• About
  • Photography

The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

The Bully Pulpit

Tag Archives: campaigns

‘Through the Haze of Pain’: Robert Kennedy Rises from the Depths

25 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Philosophy

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Aeschylus, American Government, American Politics, Arthur Schlesinger, Bobby Kennedy, campaigns, Camus, Corridors of Grief, existentialism, future, Government, Greek, Greek tragedy, history, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Kennedys, plans, politicians, politics, President, RFK, Rita Dallas, Robert Francis Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and His Times, stoicism

Robert Francis Kennedy

“With all he had striven for smashed in a single afternoon, [Robert] had an overwhelming sense of the fragility and contingency of life. He had never taken plans very seriously in the past. He could not believe in them at all now…

Robert Kennedy at last traveled in that speculative area where doubt lived. He returned from the dangerous journey, his faith intact, but deepened, enriched. From Aeschylus and Camus he drew a sort of Christian stoicism and fatalism: a conviction that man could not escape his destiny, but that this did not relieve him of the responsibility of fulfilling his own best self. He supplemented the Greek image of man against fate with the existentialist proposition that man, defining himself by his choices, remakes himself each day and therefore can never rest. Life was a sequence of risks. To fail to meet them was to destroy a part of oneself.

He made his way through the haze of pain—and in doing so brought other sufferers insight and relief. ‘For the next two and a half years,’ wrote Rita Dallas, his father’s nurse, ‘Robert Kennedy became the central focus of strength and hope for the family…. Despite his own grief and loneliness, he radiated an inner strength that I have never seen before in any other man…. Bobby was the one who welded the pieces back together.’ As his father had said so long before, he would keep the Kennedys together, you could bet.

He was now the head of the family. With his father stricken, his older brothers dead, he was accountable to himself. The qualities he had so long subordinated in the interest of others—the concern under the combativeness, the gentleness under the carapace, the idealism, at once wistful and passionate, under the toughness—could rise freely to the surface. He could be himself at last.”

__________

A passage pulled from Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

I promise this is the last section from Schlesinger or Dallek that I’ll post — at least for awhile.

RFK / JFKRobert Kennedy FamilyRobert Kennedy and ChildrenRobert Kennedy and daughterJohn F. And Jacqueline Kennedy With Baby Caroline Kennedy

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

How Robert Kennedy Responded to Tragedy

22 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Philosophy, Sports

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

American Government, American Politics, Arthur Schlesinger, campaigns, Government, history, JFK, Joe Kennedy Jr., Joe Kennedy Sr., John F. Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., Kennedys, Lem Billings, Mark Dalton, politicians, politics, President, Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and His Times

Robert Kennedy and Brothers

“The question arose whether the coffin should be open or closed. The casket arrived at the White House early in the morning of the twenty-third. After a brief service in the East Room, ‘I (Robert) asked everybody to leave and I asked them to open it… When I saw it, I’d made my mind up. I didn’t want it open.’…

He spent the night in the Lincoln bedroom. Charles Spalding went with him and said, ‘There’s a sleeping pill around somewhere.’ Spalding found a pill. Robert Kennedy said, ‘God, it’s so awful. Everything was really beginning to run so well.’ He was still controlled. Spalding closed the door. ‘Then I just heard him break down…. I heard him sob and say, “Why, God?”’

He lay fitfully for an hour or two. Soon it was daylight. He walked down the hall and came in on Jacqueline, sitting on her bed in a dressing gown, talking to the children. Young John Kennedy said that a bad man had shot his father. His older sister, Caroline, said that Daddy was too big for his coffin…

Robert Kennedy sent a letter to each of his children and told his sisters to do likewise. He wrote his son Joe:

On the day of the burial
of your Godfather
John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Nov. 24, 1963
Dear Joe,

You are the oldest of all the male grandchildren. You have a special and particular responsibility now which I know you will fulfill.
Remember all the things that Jack started—be kind to others that are less fortunate than we—and love our country.

Love to you
Daddy

Robert F. and John F. Kennedy

He appeared, I noted the day after Dallas, ‘composed, withdrawn and resolute.’ Ben Bradlee the same day saw him ‘clearly emerging as the strongest of the stricken.’ Discipline and duty summoned him to the occasion. Within he was demolished. ‘It was much harder for him than anybody,’ said LeMoyne Billings, his friend of so many years. He had put ‘his brother’s career absolutely first; and not anything about his own career whatsoever. And I think that the shock of losing what he’d built everything around … aside from losing the loved figure … was just absolutely [devastating]—he didn’t know where he was…. Everything was just pulled out from under him.’ They had been years of fulfillment, but of derivative fulfillment: fulfillment not of himself but of a brother and a family. Now in a crazed flash all was wiped out. ‘Why, God?’

