Bobby's Girl by Doug McVadon
Everyone else followed the same protocol: stand behind the lectern; look at your notes below the mike. But she didn’t stay safe behind the big block of wood on the stage. Even as the applause continued for her famous name, she started messing with the microphone, taking it off the stand and unwrapping the cord from around it.
Then she stepped out in front of the lectern, in her professional-looking black patterned dress just above the knee, put her hand on her hip, and unleashed that Kennedy magic.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend definitely has the family poise, charisma, humor and intelligence, not to mention the ability to play a crowd like a musical instrument. I found myself wondering what it would take for politics to become thought of as an honorable profession again in America – FDR, Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, Howard Baker, Sam Ervin, Sam Nunn, Leon Panetta – we admired their character beyond their political positions.
And then I looked at the crinkles around her eyes and the way her nose juts out, and those front teeth and remember with a start – she’s Bobby’s girl! His oldest, his first, and all that means about that amazing pre-language time one-on-one time when you ARE the Universe and you command their undivided attention because they understand that it will NEVER happen again, never another firstborn.
She was one of the award recipients at the Echo Foundation’s 15th Annual Award Gala, held uptown at the new Knight Theater, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention kicking off just three blocks away. She didn’t disappoint us; she told us about her father. She told us about a conversation he had with just her, the oldest, because she might be old enough to understand. He was Senator Robert Kennedy of New York then, and he has just come back from a trip to Mississippi. He walked into the dining room, where she was sitting.
It was a very nice dining room, she stopped to remind us—we had a very nice house, she quipped—and her father seemed shaken. “Kathleen, do you know how lucky you are?” She nodded. He went on, “I saw children in Mississippi with sores on their bodies and no health care at all, and their bellies are distended from hunger.”
And then the line she remembered most: “You have got to do something for your country.”
For your country. Not for your career, or your survival. The notion that one SHOULD do something for one’s country has so many tentacles. Number one, you gotta be proud of your country, number two you gotta feel like you and your family are gonna be okay, that you will survive. Otherwise you can’t stay in the making a difference game, not if you’re worried about your own survival, not really.
Now we think we’ll just save up enough gold and ammo to make it on our own, in spite of all those imbeciles in Washington, or if that doesn’t work, move to another country, you know, where they aren’t so screwed up.
Listening to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, I could hear the narrowness of my current view of politics. We have dumbed it down to name-calling. Her father was out to change the world, before that became synonymous with naïve disillusionment. He meant actual change, like feeding babies in Mississippi and registering their mothers to vote for the first time, taking a public action to better their lot in life, so they could begin to relate to the public process as their personal access to economic equality and social freedom.
I wrote that last sentence myself, and I didn’t get it from a political brochure. I wasn’t having thoughts like that two days ago, or they were dormant within me. Now I feel the pull of our great democratic tradition, of debating and advocating and voting and legislating and appointing committees and filing an official complaint…. a sense of obligation, to trust our public institutions as the legacy that our forebears created for us, but not blindly trust, rather verify trust by PARTICIPATION. Participating in the public conversation as a way to VERIFY that they work, coming from the point of view that we WANT them to work, to work for us as individuals, and for us collectively.
Taking the small stage at the Charlotte Observer building, where an exhibit of iconic pictures of her father taken by renowned LIFE photographer Bill Eppridge was opening, Kathleen did her daddy proud again. This time surrounded by a political crowd and not up on a stage, just a six-inch riser, she was electric, telling another story about RFK, this time also invoking the spiritual leader of the modern Democratic Party, her uncle Jack, JFK.
The story was about a note that Bobby wrote to her, after Jack was assassinated. Here is how the story goes (it’s famous, you can find it online):
Two days after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Kathleen's father Robert wrote his 12-year-old daughter a note on White House stationery: "As the oldest of the next generation you have a particular responsibility... Be kind to others and work for your country. Love, Daddy."
Last night she told us, looking back she is stunned by that response. His brother had been murdered. He could be angry, upset, inconsolable, seeking revenge, anything…. but thinking about being kind and serving your country? That’s what came out. And she heeded that call. She’s in Charlotte this week asking us to get that same message, in 2012, about our calling and our country, and being kind to each other.
