The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (50 page)

Bobby called Fredericks. Should he cancel? Fredericks said no, go. The Kennedy staff scrambled to get prepared. Legislative aide Adam Walinsky did the speech drafts and, with Fredericks’s help, coordinated briefing sessions for Kennedy at Hickory Hill.
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Six days before he was to leave came another blow: the South African government announced that it would not give visas for the forty-odd press that had applied for them. Bobby would be alone, with Ethel and three aides. How different this was from Jack’s calibrated foray into the subject of the African revolution in his speech in July 1957 on Algeria — a speech given after months of research and drafting and delivered on the floor of an empty Senate chamber. Fortunately, Walinsky in Washington and Johnston in South Africa had worked out a strategy of sorts: the senator would talk about the struggle for racial justice in
America
, a subject he knew deeply. This would disarm the Afrikaners and, at the same time, appeal to white progressives and black South Africans.

The day before he was to leave, Kennedy went to his UN Plaza apartment in New York and called radical activist Allard Lowenstein, who had spent time in southern Africa, to see if he could press him into a last-minute review of the Cape Town speech. Lowenstein delayed his trip to the Dominican Republic long enough to stop by for a look. He immediately pronounced the draft “disastrous, terrible.” He thought it too cautious. He telephoned two South Africans who happened to be in New York at the time, Frances Suzman and Treber Coon, and got them to come over to the apartment to give ballast to his view. With Kennedy’s agreement, Walinsky and Lowenstein spent that afternoon strengthening the speech.
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Bobby also got Dick Goodwin, who had accompanied him to Latin America the previous year, to take a final cut at the text. Goodwin added soaring metaphors about courage as well as an existential counterpoint about sacrifice. The result, as the
London Daily Telegraph
later put it, was “perhaps the most fluent and inspiring speech ever given by a foreigner in South Africa.”

The senator, Ethel, Angie Novello, and Walinsky landed at 11:40 P.M. at Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg, where a crowd of 1,500 people was on hand to greet them. Kennedy’s first word —
Gooinaand
(“Good evening” in Afrikaans) — did not exactly strike the right note with his English South African audience. (“There’s his first mistake,” someone said. “I suppose someone told him that there would be lots of Afrikaners here to greet him.”)
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But the effect elsewhere was properly anodyne, particularly when the senator proceeded to speak about his grandfather, Congressman John F. Fitzgerald, who in December 1900 had recommended that the Boers, who were concluding a bloody war against imperial Britain, be allowed to emigrate to the United States. He quoted his grandfather’s resolution, describing the good character, self-reliance, and industriousness of the Boers.
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It was a nice touch and showed up in the Afrikaner press. Seeing a “Yankee Go Home” sign, Kennedy pointed to it and said, “We will not always agree, as we in the United States do not always agree among ourselves. But what is important is that we frankly discuss the problems and prospects of the future, the hopes and the hazards, which we share as inhabitants of the globe.” At the conclusion of his remarks, the crowd surged toward Kennedy, cheering and reaching for him. He climbed to the top of the limo — the first of three whose tops he would scratch, the American mission was to note sourly — but not before his cuff links were torn off.
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It was a sign of things to come.

The next afternoon, Bobby met with four editors of the Afrikaans newspapers
(Die Transvaler, Die Vaderland
,
Die Beel
and
Dagbreek
). He dispensed with any introductory exchange and instead began asking questions. What did “colored” mean? “Bastard,” one editor replied. Kennedy then asked if a child born out of wedlock to a white man and a white woman would be considered colored. They said no.
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Another editor said “colored” was someone who was neither white nor black. Was a South American “colored”? Kennedy asked. Yes, they said. An Indian? Yes. A Chinese? Yes. A Japanese? No, one replied, “because there are so few of them.”
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That evening Kennedy had dinner with leading members of South African industry at the Johannesburg Country Club. His host, J. de L. Sorour, remarked that, despite differences about racial policies, South Africa had earned its status as an American ally because of its anticommunism. Kennedy asked another of his jarring questions. “But what does it mean to be against communism if one’s own system denies the value of the individual and gives all power to the government — just as the Communists do?” The South African businessmen retorted that South Africa’s problem was unique. “Cruelty and hatred anywhere can affect men everywhere,” Kennedy said.
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But you don’t understand, they countered, we are beleaguered. But who really was beleaguered? Kennedy asked. Was it his dinner companions “talking easily over cigars and brandy and baked Alaska? Or Robertson and Paton and Luthuli? And the Indian population being evicted from District 6, an area of Cape Town, after living there for decades, its leadership banned for five years for protesting?”

As a result of his own intense preparation for the trip, Kennedy understood apartheid for what it was — a resilient tyranny that carefully matched repression to threat. He later explained its workings in an article in
Look
magazine:

The minister of justice can deprive a person of his job, his income, his freedom and — if he is black — his family. The minister’s word alone can jail any person for up to six months as a “material witness,” unspecified as to what. The prisoner has no right to consult a lawyer or his family. Without government permission, it is a criminal offense even to tell anyone he is being detained. He simply disappears, and he may be in solitary confinement for the entire six months. No court can hear his case or order his release.