Robert Kennedy was a desperately wounded man. ‘I just had the feeling,’ said John Seigenthaler, ‘that it was physically painful, almost as if he were on the rack or that he had a toothache or that he had a heart attack. I mean it was pain and it showed itself as being pain…. It was very obvious to me, almost when he got up to walk that it hurt to get up to walk.’ Everything he did was done through a ‘haze of pain.’ ‘He was the most shattered man I had ever seen in my life,’ said Pierre Salinger. ‘He was virtually non-functioning. He would walk for hours by himself.’ Douglas Dillon offered him his house in Hobe Sound, Florida, where Robert and Ethel went with a few friends at the end of the month. They played touch football —‘really vicious games,’ Salinger recalled. ‘… It seemed to me the way he was getting his feelings out was in, you know, knocking people down.’

Sardonic withdrawal seemed to distance the anguish. Seigenthaler went out to Hickory Hill after the funeral. ‘Obviously in pain, [Robert] opened the door and said something like this, “Come on in, somebody shot my brother, and we’re watching his funeral on television.” When Helen Keyes arrived from Boston to help with his mail, ‘I didn’t want to see him; I just figured I’d dissolve; and I walked in and he said, “Come in.” I said, “All right.” And he said to me, “Been to any good funerals lately?” Oh, I almost died, and yet once he said that it was out in the open, and, you know, we just picked up and went on from there.’ Senator Herbert Lehman of New York died early in December. Robert Kennedy, in New York for the services, said to his Milton friend Mary Bailey Gimbel, ‘I don’t like to let too many days go by without a funeral.’

Robert and John F. Kennedy2

Friends did their best. John Bartlow Martin, retiring as ambassador to the Dominican Republic, went to say goodbye. ‘How his face had aged in the years I’d known him.’ Martin attempted a few words of comfort. ‘With that odd tentative half-smile, so well known to his friends, so little to others, he murmured…‘Well, three years is better than nothing.’ Peter Maas arrived from New York on the first day the Attorney General went out publicly—to a Christmas party arranged by Mary McGrory of the Washington Star for an orphanage.

The moment he walked in the room, all these little children—screaming and playing—there was just suddenly silence…. Bob stepped into the middle of the room and just then a little black boy—I don’t suppose he was more than six or seven years old—suddenly darted forward, and stopped in front of him, and said, ‘Your brother’s deadl Your brother’s dead!’ … The adults, all of us, we just kind of turned away…. The little boy knew he had done something wrong, but he didn’t know what; so he started to cry. Bobby stepped forward and picked him up, in kind of one motion, and held him very close for a moment, and he said, ‘That’s all right. I have another brother.’”

__________

From Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

It’s the “remember all the things that Jack started” in Robert’s letter to young Joe that gets me. Started: like the title Robert Dallek’s great book, an unfinished life.

The KennedysRobert and John F. Kennedy 8Robert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy
Robert Kennedy and John F. KennedyRobert Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Robert and John F. Kennedy3 John F. Kennedy Material released by the National Archives in Washington

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Jack’s Easy Conquests

20 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Affairs, American Government, American Politics, campaigns, Government, history, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Kennedys, Lem Billings, Love, Mark Dalton, Mussolini, politicians, politics, President, sex, William Walton, women

John F. Kennedy

“Jack’s greatest success in his first two years at Harvard was in winning friends and proving to be ‘a lady’s man’…

Jack’s discovery that girls liked him or that he had a talent for charming them gave him special satisfaction… ‘I can’t help it,’ he declared with evident self-pleasure [in a letter to an adolescent friend] . ‘It can’t be my good looks because I’m not much handsomer than anybody else. It must be my personality.’…

Jack’s easy conquests compounded the feeling that, like the member of a privileged aristocracy, of a libertine class, he was entitled to seek out and obtain what he craved, instantly, even gratefully, from the object of his immediate affection. Furthermore, there did not have to be a conflict between private fun and public good. David Cecil’s The Young Melbourne, a 1939 biography of Queen Victoria’s prime minister, depicted young British aristocrats performing heroic feats in the service of queen and country while privately practicing unrestrained sexual indulgence with no regard for the conventional standards of monogamous marriages or premarital courting. Jack would later say that it was one of his two favorite books.

