HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BOB
Had he lived, Robert F. Kennedy would be 82 years old today. We thought it might be interesting to honor him this year not with a few selected quotations by him, but rather quotations about him.
How was Bobby Kennedy described by the people who knew him best?
Their opinions were not always kind, to say the least. Lyndon Johnson called Bobby “that little shitass” and “a grandstanding little runt.” (Kennedy, who cherished his very own LBJ voodoo doll, called Johnson “mean, bitter, and vicious–an animal in many ways.”)
Joe McCarthy’s chief aide (and longtime RFK nemesis) Roy Cohn referred to Robert Kennedy as a “rich bitch,” saying: “he always had that little smirk on his face, designed to get under my skin, and it did.”
Apparently the feeling was mutual, as the two men once nearly came to blows in the Senate hearing room during the Army-McCarthy hearings.
Jimmy Hoffa, who thought Kennedy “a damn spoiled jerk,” described his first meeting with him in 1957: “I can tell by how he shakes hands what kind of fellow I got. I said to myself, `Here’s a fella thinks he’s doing me a favor by talking to me.’” Hoffa later bragged that during the Rackets Committee hearings, “I used to love to bug the little bastard.”
As Bobby himself once said, we are not here “to curse the past or to praise it,” so we thought it appropriate to include the bad with the good when selecting quotes from others on what they thought of Robert Kennedy. Opinions varied, at times so wildly, you’d almost never believe that all of these people are talking about the same man.
The full truth about RFK, as ever, lies somewhere in the middle of these extremes.
I think that’s why he still fascinates us. Even after all these years, the real RFK is (to borrow from Churchill) ”a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” He’s a puzzle, difficult to solve, and yet we never seem to want to stop trying.
AS THEY REMEMBER BOBBY
“The major difference between Bobby and his brothers is that Bobby always had to fight for everything.”
– Bobby’s wife, Ethel Skakel Kennedy
“He was the smallest and thinnest, and we feared he might grow up puny and girlish. We soon realized there was no chance of that.”
– Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (mother)
“Jack is too soft and forgiving. You can trample all over him and the next day he’ll be waiting for you with open arms. But when Bobby hates you, you stay hated.”
– Joseph P. Kennedy (father)
“Bobby was the most generous little boy.”
– Jack Kennedy’s lifelong best friend, Lem Billings. (To which Joseph Kennedy Sr. gruffly replied: “I don’t know where he got that!”)
“All this business about Jack and Bobby being blood brothers has been exaggerated.”
– Bobby’s sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver.
“Kennedy was not arrogant, but he had a sarcasm that could be biting.”
– Frank Hurley, Bobby’s classmate at Portsmouth Priory
“How would you like looking forward to that high whining voice blasting into your ear for the next six months?”
– Jack Kennedy, on hiring his younger brother Bobby to manage the 1960 campaign.
“Jack thought Bobby was too serious, a severe figure, and tried to lighten him up. At the same time, he thought Bobby was…the sacred one. He felt protective about him.”
– Chuck Spalding, longtime friend to both JFK and RFK.
“I don’t know what Bobby does, but it always seems to turn out right.”
–President-elect John F. Kennedy, shortly after winning the 1960 presidential election
“Up until the Bay of Pigs, Jack had more or less dismissed the reasons his father had given for wanting Bobby in the cabinet as more of that tribal Irish thing. But now he realized how right the old man had been. When the crunch came, family members were the only ones you could count on. Bobby was the only person he could rely on to be absolutely dedicated. Jack would never have admitted it, but from that moment on, the Kennedy presidency became a sort of collaboration between them.”
– Lem Billings, lifelong friend to the Kennedy brothers
“Everybody bitches about Bobby, and I’m getting sick and Goddamn tired of it. He’s the only one who doesn’t stick knives in my back, the only one I can count on when it comes down to it.”
– President John F. Kennedy
“You knew that, if you were in trouble, he’d always be there.”
– Former first lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis on RFK
“He had a better sense of what was important, and what was not, than anyone I ever met. Once he realized something was significant, he became the most deliberate, most thoughtful, most intense man.”
– John Nolan, Kennedy’s administrative assistant at the Justice Department.
“His most tenaciously maintained secret was a tenderness so rawly exposed, so vulnerable to painful abrasion, that it could only be shielded by angry compassion to human misery, manifest itself in love and loyalty toward those close to him, or through a revelatory humor.”
– Richard Goodwin, speechwriter, longtime friend and advisor to JFK, RFK, and LBJ
”I always say—don’t try to psychoanalyze Bob. Look at what he said and look at what he did. He meant what he said, and what he did was incredible.”
– Ed Guthman, Robert Kennedy’s special assistant for public information in the Department of Justice and his first senatorial press secretary.
(....more....)
FULL STORY AND PHOTOS AT:
http://rfkin2008.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/happy-birthday-bob/
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