The next day, after meeting with African journalists and progressive churchmen, the Kennedy party flew to Cape Town for the Day of Affirmation speech. As the airplane banked over the city in the bright sunlight, the view was spectacular — the rocky slopes of the Cape of Good Hope, the blue waters of the Atlantic and Pacific, and Cape Town itself perched in white on the sea. When someone pointed out Robben Island, where two thousand political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, were living out their lives, the plane went “silent and cold,” according to Kennedy. From D. F. Malan airport in Cape Town, where a crowd of three thousand greeted him, Kennedy went directly to the apartment of his now-banned host, Ian Robertson. To avoid putting Robertson in further jeopardy, Bobby asked if he thought he was being bugged. When Robertson responded positively, Kennedy told him to turn on the phonograph. To further drown out the listening devices, Robertson began kicking the floor boards with his foot. Kennedy gave him a copy of
Profiles in Courage
signed by himself and Jackie Kennedy.

From there Bobby proceeded to the university to deliver his address. Enunciating the essential liberties of all human beings — the right to speak freely, the right to be heard, the right to limit government — Kennedy spoke of America’s long and imperfect journey toward full human rights, pointing out that “even as my father grew up in Boston, signs told him ‘No Irish Need Apply.’ ”
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The most important thing, Kennedy said, was to try:

There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve in the streets in India, a former prime minister is summarily executed in the Congo, intellectuals go to jail in Russia, thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia, wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere. These are differing evils — but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows. . . . And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and of indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings.

The only way to salvage hope was to rely on youth:

The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet . . . cannot be moved by those who cling to a present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger which comes with the most peaceful progress. This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite of adventure over a love of ease. It is a revolutionary world we live in.

then spoke of the “dangers” to courage — futility, timidity, and expediency — and encouraged the students never to give up:

A young monk began the Protestant Reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. . . . Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts of courage will be written the history of this generation. . . . Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of belief and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

It was late in the evening when he finished, but the crowd went wild, screaming, chanting, and stamping its feet at this small, slump-shouldered man who now in repose looked vulnerable but seconds earlier had literally trembled with fight. The crowd, it seemed, had determined that it would not let him leave. Back in the car, the Kennedy party’s euphoria didn’t last long. They learned that James Meredith had been shot on his freedom walk in Alabama.

The next day Kennedy visited a far tougher place — the University of Stellenbosch — a fountainhead of Afrikaner racialism. Expecting a hostile reception from the students, Kennedy was surprised when they pounded soup spoons on tables, making a sound he later described “like rolling thunder.” The initial invitation to speak from the Current Affairs Club had been withdrawn because of public intimidation, only to be reconveyed by one of the men’s residence halls.
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Kennedy began with the trope Walinsky had developed for the Day of Affirmation speech:

I come here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America. But I am glad to come here to South Africa.

There was laughter and cheering. During the question-and-answer session, the students defended apartheid by saying it would produce two nations, one white, the other black, in the manner of India and Pakistan. Did the black people have a choice? Kennedy asked. They made up 78 percent of the population but owned only 12 percent of the land, with no seaport or major city. How could they live in areas whose soil was already exhausted and which had no industry? And they had no education to prepare them: one in every fourteen white students reaches the university, one in 762 blacks makes it.

The Kennedy party then flew to Durban, where Kennedy met with white and African progressive leaders — the novelist Alan Paton of the outlawed Liberal party, Zulu chief Gatsha Buthelezi, Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban, and others.
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That evening he spoke at the University of Natal before a crowd of ten thousand. Buoyed by their extraordinary reception, Kennedy now opened up in his counterpunching style: “Maybe there is a black man outside this room who is brighter than anyone — the chances are that there are many.” Incredibly, there was applause. During the question-and-answer period, someone argued that Black Africa was too primitive for self-government, that violence and chaos were part of the fabric of African character. In response, Kennedy said that he deplored such massacres as those that had recently taken place in the Congo but that no race or people were without fault: “Was Stalin black? Was Hitler black? Who killed forty million people just twenty-five years ago? It wasn’t black people, it was white.”

Another man said that the Dutch Reformed Church taught apartheid as “a moral necessity.” The Bible says that the Negro should serve.

“But suppose God is black,” Kennedy replied. “What if we go to heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and he is not white? What then is our response?” There was silence in the hall. Suddenly someone asked Kennedy to lead the singing of “We Shall Overcome,” which he did.

Bobby was now in his element. Navigating the hot current of crowd emotion — the anger, the cheering, the heckling, the questions — he seemed to draw out the poison and the adrenalin to produce a group catharsis. The style was all the more effective because it was disjointed. He would often start with dry, self-deprecatory humor, then ask the audience questions, and suddenly begin punching the air in a downward motion with his right hand as he delivered simple and emotional conclusions. Walinsky later described Bobby as an “instinctive dancer.”
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It was as if, caught between hope and melancholy, boldness and despair, Kennedy could not communicate unless he seized hands, gazed into faces, and absorbed the emotion of crowds. He was as they were.