One woman reporter remembered that Jack ‘didn’t have to lift a finger to attract women; they were drawn to him in battalions.’ After Harvard, when he spent a term in the fall of 1940 at Stanford (where, unlike at Harvard, men and women attended classes together), he wrote Lem Billings: ‘Still can’t get use to the co-eds but am taking them in my stride. Expect to cut one out of the herd and brand her shortly, but am taking it very slow as do not want to be known as the beast of the East.’

But restraint was usually not the order of the day. He had so many women, he could not remember their names; ‘Hello, kid,’ was his absentminded way of greeting a current amour. Stories are legion — no doubt, some the invention of imagination, but others most probably true — of his self-indulgent sexual escapades. ‘We have only fifteen minutes,’ he told a beautiful co-ed invited to his hotel room during a campaign stop in 1960. ‘I wish we had time for some foreplay,’ he told another beauty he dated in the 1950s… At a society party in New York he asked the artist William Walton how many women in the gathering of socialites he had slept with. When Walton gave him ‘a true count,’ Jack said, ‘Wow, I envy you.’ Walton replied: ‘Look, I was here earlier than you were.’ And Jack responded, ‘I’m going to catch up.'”

__________

Again from Dallek’s great biography, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, this excerpt pulled from chapter 2 (“Privileged Youth”).

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

John in Joe’s Shadow

19 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

American Government, American Politics, campaigns, Government, history, Honey Fitz, JFK, Joe Kennedy Jr., Joe Kennedy Sr., John F. Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., Kennedys, Lem Billings, Mark Dalton, politicians, politics, President

Joe Kennedy Jr. and John F. Kennedy

“For someone who prided himself on his independence — whose sense of self rested partly on questioning authority, on making up his own mind about public issues and private standards — taking on his elder brother’s identity was not Jack Kennedy’s idea of coming into his own. Indeed, if a political career were strictly a case of satisfying his father’s ambitions and honoring his brother’s memory by fulfilling his life plan, it is more than doubtful that he would have taken on the assignment. To be sure, he felt, as he wrote Lem Billings, ‘terribly exposed and vulnerable’ after his brother’s death. Joe’s passing burdened him with an ‘unnamed responsibility’ to his whole family — to its desire to expand upon the public distinction established by Joe Sr. and to fulfill Joe Jr.’s intention to reach for the highest office.

Nor was his father completely confident that Jack was well suited for the job. As Joe said later, his eldest son [Joe Jr.] ‘used to talk about being President some day, and a lot of smart people thought he would make it. He was altogether different from Jack — more dynamic, more sociable and easy going. Jack in those days back there when he was getting out of college was rather shy, withdrawn and quiet. His mother and I couldn’t picture him as a politician. We were sure he’d be a teacher or a writer.’ Mark Dalton, a politician close to the Kennedys in 1945, remembered Jack as far from a natural. He did not seem ‘to be built for politics in the sense of being the easygoing affable person. He was extremely drawn and thin… He was always shy. He drove himself into this… It must have been a tremendous effort of will.’ Nor was he comfortable with public speaking, impressing one of his navy friends as unpolished: ‘He spoke very fast, very rapidly, and seemed to be just a trifle embarrassed on stage.’…

Despite his father’s help — or perhaps because of it — Jack continued to have great doubts about whether he was making the right decision. He could not shake the feeling that he was essentially a stand-in for Joe Jr. When he spoke with Look magazine, which published an article about his campaign, he said that he was only doing ‘the job Joe would have done.’ Privately he told friends, ‘I’m just filling Joe’s shoes. If he were alive, I’d never be in this.’ He later told a reporter, ‘If Joe had lived, I probably would have gone to law school in 1946.’ He disliked the inevitable comparisons between him and his brother, in which he seemed all too likely to come off second-best, but it seemed impossible to shake them.

Jack also felt temperamentally unsuited to an old-fashioned Boston-style campaign. False camaraderie was alien to his nature. He was a charmer but not an easygoing, affable character like his grandfather Honey Fitz, who loved mingling with people. Drinking in bars with strangers with whom he swapped stories and jokes was not a part of JFK’s disposition. ‘As far as backslapping with the politicians,’ he said, ‘I think I’d rather go somewhere with my familiars or sit alone somewhere and read a book.'”

Joe Kennedy Jr., Joseph Kennedy Sr., and John F. Kennedy

__________

From chapter 4 (“Choosing Politics”) of Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963.

