If Not One Kennedy, Perhaps Another, a 3rd Kennedy Says

December 8, 2008

Last week, Kerry Kennedy, a daughter of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, made waves when she appeared on MSNBC to say she thought her brother Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an environmental lawyer, would be an excellent choice to be the next United States senator from New York.

Mr. Kennedy, however, quickly took his name out of consideration. But after news that Gov. David A. Paterson and Caroline Kennedy — Ms. Kennedy’s cousin — had spoken about the Senate job, Ms. Kennedy was back on the airwaves today. Same channel, same (almost) message: My cousin Caroline, she said, would make an excellent next United States senator from New York.

“Absolutely,” Ms. Kennedy said, when asked if she was encouraging her cousin to seek the job. “I think Caroline would be just a wonderful public servant. She’s been doing this for many, many years. She’s a lawyer, she’s worked in New York and Washington, at the bar in both those places. She’s a best-selling author. But most of all, she’s a committed public servant.”

Ms. Kennedy also cited her cousin’s work raising money for the New York City public school system and running the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, named for President John F. Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy’s father and a brother of the senator.

(Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, down in Washington for a conference on Monday, was also asked about Caroline Kennedy, according to The Associated Press. The mayor praised Ms. Kennedy’s work for the city and said that she “can do anything.” The mayor added: “Caroline Kennedy is a very experienced woman, she’s worked very hard for the city. I can just tell you she’s made an enormous difference in New York City.”)

Kerry Kennedy also confirmed reports that her uncle, Edward M. Kennedy, had lobbied Mr. Paterson on Caroline Kennedy’s behalf.

“Right, you know, I think that Teddy and Caroline are so incredibly close, and I can’t imagine a better team than the two of them in the Senate from Massachusetts and from New York,” Ms. Kennedy said.

Mr. Kennedy made no mention, however, of another prospective Senate pick: her ex-husband, State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo.Shortly before Ms. Kennedy’s appearance, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who is close to Mr. Kennedy, said Caroline Kennedy “would be a great choice” to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is being nominated to be secretary of state.

Ms. Kennedy’s appearance came shortly after a news conference held by Mr. Paterson in Manhattan to discuss failures in New York’s efforts to transport relief supplies to Haiti after a recent hurricane.

Mr. Paterson said he would consider people for the job who had not held elective office, in addition to the large number of New York elected officials who are angling for the job, publicly and privately. (Caroline Kennedy, it should be noted, has never held elected office.)

“Elective office is not the only place that people have distinguished themselves and could serve the public,” the governor said, citing Mr. Bloomberg’s jump from business to politics in 2001, among others.But Mr. Paterson did not say anything about his private discussions with other officials about the appointment.

“First, it’s tell us who the candidates are, tell us what time you’re meeting with them, tell us whether or not you’ve talked to them before,” the governor said. “This is all gossip.”

Go to:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/if-not-one-kennedy-perhaps-another-a-3rd-kennedy-says/

NYC’s Triborough Bridge renamed for Robert F. Kennedy

Several generations of Robert F. Kennedy’s family gathered today for a ceremony renaming one of the city’s major bridges in honor of the slain senator and U.S. attorney general.
Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, sons Joseph and Robert Jr., and daughter Kerry were joined today by dignitaries including former President Bill Clinton in a park at the foot of the Triborough Bridge. They were joined by his niece, Caroline Kennedy.
"I love that the city he knew and cared about returned his devotion," Ethel Kennedy said in prepared remarks.
Kennedy, who would have turned 83 on Thursday, was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The senator "was about wanting to make life better for others," said Gov. David Paterson, who handed Ethel Kennedy a framed copy of the bill he signed renaming the bridge.
Kennedy "operated on a grand scale," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "He united us as New Yorkers and as Americans. America would not be the country it is without Robert F. Kennedy and all the Kennedys."
The bridge, which opened in 1936, is the first major public work dedicated to Kennedy in the state he represented from 1965 to 1968. It is a complex of three spans that connect Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens.

