Dear Caroline Kennedy:
So you think you have the stuff to be a U.S. senator from the state of New York, do you? A word of advice: Don’t try it.
OK, so that’s actually three words, but you get my drift. I’m a little skittish about Kennedys who use their family name to run for political office, and for good reason. Remember when your cousin, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, tried to run for governor of Maryland in 2002?
Bob Ehrlich, a Republican in a state run and controlled — I’m trying to avoid slipping in the word “oppressed” here — by Democrats, trounced her at the polls. The fact that your cousin was the incumbent lieutenant governor in a state that hadn’t elected a Republican chief executive in 36 years made the defeat all the more ignominious.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s middle name didn’t help her, and I was not surprised. I’ve contended, for years, that the only Kennedy who served in public office and was worth a tinker’s damn was your uncle, the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York. And even he had his bad moments.
The worst was probably in 1962, when he teamed with your dad and mishandled the crisis at the University of Mississippi. James Meredith, a black Mississippian, tried to enroll in the Ole Miss law school. His attempt was met with rioting by whites, who rampaged through Oxford and made it necessary for your dad to send in U.S. marshals.
Eventually troops had to be called in. Your dad and uncle ordered the re-segregation of an integrated military police unit so that no blacks would appear among the troops. Why offend rioting lawbreakers?
Author William Doyle recounts the details of that travesty in his book, “An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi, 1962.” (You can find it in the section of our bookstore called “Those Whacky Caucasians.”) Fortunately for your dad and uncle, the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred shortly after the Ole Miss debacle, so most folks forgot how badly they both bungled the latter.
Of course, it’s not likely the Cuban Missile Crisis would ever have occurred if your dad hadn’t unwisely authorized a CIA-sponsored, Cuban-exile-led invasion of Cuba in April of 1961. Historians have accurately labeled that the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Not exactly a shining moment for your dad, who never got it about Cuba, got it only a little bit on civil rights and whose presidency was pretty much a dud.
Your uncle got it about civil rights long before your dad did. Charles Evers, who replaced his brother Medgar Evers as Mississippi’s National Association of Colored People field secretary after the latter’s assassination in 1963, said your uncle didn’t get it about civil rights until the mid-1960s, after he visited Mississippi and saw firsthand the poverty there.
But Gloria Richardson Dandridge, who led a movement to desegregate public accommodations in Cambridge, Md., in the early 1960s, said your uncle got it about civil rights even then. I had the pleasure of interviewing Dandridge for a story about the Cambridge riots of 1963 and 1967. She told me that as early as 1963, your uncle was pushing Maryland Democrats to fully integrate state jobs.
Your uncle may have even been the inspiration for the much-maligned No Child Left Behind Act, which your other uncle, Sen. Edward Kennedy, supported.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Baltimore and Maryland for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
