JOE SCARBOROUGH

The former Florida congressman and longtime Republican conservative Joe Scarborough recently switched his affiliation to Independent. He is the cohost of Morning Joe on MSNBC. As a member of Congress, Joe Scarborough worked with my brother, Congressman Joe Kennedy, to name the Department of Justice building after Robert F. Kennedy, a position that put him at odds with many of his Republican colleagues.

Despite being on separate sides of the political divide, I have always considered Joe a friend, and he has been consistently supportive of the work of RFK Human Rights.

Joe Scarborough: I’ve read just about everything ever written about your dad, and I’ve never been able to confirm this quote, “Question initial assumptions.” That saying was attributed to your father somewhere, and I ran with it. I posted the quote on my office door when I was in Congress so every time I would leave my office for a vote on the House floor, I would be reminded to “question initial assumptions.” It has remained a guiding principle in my life through the years and all these years later, I don’t really care if he said it or not. Few phrases would better sum up his legacy of service than that.

When I was first elected to Congress in 1994, my freshman class had campaigned on the Contract with America agenda. Though I have never been much of a joiner, I signed the contract belatedly and voted for most of its key provisions. Many were political softballs that Democrats supported as well. Many of us voted for term limits, a balanced budget amendment, a bill that made Congress abide by the same laws they passed, and limits on the years chairmen could run committees. Most were easy calls politically. But when it was time to pay for our proposed tax cuts, Newt Gingrich suggested that we pay for those cuts with spending cuts in Medicaid. I remember the speaker standing in front of the Republican caucus and telling us we could sell a $270-billion cut in Medicaid by framing the program as medical welfare. As a small government conservative, I was always looking for federal programs to cut or eliminate. But even in those ideological days, I knew that this was a step too far. That’s when everything stopped for me and I started questioning the assumptions that had guided my short political life.

Anyone who has been to an emergency room at midnight knows that for too many disadvantaged Americans, the ER is the primary care provider for the poor. And to make the political argument that the poorest among us are somehow gaming the health care system when they receive inferior care at almost every turn is as deeply offensive now as it was then. I grew up in the Southern Baptist church, but any good Catholic would also know as well that Jesus told his disciples that they would all be judged by how they treated the poor, the sick, the hungry, the imprisoned, and the hopeless. Those words in Matthew 25 were more important than the words in the Contract with America, and I stepped back in that instance and remembered what I had learned growing up because I followed the charge of always questioning my beliefs at every turn.

Many have written about how Bobby Kennedy evolved from a tough, take-no-prisoners conservative to a progressive champion. He used his power on the Senate committee and as attorney general in a way that caused concerns to civil libertarians on both sides of the ideological divide. But that makes his remarkable transformation from November 22, 1963 to June 6, 1968 all the more breathtaking. From his moral leadership inside the Senate, to Cape Town, to Indianapolis to California, the arc of your father’s life shows how we can continue to grow while in public service.

Kerry Kennedy: I agree that one of his great strengths was his ability to evolve, something which few adults do.

JS: The 1968 campaign was like nothing that has ever happened in modern American history. His transformation was made all the more extraordinary and moving because it was the hardened Bobby Kennedy who both his friends and critics saw transforming in front of their eyes. Even if you disagree with historians’ take on the tough and ruthless Bobby, the magnitude and significance of his growth as a human being while still in office remains inspiring 50 years later.

If we want to consider the meaning of his life, why he is still relevant to us today, I think of the dust cover of Arthur Schlesinger’s book, which says: “The story of Bobby Kennedy is a story of our times.” When conservatives ask me why I admire Bobby Kennedy so much and why your father is the reason I got into politics, I tell them that your father was conservative with a “small-c.” Both Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk believed conservatism was both the party of preservation and the party of progress. If you are a conservative with a “small-c,” you look at the challenges of your times and ask, “Is now the time to preserve the existing order or push for change?” The answer to that question in Trump’s time is to push back to preserve our constitutional values, push back to preserve our cultural norms, and push back the best of our historical heritage. Now is the time to preserve.

Today, Americans must fight to preserve their governmental institutions, their constitutional traditions, and the cultural norms that have held Washington together for centuries. We are a nation of immigrants that has striven to be more culturally inclusive. But Trump undermined these traditions during his campaign and during his time in the White House. It is troubling that so many members of Congress have remained compliant even as Trump undermined the rule of law by attacking the legitimacy of federal judges and slandered the free press as “enemies of the people.” These elected leaders are complicit because they fear attacks from talk radio and twitter. They cower at the thought of crossing their political base while your father seemed fearless in the face of the greatest challenges. He would deliver the same message to a group of Wall Street bankers that he would deliver to a gathering of West Virginia miners. His audience might change but his speech never would. That was another example I tried to take from his life and use it as a guide for my own public career.

Many saw your father as a tough-as-nails conservative when he worked for his older brother in the Senate and as his attorney general before President Kennedy’s assassination. I always thought of your father as a tough liberal who would dare to dream and then fight to make that dream a reality. But because he was a romantic realist, I have no doubt that he would also have been the first to scrap ineffective liberal programs even if doing so upset party leaders. I also read that he had little use for political leaders whose heart wasn’t in the fight. I think that Americans have elected too many of those type of leaders in the early part of the 21st century.

We seem to keep electing people to the highest office in the land who aren’t completely invested in the nation’s capital or its long and winding history. Public service was your father’s lifework. It was President Kennedy’s lifework. Washington was Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon’s town. For better and for worse, these men lived and breathed politics, focused completely on government work and made their work in Washington their life. The outcomes were not always spectacular but those in charge of the levers of power were as qualified as anyone alive to sit in the Oval Office. LBJ and Nixon blew through too many constitutional red lights but were still constrained by their limits of power. When the Supreme Court told Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes, Richard Nixon complied immediately even though he knew it would mean the end of his presidency. Nixon was a tragic figure, in part, because his personal flaws eclipsed his political genius. LBJ was also terribly flawed as a man but his ability to push forward the civil rights agenda of President Kennedy remains his greatest legacy. And he could accomplish that Herculean task because he knew how Washington, DC, worked as well as anyone alive at that time.

This century we have elected George W. Bush, who openly disdained Washington and seemed to be driven to run by family motivations as much as any others. There are many things I admire about Barack Obama, but he too had little use for Washington and even less patience for figuring out how to make it work in his favor. And now we have an old reality TV star as president who didn’t even expect to be elected. His campaign run was nothing more than a marketing ploy. Despite anyone’s personal feelings for all three 21st century presidents, it is an inescapable fact that not one was prepared to be president and not one has any use for Washington. Bobby Kennedy thought public service was the highest of callings and he lived his life in a way that proved it was. For Bobby, governing wasn’t an afterthought. Working to make people’s lives better was why you were supposed to run for office in the first place.

As I was growing up with RFK as my hero, my conservative family members asked me: “Why do you like Bobby Kennedy so much, Joey? He was a tough son of a bitch.” I even heard the same from my favorite liberal history professor in college. “Why do you like Bobby Kennedy?” he asked. “He’s a son of a bitch.”

After hearing it a second time, I thought: “It takes that kind of toughness to stand up to bullies, to stare down Hoffa, to challenge the Teamsters even as they were threatening his own family, to stand up to business interests who were exploiting workers, to stand up to segregationists in the South when that was a tough thing for a Democratic attorney general to do.” That’s one of the things that drew me to your father’s legacy. His inner toughness so often made the difference in his effectiveness. Where did it come from?

The answer? I have my ideas about it. I think he was the good son. I think he was the good Catholic. I think as a younger child, he thought that’s how he could be a good soldier for his dad. You always read that Joe Jr. was the golden child. You read that when his Choate headmaster asked JFK why he wasn’t a particularly good student, he said “My older brother’s got that down. He’s done that. I don’t want to do what he does.” Maybe it was that same logic for your father. Maybe by the time he looked around and surveyed the landscape before him, he decided what he could do best was serve his father and brothers. I’m the youngest of three children and my older siblings came of age in the chaos of the late 60s and early 70s. By the time I got into high school, I wanted to be the good son who didn’t cause his parents any trouble.