Go to:

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/northeast/view.bg?articleid=1133449
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Triborough Bridge to be named for Robert Kennedy

New Yorkers soon will be able to take the RFK on their way to LGA and JFK.

On Nov. 19, the Triborough Bridge will formally be renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in honor of the late New York senator, who was assassinated 40 years ago while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"I really can't imagine a more appropriate way to honor his memory in his state, because he did reach out to so many people and did literally bridge so many divides," Kennedy's daughter, Kerry Kennedy, said at a news conference Thursday at the MTA's Manhattan offices, during which details of the name change were released.

The renaming of the bridge in honor of Kennedy was the brainchild of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. His successor, Gov. David A. Paterson, pushed for the State Legislature to adopt the plan, which it did in August.

Paterson said Thursday he was "honored" to sign the measure into law and fully expects that "the RFK name will quickly catch on with New Yorkers."

The bridge will be the first major public works project named after Kennedy, who grew up in the Bronx and Westchester County, and represented New York in the U.S. Senate from 1965 until he was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan in June 1968, just after Kennedy won the California Democratic primary.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chief Elliot Sander said yesterday that the renaming was "the real deal" and required eliminating references to the Triborough Bridge on nine large road signs and 40 smaller toll plaza signs, and replacing them with the bridge's new name. The new signs will start going up on Nov. 14.

"This is a fitting honor for a distinguished and truly great American and New Yorker," Sander said.

To help spread the word about the name change, advertisements are being placed on the backs of 6 million MetroCards, and 1,400 advertisements have started to go up in subway cars, along with 3,800 advertisements in buses. The ads, as well as a large banner on the bridge, will feature famous quotes from the Democratic senator.

The project is a partnership with the Robert F. Kennedy Center For Justice & Human Rights, which brought in CBS to underwrite the cost of the ads.

A formal renaming ceremony will be held in Astoria Park in Queens, at the foot of the bridge, on the morning of Nov. 19 - the day before Robert F. Kennedy would have celebrated his 83rd birthday.

Kerry Kennedy said she expects several members of her family to attend. While suggesting that her uncle, ailing Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, would not be able to attend, she said he is "thrilled" that the bridge is being renamed after his older brother.

Built in 1936, the Triborough Bridge was one of the first major projects spearheaded by New York planner Robert Moses. The bridge, which connects Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, carried some 62.5 million vehicles last year and currently is undergoing a $1-billion rehabilitation.

Go to:

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-nyrfk0712149713nov07,0,185296,print.story

Questions for Kerry Kennedy (NY Times)

(...) In the preface, you depict Jesus as a kind of human rights activist.
I think he was. The Catholic Church in our country has a strong tradition of social-justice activism. It serves the immigrant community, opposes the death penalty and is one of the largest providers of health care in this country.

Are you concerned that Catholics have been leaving the ranks of the Democratic Party for a generation now, in favor of more conservative politics?
In this election, the fact that Joe Biden is a Catholic with a working-class background is going to play an important role in bringing Catholics who might otherwise vote Republican back to the fold.

Did you ask Biden to write an essay for your new book?
I did not, gosh darn it.

You’re the seventh of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s children?
Yes. There were so many of us, 11 in all. The time of day when there was quiet and serenity was every night when we gathered in my parents’ bedroom and knelt down together and prayed.

You were only 8 when your father was assassinated.
When I was younger, I had so many people in my family die. In my mind, heaven was as physical a place as home or school, and I knew that everyone I loved was together, enormously happy, and watching over me and awaiting my coming to this extraordinary place. In planes, I used to try to look behind the clouds to see if I saw an angel.

You supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, which meant going up against your cousin Caroline and your uncle Ted.
It’s the first time this has ever happened in my family, but now we are all enthusiastically behind Barack Obama.

Do you think Sarah Palin was chosen to capitalize on the girl power generated by Hillary?
I think that was part of it. But I think McCain was also trying to appeal to the religious right. She is an anti-abortion, born-again Christian who believes in banning library books and that going to war in Iraq is an act of God.