In the 2nd chapter of the book, there is an anecdote which relates Joe Jr.’s affable swagger during his days at Harvard:

His brother’s success in campus politics also reduced any hopes Jack may have had of making a mark in that area. Under an unstated family rule of primogeniture, the eldest son had first call on a political career. And Joe Jr. left no doubt that this was already his life’s ambition. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, one of Joe’s tutors, remembered him as keenly interested in politics and public affairs and quick to cite his father as the source of his beliefs. “When I become President, I will take you up to the White House with me,” he liked to tell people. Joe’s quick rise to prominence on campus gave resonance to his boasts.

John F. Kennedy, Joe Sr., Joe Jr.

Later, Dallek characterizes the cataclysmic effect that Joe Jr.’s death in World War Two had on his father and younger brother:

Joe’s death devastated his father, who told a friend, “You know how much I had tied my whole life up to his and what great things I saw in the future for him.” To another friend, he explained that he needed to interest himself in something new, or he would go mad, “because all my plans for my own future were all tied up with young Joe and that has gone to smash.” Joe’s death also confirmed his father’s worst fear that U.S. involvement in the war would cost his family dearly, deepening his antagonism to American involvements abroad for the rest of his life.

His brother’s death also evoked a terrible sense of loss in Jack…

His heroic death left Jack with unresolved feelings toward his brother and father. His competition with Joe had “defined his own identity,” he told Lem Billings. Now there was no elder brother to compete against, and Joe Jr.’s death sealed his superiority “forever in his father’s heart.” “I’m shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win,” Jack said.

Given the upcoming anniversary of his death, I’ll be posting more from and about Jack Kennedy in the next few days.

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Email
  • More
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit

Like this:

Like Loading...

Today’s Top Pages

  • Einstein's Daily Routine
    Einstein's Daily Routine
  • "Not Dying" by Mark Strand
    "Not Dying" by Mark Strand
  • Sam Harris: Why I Decided to Have Children
    Sam Harris: Why I Decided to Have Children
  • Henry Ford Was a Colossal Moron
    Henry Ford Was a Colossal Moron
  • Robert Nozick on Taxation
    Robert Nozick on Taxation

Enter your email address to follow The Bully Pulpit - you'll receive notifications of new posts sent directly to your inbox.

Recent Posts

  • The Other Side of Feynman
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald on Succeeding Early in Life
  • The Man Who Most Believed in Himself
  • What ’60s Colleges Did Right
  • Dostoyevsky’s Example of a Good Kid

Archives

  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (3)
  • January 2018 (3)
  • December 2017 (1)
  • November 2017 (3)
  • October 2017 (2)
  • September 2017 (2)
  • August 2017 (1)
  • July 2017 (2)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (2)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (1)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (1)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (1)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (1)
  • August 2016 (4)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (1)
  • March 2016 (2)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (4)
  • December 2015 (4)
  • November 2015 (8)
  • October 2015 (7)
  • September 2015 (11)
  • August 2015 (10)
  • July 2015 (7)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (7)
  • April 2015 (17)
  • March 2015 (23)
  • February 2015 (17)
  • January 2015 (22)
  • December 2014 (5)
  • November 2014 (17)
  • October 2014 (13)
  • September 2014 (9)
  • August 2014 (2)
  • July 2014 (1)
  • June 2014 (20)
  • May 2014 (17)
  • April 2014 (24)
  • March 2014 (19)
  • February 2014 (12)
  • January 2014 (21)
  • December 2013 (13)
  • November 2013 (15)
  • October 2013 (9)
  • September 2013 (10)
  • August 2013 (17)
  • July 2013 (28)
  • June 2013 (28)
  • May 2013 (23)
  • April 2013 (22)
  • March 2013 (12)
  • February 2013 (21)
  • January 2013 (21)
  • December 2012 (9)
  • November 2012 (18)
  • October 2012 (22)
  • September 2012 (28)

Categories

  • Biography (51)
  • Current Events (47)
  • Debate (7)
  • Essay (10)
  • Film (10)
  • Freedom (40)
  • History (122)
  • Humor (15)
  • Interview (71)
  • Journalism (16)
  • Literature (82)
  • Music (1)
  • Original (1)
  • Personal (3)
  • Philosophy (87)
  • Photography (4)
  • Poetry (114)
  • Political Philosophy (41)
  • Politics (108)
  • Psychology (35)
  • Religion (74)
  • Science (27)
  • Speeches (52)
  • Sports (12)
  • War (57)
  • Writing (11)

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×
    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
    To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
    %d bloggers like this: