American Values: Lessons I Learned
from My Family by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
American Values: Lessons I Learned
from My Family by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
A Review by Ed Curtin
June 10, 2018
“A permanent state of war abroad and
a national security surveillance state at home are in the institutional
self-interest of the CIA’s clandestine services.” — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
When a book as fascinating, truthful,
beautifully written, and politically significant as American Values: Lessons I
Learned from My Family, written by a very well-known author by the name of
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and published by a prominent publisher (HarperCollins),
is boycotted by mainstream book reviewers, you know it is an important book and
has touched a nerve that the corporate mainstream media wish to anesthetize by
eschewal.
The Kennedy name attracts the mainstream
media only when they can sensationalize something “scandalous” – preferably
sexual or drug related – whether false or true, or something innocuous that can
lend credence to the myth that the Kennedys are lightweight, wealthy
celebrities descended from Irish mobsters. This has been going on since
the 1960s with the lies and cover-ups about the assassinations of President
Kennedy and his brother Robert, propaganda that continues to the present day,
always under the aegis of the CIA-created phrase “conspiracy theory.” A
thinking person might just get the idea that the media are in league with the
CIA to bury the Kennedys.
Such disinformation has been
promulgated by many sources, prominent among them from the start in the 1960s
was the CIA’s Sam Halpern, a former Havana bureau chief for the New York Times,
who was CIA Director Richard Helms’s deputy (the key source for Seymour Hersh’s
Kennedy hatchet job, The Dark Side of Camelot), who began spreading lies about
the Kennedys that have become ingrained in the minds of leftists, liberals,
centrists, and conservatives to this very day. Fifty years later, after
decades of reiteration by the CIA’s Wurlitzer machine (the name given by the
CIA’s Frank Wisner to the CIA’s penetration and control of the mass media,
Operation Mockingbird), Halpern’s lies have taken on mythic proportions.
Among them: that Joseph. P. Kennedy, the patriarch, was a bootlegger and Nazi
lover; that he was Mafia connected and fixed the 1960 election with Chicago
mobster Sam Giancana; and that JFK and RFK knew of and approved the CIA plots
to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Of course whenever a writer extolls
the Kennedy name and legacy, he is expected to add the caveat that the
Kennedys, especially JFK and RFK, were no saints. Lacking this special
talent to determine sainthood or its lack, I will defer to those who feel
compelled to temper their praise with a guilty commonplace. Let me say at
the outset that I greatly admire President John Kennedy and his brother,
Robert, very courageous men who died in a war to steer this country away from
the nefarious path of war-making and deep-state control that it has followed
with a vengeance since their murders.
And I admire Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
for writing this compelling book that is a tour de force on many levels.
Part memoir, part family history,
part astute political analysis, and part-confessional, it is in turns delightful,
sad, funny, fierce, and frightening in its implications. From its opening
sentence – “From my youngest days I always had the feeling that we were all
involved in some great crusade, that the world was a battleground for good and
evil, and that our lives would be consumed in the conflict.” – to its last –
“‘Kennedys never give up, ’ she [Ethel Kennedy] chided us. ‘We have to
die with our boots on!’” – the book is imbued with the spirit of the eloquent,
romantic Irish-Catholic rebels whose fighting spirit and jaunty demeanor the
Kennedy family has exemplified. RFK, Jr. tells his tales in words that
honor that literary and spiritual tradition.
Might it be the opening chapter
devoted to his portrait of his grandfather, Joseph P. Kennedy, who comes across
as a tender and doting grandpa, who created an idyllic world for his children
and grandchildren at “The Big House” on Cape Cod? We see Grandpa
Joe taking the whole brood of Kennedys, including his three famous political
sons, for a ride on his cabin cruiser, the Marlin, and JFK (Uncle Jack) singing
“The Wearing of the Green” and, together with his good friend, Dave Powers,
teaching the kids to whistle “The Boys of Wexford” (Wexford being the Kennedy’s
ancestral home), an Irish rebel tune all of whose words John Kennedy knew by
heart:
We are the boys of Wexford
Who fought with heart and hand
To burst in twain
The galling chain
And free our native land.