I think she appeals to the hockey-mom constituency as well. Isn’t hockey more of a red-state sport than soccer?
I myself am a soccer mom, a volleyball mom and a basketball mom.

Have you thought of running for office?
I’ve thought about it on several occasions, but Cara and Mariah are 13 and Michaela is 11, and as a single mother, I think that would be just too tough on our family. Their father is a politician.

You’re referring to Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general of New York State, from whom you were very publicly divorced. Is that what led you to undertake a book on Catholicism?
I think Catholicism was a source of strength during that process and, interestingly, one of the reasons I stayed in a difficult marriage for 13 years. I believed that one should be married for life. That was my upbringing. Work on it. Make it work.

Not everything can be made to work.
I give it over to God. Thy will be done.

That sounds like a good ending for this interview.
But maybe that’s very unempowering to women. I don’t want to give the impression that you work and work and work, then you have no say and it’s all up to God. At a certain point, you have to make the decision to change your life.

Go to http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/magazine/14wwln-Q4-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

A Kennedy plumbs life as a Catholic

Catholicism ran deep at the home of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy.
Prayers before and after every meal, when a family trip was beginning, when something got lost. Bible readings after dinner. St. Christopher medals around the neck. St. Francis pictures on the wall. Virgin Mary statues in the corner. Mass schedules by the bedsides. And Mass every Sunday, until Bobby was killed in 1968; then it was daily.
"It was central to my upbringing - I mean, we woke up in the morning, and we were down on our knees, consecrating the day to Lord Jesus," recalls Kerry Kennedy, 49, the seventh of the 11 children of the Kennedy couple. "And then before bed, we'd spend about 20 minutes with the entire family saying prayers together."
But today, like many Catholics, Kennedy has a hard time reconciling her own views with some of the teachings and actions of her church; in fact, she often can't. So Kennedy decided to talk with well-known Americans about their often complicated relationships with the Catholic faith; the result is a revealing book being released tomorrow.
The book, "Being Catholic Now," offers an unusually intimate view of how much being raised Catholic shapes the identity of many prominent Americans, but also how much tension many feel with the institutional church.
(...) Bill O'Reilly, the FOX News personality, told Kennedy, "Cardinal Law is a villain. I got him removed from office in Boston. I pounded him relentlessly, because he was not doing what he should have for the protection of children in this country."
(...) Kennedy, who was born in Brighton, raised in Virginia, and now lives in New York, said she does not view her book, which includes interviews with conservatives and liberals, as an attack on the church. A human rights lawyer, Kennedy is raising her three daughters in the Catholic faith, attending Mass regularly, and teaching religious education at her parish, and she says the more she realized that other Catholics struggle with their church, the less isolated she felt.
"I was feeling conflicted because my Catholicism is so deeply important to me - it was my sense of connection to the Almighty, to humanity, to my heritage, my upbringing," she said during an interview in Hyannis Port, where she and other members of the Kennedy family have summered for decades. "And my Catholicism informed my view of the world, and the work that I do every day on social justice issues. And yet, so often when I went to church, I was confronted with words and symbols that were anathema to my values."
(...) Many of those Kennedy interviewed praised the Catholic church for imbuing them with a sense of spirituality and community and concern for justice. But Kennedy found multiple recurrent themes among many of the people she interviewed - concern about the role of women in the church, concern about the handling of the abuse scandal, opposition to the church's teaching on birth control, and even frequent unhappy references to the way the specter of hell was used to discipline them when they were children.
(...) Kennedy said she is at odds with the church hierarchy over many issues - abortion rights and women's ordination among them. Her views do not make her extraordinary; polls suggest that an overwhelming majority of American Catholics support women's ordination and that American Catholics reflect the general public's split over abortion.
Kennedy is divorced from Andrew Cuomo, but said her divorce has not been an issue for her in Catholicism because she has not remarried; however, she said, she considers the debate over whether politicians who support abortion rights, such as her uncle Senator Edward M. Kennedy, should be allowed to receive Communion "a terrible mistake" by "a few wayward bishops."
But Kennedy also said that in her travels around the world as a human rights advocate, she concluded that in "virtually every country I've gone to, the Catholic church is on the cutting edge of social change."
"I was witnessing the mighty spirit, and the tremendous capacity of this institution which was so much a part of my history, and my family, and my sense of spirituality, and my vision of social justice . . . and then coming back and hearing bishops who were protecting their turf instead of protecting children and playing Three-card Monte with the pedophile priests and blaming it on people who are gay," she said. "So it was important to me to resolve that."

