BONO

Bono is an Irish singer-songwriter, campaigner, and business leader. As the lead singer of Irish rock band U2, he has received twenty-two Grammy awards and been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He has been awarded the Legion d’Honneur in France, granted a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II and, along with Bill and Melinda Gates, named TIME magazine person of the year in 2005.

Bono is an innovative activist, co-founding The ONE Campaign and (RED) along with my cousin Bobby Shriver. These organizations have campaigned against extreme poverty, focusing on debt cancellation, HIV/AIDS, anti-corruption legislation, and women’s empowerment.

As well as ONE and (RED), Bono has worked with Bobby and my aunt Eunice on Special Olympics and collaborated with other family members on various causes. His admiration for Daddy, informed by his Irish roots, is particularly meaningful.

REMARKS FROM BONO’S ACCEPTANCE OF THE RFK RIPPLE OF HOPE AWARD

The Kennedy legacy is a living legacy. And it is worth shouting from the rooftops.

I see it through an Irish lens, I see it through Irish eyes, and it’s probably true that when it comes to the Kennedys I can’t quite see straight. Irish people can’t. In our house, the Kennedys were on the same shelf as the pope and Mary, mother of God. The Kennedys! And in my particularly eccentric house, the same shelf as the royal family! Because my mother was Protestant, my father was Catholic, and her father had fought in the British Army—it wasn’t popular in the north side of Dublin to have that duality. But you see, from my father’s point of view, the Kennedys were Ireland’s revenge on the royal family. In fact, they are our royal family. It took America to produce an Irish royal family… and I will say the irony is not lost on the Windsors. But here’s the best bit: As my dad would say, “The thing is, you, the Kennedys, you weren’t handed your titles. You earned them. You weren’t anointed; you were elected.” And to his great amusement, elected by a majority of Protestants! The greatest joke of all.

You have no idea what this meant and what it still means to us in Ireland, those of us whose ancestors missed the boat. You know, we stuck around, we ate the potatoes. By the 1960s and ’70s, when I was growing up in Dublin, you could almost taste the regret in having stayed put. Or maybe that was the defeat we were tasting. Or ashes. Either way, you cannot exaggerate the miserableness or the miserablism of Ireland at that time—the Troubles, which Teddy Kennedy did more than most to put an end to; the economy; the brain drain—it was like the famous dampness of Ireland had finally soaked into our collective spirit, and for all that Irish resilience and defiance, all our bluff and bravado, our souls had the chills. And we couldn’t shake them.

Enter the Kennedys.

They gave us warmth… and light… and pride… and hope. They were good looking, they were glamorous, they had money… and they had brains. OK, they were “Americans.” We knew that. But they never forgot where they came from. And it’s worth remembering that when JFK came to Dublin in 1963, bringing Eunice and half of the so-called Irish mafia, a Dublin paper called it “A Big Family Picnic.” That’s how it was described in Ireland. And it was Dubliners climbing lampposts, standing four deep on the streets along the road for hours. And there was a hailstorm that day, and it covered all the fields with white. It was a really mythic kind of mood in the country. The way we looked at it was—and I was only three—but the way I looked at it when I was three was “this is a local boy made good.” Well, that’s the way our family looked at it and every family. Three generations removed, but it was a local boy done good. That’s how the New York Times recorded it at the time.

There was a hailstorm. And you know what? The Irish are tough, man. And no Kennedy knew it more and no Kennedy identified with it more than Bobby Kennedy. The toughness. When he was a student at Harvard, he wrote to a friend of his, “Next to John Fitzgerald and JP Kennedy, I’m the toughest Irishman that lives, which makes me the toughest man that lives.” The only thing we Irish don’t lack is modesty.

But Bobby never went in for that romantic bollocks about Ireland—the nonsense of a sad, simple people with the gift of the gab, rhyming song, bit of drink, little bit of gambling. No. What he felt, I think, and what he reflected, was our fierceness. Fierce loyalty to family, fierce confidence in ourselves, fierce intolerance to injustice.

And I’m no expert but there’s a myth about Bobby Kennedy that’s always bugged me: the myth says that “Tough Bobby,” the family’s self-designated SOB, disappeared on that dark November 1963, to be replaced by a new, softer RFK. That he went from the man who sometimes, if we’re honest, could inflict some pain, to a man who took on all the world’s pain. That’s the myth. And like most myths, it reflects certain truths. There’s something to be said of this idea of transformation. Even Bobby himself, I’ve read, said that’s what he felt he was undergoing. And no one can go through all the soul-searching and the self-churning Bobby went through after November 1963 and come out the other end the same person. You understand that you’re either crushed by it, or you’re enraged by it, made uglier or more empathetic. Clearly, he was the latter.