We see Joseph P. Kennedy sitting on
the great white porch, holding hands with his wife Rose Kennedy, as the kids
played touch football on the grass beyond. We read that “Grandpa wanted
his children’s minds unshackled by ideology” and that his “overarching purpose
was to engender in his children a social conscience” and use their money and
advantages to make America and the world a better place. We learn,
according to Joe’s son, Senator Robert Kennedy, that he loved all of them
deeply, “not love as it is described with such facility in popular magazines,
but the kind of love that is affection and respect, order, encouragement and
support.” We hear him staunchly defended from the political criticisms
that he was a ruthless, uncaring, and political nut-case who would do anything
to advance his political and business careers. In short, he is presented
very differently from the popular understanding of him as a malign force and a
ruthless bastard.
Portraying his grandfather as a good
and loving man may be one minor reason that Robert Jr.’s book is being ignored.
No doubt it is not because of the
picture he paints of his paternal grandmother, Rose Kennedy, who comes across
similarly to her husband as a powerful presence and as a devoted mother and
grandmother who expected much from her children and grandchildren but gave much
in return. Robert Jr. writes that “Grandpa and Grandma were products of
an alienated Irish generation that kept itself intact through rigid tribalism
embodied in the rituals and mystical cosmologies of medieval Catholicism,” but
that both believed the Church should be a champion of the poor as Christ
taught. The glowing portrait of Grandmother Rose could not be the reason the
book has not been reviewed.
Nor can the chapter on Ethel
Kennedy’s family, the Skakels, be the reason. It is a fascinating peek
into certain aspects of Ethel’s character – the daring, outrageous, fun-loving,
and wild side – from her upbringing in a wild and crazy family, together with
the Kennedys one of the richest Catholic families in the U.S. in days
past. But there their similarities end. The Skakels were
conservative Republicans in the oil, coal, and extraction business, who
“reveled in immodest consumption,” were huge into guns and “more primitive
weaponry like bows, knives, throwing spears and harpoons,” and “pretty much
captured shot, stabbed, hooked, or speared anything that moved, including each
other.” The Skakel men worked as informers for the CIA wherever their
businesses took them around the world and they worked very hard to sabotage
JFK’s run for the presidency. Ethel’s brother George was a creepy and crazy
wild man. Once Ethel met RFK, she switched political sides for good, embracing
the Kennedy’s liberal Democratic ethos.
A vignette of Lemoyne Billings, JFK’s
dear friend, who after RFK’s assassination took Robert Jr. under his wing,
can’t be the reason. It too is a loving portrait of the man RFK Jr. says
was “perhaps the most important influence in my life” and also the most
fun. In his turn Billings said that JFK was the most fun person he had
ever met. They referred to each other as Johnny and Billy and both were
expelled from Choate for hijinks. But stories about Lem, JFK, and RFK Jr.
would attract, not repel, the mainstream press’s book reviewers.
Clearly the chapter about Robert
Jr.’s early bad behavior, his drug use, and his conflicted relationship with
his mother would be fuel for the Kennedy haters. “I seem to have been at
odds with my mother since birth,” he writes. “My mere presence seemed to
agitate her.” Mother and son were at war for decades, and his father’s
murder sent him on a long downward spiral into self-medicating that inflamed
their relationship. Moving from school to school and keeping away from
home as much as possible, his “homecomings were like the arrival of a
squall. With me around to provoke her, my mother didn’t stay angry very
long – she went straight to rage.” His victory over drugs through Twelve
Step meetings and his reconciliation with his mother are also the stuff that
the mainstream press revels in, yet they ignore the book.
The parts about his relationship with
his father, his father’s short but electrifying presidential campaign in 1968,
his death, and funeral are deeply moving and evocative. Deep sadness and
lost hope accompanies the reader as one revisits RFK’s funeral and the
tear-filled eulogy given by his brother Ted, then the long slow train ride
bearing the body from New York to Washington, D.C. as massive crowds,
lined the tracks, weeping and waving farewell. And the writer, now
a 64-year-old-man, but then a 14- year-old-boy, named after his look-alike
father, the father who supported and encouraged him despite his difficulties in
school, the father who took the son on all kinds of outdoor adventures –
sailing, white water canoeing, mountain climbing – always reminding him to
“always do what you are afraid to do” and which the son understood to be “boot
camp for the ultimate virtue – moral courage. Despite his high regard for
physical bravery, my father told us that moral courage is the rarer and more
valuable commodity.” Such compelling, heartfelt writing, with not a word
about who might have killed his father, would be another reason why the
mainstream press would review this book.