Go to:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008/09/08/a_kennedy_plumbs_life_as_a_catholic/?page=full

Convention Confidential: Kennedy Bob-ing out of the way

Bobby Kennedy Jr. politely dodged questions about his political future now that Hillary Clinton won't be vacating her U.S. Senate seat. But he gave such a rousing speech at a Denver benefit for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial on Wednesday that admirers urged him to run for something soon.
Building on the emotional appearance of Uncle Ted at the Democratic convention two days earlier, Kennedy departed from his usual environmental concerns to connect his father's mission with the state of America today.
"When I was 13, I went on a trip to Europe with my father and mother," he recalled. "We went to Czechoslovakia and Poland and Germany. We were greeted by hundreds of thousands of people, who came to hear an American politician. It wasn't because [President Kennedy] had been martyred three years before. Even when Eisenhower went to Kabul and Teheran, he was met by thousands of Muslims who carried American flags.
"It took 230 years of discipline and restrained leadership by Republican and Democratic Presidents to build up a reservoir of love for the U.S. In the last seven years, through incompetence, we have drained those reservoirs dry."
Kennedy went on to indict the Bush administration for "torture, suspending habeas corpus and eavesdropping on hundreds of thousands of people."
Though Ted Kennedy was back in Massachusetts continuing his cancer treatment, 80-year-old Ethel Kennedy came with a flock of children and grandchildren.

Her daughter Kerry, who's been at the front of the RFK Memorial's human rights crusade, told us she's thought about running, "but I'm divorced with three kids. Right now, I want to be a mother."
What about rumors that her increasingly visible cousin, Caroline Kennedy, might run for office?
"I don't know," said Kerry, "but she'd be so great. She really has the capacity to bring people together." Bobby agreed: "We'd all be delighted to see her [run]."
Meanwhile, Gov. Patterson confirmed that the Triborough Bridge would be officially renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge on Nov. 19.
(...)

Go to:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2008/08/29/2008-08-29_convention_confidential_kennedy_bobing_o.html

Kennedy twins Matt and Joe make party twice as nice

Meet the future of the Kennedy Dynasty: twin bros Matt and Joe Kennedy.
The sons of ex-Congressman Joe Kennedy, the handsome 27-year-olds have been front and center for the clan at the DNC in Denver all week long.
On Wednesday, the boys stood with grammy Ethel Kennedy and aunt Kerry Kennedy to welcome the hundreds of guests to the RFK Memorial reception. The twins spent over an hour shaking hands, schmoozing the guests and posing for pics in the receiving line. And despite the massive contingent of pols, fixers, celebs and Kennedys at the event, the buzz was all about Matt and Joe.
“They are really nice kids,” said one Demmie insider. “And they appear to have the Kennedy charm.”
Perhaps the clan’s famous charisma skipped a generation. Because the sons and daughters of JFK, RFK and Ted Kennedy haven’t exactly set the world on fire. But Matt and Joe seem to be off to a fine start if they have any plans to eventually enter the family business.
Joe, a redhead who more resembles the Kennedys, is entering his third year at Harvard Law. He is spending the summer as an intern at the Cape & Islands District Attorney’s Office.
Matt, the spitting image of mom, Sheila Rauch Kennedy, is a Harvard Business School grad who works full time for Barack Obama’s campaign. (Dad, Joe, BTW, dropped out of Harvard and eventually got his degree from UMass-Boston.)
(...)

Go to:

http://www.bostonherald.com/track/inside_track/view.bg?articleid=1115727