Then she stepped out in front of the lectern, in her professional-looking black patterned dress just above the knee, put her hand on her hip, and unleashed that Kennedy magic.
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend definitely has the family poise, charisma, humor and intelligence, not to mention the ability to play a crowd like a musical instrument. I found myself wondering what it would take for politics to become thought of as an honorable profession again in America – FDR, Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, Howard Baker, Sam Ervin, Sam Nunn, Leon Panetta – we admired their character beyond their political positions.
And then I looked at the crinkles around her eyes and the way her nose juts out, and those front teeth and remember with a start – she’s Bobby’s girl! His oldest, his first, and all that means about that amazing pre-language time one-on-one time when you ARE the Universe and you command their undivided attention because they understand that it will NEVER happen again, never another firstborn.
She was one of the award recipients at the Echo Foundation’s 15th Annual Award Gala, held uptown at the new Knight Theater, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention kicking off just three blocks away. She didn’t disappoint us; she told us about her father. She told us about a conversation he had with just her, the oldest, because she might be old enough to understand. He was Senator Robert Kennedy of New York then, and he has just come back from a trip to Mississippi. He walked into the dining room, where she was sitting.
It was a very nice dining room, she stopped to remind us—we had a very nice house, she quipped—and her father seemed shaken. “Kathleen, do you know how lucky you are?” She nodded. He went on, “I saw children in Mississippi with sores on their bodies and no health care at all, and their bellies are distended from hunger.”
And then the line she remembered most: “You have got to do something for your country.”
For your country. Not for your career, or your survival. The notion that one SHOULD do something for one’s country has so many tentacles. Number one, you gotta be proud of your country, number two you gotta feel like you and your family are gonna be okay, that you will survive. Otherwise you can’t stay in the making a difference game, not if you’re worried about your own survival, not really.
Now we think we’ll just save up enough gold and ammo to make it on our own, in spite of all those imbeciles in Washington, or if that doesn’t work, move to another country, you know, where they aren’t so screwed up.
Listening to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, I could hear the narrowness of my current view of politics. We have dumbed it down to name-calling. Her father was out to change the world, before that became synonymous with naïve disillusionment. He meant actual change, like feeding babies in Mississippi and registering their mothers to vote for the first time, taking a public action to better their lot in life, so they could begin to relate to the public process as their personal access to economic equality and social freedom.
I wrote that last sentence myself, and I didn’t get it from a political brochure. I wasn’t having thoughts like that two days ago, or they were dormant within me. Now I feel the pull of our great democratic tradition, of debating and advocating and voting and legislating and appointing committees and filing an official complaint…. a sense of obligation, to trust our public institutions as the legacy that our forebears created for us, but not blindly trust, rather verify trust by PARTICIPATION. Participating in the public conversation as a way to VERIFY that they work, coming from the point of view that we WANT them to work, to work for us as individuals, and for us collectively.
Taking the small stage at the Charlotte Observer building, where an exhibit of iconic pictures of her father taken by renowned LIFE photographer Bill Eppridge was opening, Kathleen did her daddy proud again. This time surrounded by a political crowd and not up on a stage, just a six-inch riser, she was electric, telling another story about RFK, this time also invoking the spiritual leader of the modern Democratic Party, her uncle Jack, JFK.
The story was about a note that Bobby wrote to her, after Jack was assassinated. Here is how the story goes (it’s famous, you can find it online):
Two days after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Kathleen's father Robert wrote his 12-year-old daughter a note on White House stationery: "As the oldest of the next generation you have a particular responsibility... Be kind to others and work for your country. Love, Daddy."
Last night she told us, looking back she is stunned by that response. His brother had been murdered. He could be angry, upset, inconsolable, seeking revenge, anything…. but thinking about being kind and serving your country? That’s what came out. And she heeded that call. She’s in Charlotte this week asking us to get that same message, in 2012, about our calling and our country, and being kind to each other.
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