It is the heart of this book that has
the reviewers avoiding it like the plague, perhaps a plague introduced by a
little mockingbird.
American Values revolves around the
long war between the Kennedys and the CIA that resulted in the deaths of JFK
and RFK. All the other chapters, while very interesting personal and
family history, pale in importance.
No member of the Kennedy family since
JFK or RFK has dared to say what RFK, Jr. does in this book. He indicts
the CIA.
While some news outlets have
mentioned the book in passing because of its assertion that what has been known
for a long time to historically aware people – that RFK immediately suspected
that the CIA was involved in the assassination of JFK – Robert Jr.’s writing on
the war between the CIA and his Uncle Jack and father is so true and so
carefully based on the best scholarship and family records that the picture he
paints fiercely indicts the CIA in multiple ways while also indicting the mass
media that have been its mouthpieces. These sections of the book
are masterful lessons in understanding the history and machinations of “The
Agency” that the superb writer and researcher, Douglass Valentine, calls
“organized crime” – the CIA. A careful reading of RFK Jr.’s critical
history leads to the conclusion that the CIA and the Mafia are not two separate
murderer’s rows, but one organization that has corrupted the country at the
deepest levels and is, as Kennedy quotes his father Robert – “a dark force
infiltrating American politics and business, unseen by the public, and out of reach
of democracy and the justice system” – posing “a greater threat to our country
than any foreign enemy.” The CIA’s covert operations branch has grown so
powerful that it feels free to murder its opponents at home and abroad and make
sure “splendid little wars” are continually waged around the globe for the
interests of its patrons. Robert Jr. says, “A permanent state of war
abroad and a national security surveillance state at home are in the
institutional self-interest of the CIA’s clandestine services.”
No Kennedy has dared speak like this
since Senator Robert Kennedy last did so – but privately – and paid the price.
His son tells us:
“Days before his murder, as my father
pulled ahead in the California polls,
he began considering how he would
govern the country. According to his
aide Fred Dutton, his concerns often
revolved around the very question that
his brother asked at the outset of
his presidency, ‘What are we going to do
about the CIA?’ Days before the
California primary, seated next to journalist Pete Hamill on his campaign
plane, my father mused aloud about his options. ‘I have to decide whether to
eliminate the operations arm of the Agency or what the hell to do with it,’ he
told Hamill. ‘We can’t have those cowboys wandering around and shooting
people and doing all those unauthorized things.’”
Then he was shot dead.
For whatever their reasons, for fifty
plus years the Kennedy family has kept silent on these matters. Now
Senator Robert Kennedy’s namesake has picked up his father’s mantle and dared
to tell truths that take courage to utter. By excoriating the secret
forces that seized power, first with the murder of his Uncle Jack when he was a
child, and then his father, he has exhibited great moral courage and made great
enemies who wish to ignore his words as if they were never uttered. But
they have. They sit between the covers of this outstanding and important
book, a book written with wit and eloquence, a book that should be read by any
American who wants to know what has happened to their country.
There is a telling anecdote that took
place in the years following JFK’s assassination when RFK was haunted by his
death. It says so much about Senator Kennedy and now his son, a son who
in many ways for many wandering years became a prodigal son lost in grief and
drugs only to return home to find his voice and tell the truth for his father
and his family. He writes,
“One day he [RFK] came into my
bedroom and handed me a hardcover copy of Camus’s The Plague. ‘I want you to
read this,’ he said with particular urgency.It was the story of a doctor
trapped in a quarantined North African city while a raging epidemic
devastates its citizenry; the physician’s small acts of service, while
ineffective against the larger tragedy, give meaning to his own life, and,
somehow, to the larger universe. I spent a lot of time thinking about
that book over the years, and why my father gave it to me. I believe it
was the key to a door that he himself was then unlocking….It is neither our
position nor our circumstances that define us… but our response to those
circumstances; when destiny crushes us, small heroic gestures of courage and
service can bring peace and fulfillment. In applying our shoulder to the
stone, we give order to a chaotic universe. Of the many wonderful things
my father left me, this philosophical truth was perhaps the most useful.
In many ways, it has defined my life.”
By writing American Values: Lessons I
Learned from My Family, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has named the plague and entered
the fight. His father would be very proud of him. He has defined
himself.
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