of being pro-Nazi because as Attorney General he settled a case against the General Aniline and Film Company.

Bobby Kennedy had told President Johnson in June 1964 that he was not interested in running for the Senate. Bobby spent the next two months hoping that Johnson would pick him as the vice presidential candidate. Once the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, Johnson could have won election with Barney Fife on the ticket, and Kennedy was left out in the cold.

After listening to entreaties from his friends, Kennedy finally decided to run but had to face a popular liberal in Keating. But first he had to go to the old-time Democratic bosses, men like Bronx boss Charlie Buckley; the Democratic leader of Erie County, Peter Crotty, and Daniel O'Connell, the potentate of Albany County. These were the men who controlled the delegates at the state Democratic Convention held in early September. Jack Newfield once told me that Kennedy seemed more comfortable with those men than he did with the so-called "reformers" who supposedly shared his values.

In any event, the bosses, who had no real candidate to begin with and who remembered Jack fondly, quickly lined up behind Bobby and he got the nomination easily at the convention in early September, defeating upstate Congressman Sam Stratton. Then Bobby had to supplicate himself before the patronage bottom-feeders of the Liberal Party, led by Alex Rose.

That was the easy part. Unlike Caroline, who has a constituency right now of one—David Paterson—Kennedy had to mount a statewide campaign in just two months to topple an incumbent.

A Two-Year Tour

If Caroline is indeed given the job by Paterson, she will have two years to travel the 62 counties, to meet with the editorial boards and to go on a Hillary-style "listening tour," all the while raising the tens of millions of dollars it will take to get her elected on her own in 2010. Of course, Hillary could have made this easier for everyone if she resigned the day after she was chosen as Obama's Secretary of State. So far, Caroline has had a fair amount of negative public reaction to her interest in the seat. The snakiest local comment came from Queens Congressman Gary Ackerman, who compared her to the actress Jennifer Lopez and denounced her lack of experience for the job. Of course, Ackerman, left out the fact that his previous job was in the State Senate and before that he was a publisher of a string of Queens newspapers. He was the only person quoted in a Times article that carried a front-page blurb that "some" people (including—for real—unnamed "bloggers") were upset with her candidacy.

There is nothing inherently wrong with being a publisher; it is a perfectly honorable profession and much needed in our society. While some pundits might want to make the point that publishers, editors and writers are perfectly suited to govern based on what we observe and write about, most voters wouldn't put that at the top of their list when asked what qualifies someone to be a Senator. The publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were both Members of Congress from New York, but quickly found it too boring.

Stormy View From Bay

Nationally, Caroline has had to endure the snarling Bay Buchanan, who called her candidacy an "outrage" on a cable channel. Buchanan was in an uncontrolled rage last month at the thought of this "unqualified" woman in the Senate. It's a good thing Bay wasn't on the air in 1996 when her brother Pat decided he had lots of experience to be President. He was, after all, a reporter. Then he became a columnist. Then he wrote books! Then he was a guttersnipe for the worst elements of Richard Nixon's White House, followed by a stint as Ronald Regan's "Director of Communications." Lots of experience there.

Before there was cable TV, there were editorial writers at the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, and they were not bashful about Bobby's lack of qualifications for the Senate seat. But the harsher attacks came in newspaper ads sponsored by a group called "Democrats for Keating." Led by the ferocious Kennedy-hater Gore Vidal, (he had also run unsuccessfully for Congress; presumably, the voters weren't impressed with his qualifications as a writer), the committee also included the actor Paul Newman, the writer James Baldwin and the editor of The Nation, Carey McWilliams. ABC-TV newswoman Lisa Howard held meetings of the stop-Bobby movement in her apartment. She was a big fan of El Commandante Fidel Castro—she admitted to a sexual affair with him— and blamed Bobby, not the Tyrant for Life, for just about everything that was wrong in Cuba.

It would have made a perfect "only in New York" screenplay: the crusty old Democratic deal-makers on their way to being the dinosaurs of the party were backing Bobby, and the liberal intelligentsia were accusing him of not being a "real liberal," whatever that meant.

When Kennedy was murdered in 1968, he had an almost cult-like following in the ghettoes of America as well as in the white working class neighborhoods of Indiana and among the anti-war young. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller passed over New York Mayor John Lindsay and others and appointed an upstate Congressman named Charles Goodell, who quickly turned against the Vietnam War and denounced Nixon. Goodell was defeated in 1970 by a real carpetbagger—the patrician James Buckley from Connecticut— when he and Westchester Congressman Richard Ottinger split the moderate and liberal vote. (David Paterson's father Basil was a candidate for Lieutenant Governor on the statewide ticket, running with gubernatorial candidate Arthur Goldberg).

Where Does She Stand?

We haven't heard much from Caroline about the issues, although now is the time when she should be traveling the state with bold proposals for rebuilding the cities, with specifics that will tell us how she will make sure that unionized city and state workers don't get hosed because reporters, politicians and regulators have suddenly discovered that there has been wholesale thievery on Wall Street.

We need to hear from her about the greening of New York, about how she will fight to keep the safety net for the poor and working class, how she will be shouting to the White House for the tens of billions of dollars in Federal aid for a state and city that are being battered daily by economic news not of our doing, no matter what the Citizens Budget Commission or the anti-union lobbyists at the Manhattan Institute or the publisher of the Daily News—who lost $30 million to a Ponzi con man—think.

She needs to be a lot more specific than her Uncle Bobby, who thought he could coast to victory on the memory of his slaughtered brother but won by 770,000 votes—a comfortable margin but not even close to LBJ's two-million vote drubbing of Goldwater in New York.

Caroline would do well to dig out an old campaign flier that I and my high school buddies in the "Young Democrats for Kennedy" handed out on the subways in 1964. It was our first political act, and I still have the framed flier on my office wall. It is a 10-by-14 poster-sized piece, with the headline "I Pledge My Future to New York." There is a photo of Bobby standing on what looks like a sound truck, microphone in hand.

Issues Still Relevant

Although the issues highlighted in the flier were quite general in nature, it is eerie how much the topics still resonate today. Bobby was promising to raise the minimum wage, reform the immigrant laws so "relatives in southern and Eastern European countries can rejoin their families and so that skilled and trained people we need can come to help us build our country." Bobby promised "a broad new housing program" to help young families buy homes, and to build lowand middle-income housing, to replace slums, build parks, improve transit and provide medical care through Social Security. "One million people over 65 in New York live in fear of medical bills they cannot pay," the flier said. Kennedy also promised better schools, better Teachers and better recreation facilities. "A child without hope is a waste of a precious resource," he said.

Not much to argue with there, but Caroline's job 44 years later is to fill in the blanks with specifics—during the next few weeks—and to promise to run again in 2010. The Senate is too important to be a tryout camp to see if she likes the big leagues.

Mr. Callaghan, a staff writer for the New York Teacher, has been writing about city politics since 1978. The views expressed are his own, not his union's. He can be reached at mcalla24@aol.com.