KK: He was the seventh child, and I was the seventh child. As a younger child in a large family, you understand the benefits of having fair rules that apply to everyone; you don’t want to see people who are smaller or weaker get picked on. He was physically smaller. He was also tough. He learned to be. But I think he had a very healthy relationship with his dad. Grandpa was a great father—he was fully engaged, and highly opinionated, and he expected his children to be that way, too. They respected one another. As a child Daddy was very sweet but had no tolerance for bullies.

JS: He could relate to people in a way I suppose his oldest brother, Joe Jr., never could. Joe Jr. looked like a model; he was a great student and a great football player, everybody’s all-American. It’s very hard for a guy like that to look at someone who’s hurting the same way someone in your father’s position could.

KK: Exactly. When he went to school he was always the kid who fought to protect the little kids. When he got into public life he already had a long history of being on the side of the underdog. He was always able to connect with people who were vulnerable or hurting or broken.

JS: The things he stood up for then, many are still fighting for now. Racial justice has taken great steps forward over the past fifty years, but the past year has been filled with bitter setbacks. Your father visited the poor and oppressed that lived across the Mississippi delta and in other challenging areas. The rise of Donald Trump shocked so many because too many stayed isolated in Manhattan and Washington and all the places where elites live and vacation. After Trump got elected you had media types announcing, “I’m going to middle America!” They would drive thirty miles through Pennsylvania. And I guess that was good enough because anyone wanting to get a read on how much Americans were hurting didn’t need to drive to Kansas to see what was happening. They could just take a cab down to Wall Street and then jump on the Staten Island Ferry. After walking around the Walmart, getting dinner and spending an hour in a Staten Island bar, any decent reporter would figure out quickly just how much trouble Hillary Clinton’s campaign was in.

I learned a similar lesson driving from New York to Scranton, Pennsylvania, for a relative’s wedding. It was the summer of ’16 and as I was driving out, I had to find an ATM because I didn’t have my E-ZPass. I finally spotted a Target about twenty minutes west of Nyack right off of the Hudson River. I got my money out of the ATM, I looked around, and I pulled out my phone and called Mika.

“I think Trump is going to win.” This came as no surprise to Mika since she had been predicting as much for months but still asked, “Why do you say that? I’m in this Target about twenty-five miles outside of Manhattan and I might as well be in Wyoming. Everybody in this store is going to vote for Trump. He’s going to win.”

I just got the sense that these were people we hadn’t bothered talking to. What was remarkable about that moment was realizing how much of a bubble we were all living in. Your father went to the Mississippi delta when none of his political advisers thought that made sense, went to South Africa when nobody wanted him to go to South Africa, visited disadvantaged and forgotten communities and I read how he would come home to your dinner table and tell everyone assembled there, “Let me tell you what I saw yesterday.” Then he told their sad story to the rest of America.

People listened to him. They related to him. They could tell right away. “This man understands me, he’s on my side. It’s not that he looks like me; it’s deeper than that.” Your father had an edge to him that I could really relate to. Others like George Wallace had an edge as well, but used it to undermine American values. We saw Donald Trump do the same as Wallace in the New Hampshire primary. I looked up in the stands and there were working-class guys in there, and you could tell that they pulled their one dress jacket out of the closet that they probably hadn’t worn in fifteen years. But they put it on to come out and listen to Donald Trump. That moment proved to me just how much Washington had let down working-class voters through the years. I still believe this country never really recovered from what happened in 1968 with the passing of your father.

Deindustrialization, globalization, and automation have combined to drive real wages down on average since 1973. It seems like the economic realities of the past half century have conspired against most American workers. I had a 95 percent conservative rating while I was in Congress, but even I don’t believe you improve the challenges facing our country’s workers by cutting taxes for the richest 1%. Our leaders are in a race against time and unless they start challenging all of their initial assumptions, we will face an ugly economic and political reckoning all too soon.

The challenge for future leaders is to figure out a way to respond to that challenge and confront the fact that the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. Your father was already sounding the warning bells on this issue back in the sixties, when the challenge was far less great.

KK: People are suffering. Daddy always cared about their suffering, even if they disagreed with him on every other matter. He was authentic in his empathy, and he was authentic when he challenged those with whom he disagreed. People respected him for that.

JS: Here’s the great irony: When you go out and speak your mind, when you stand up and say, “This is what I believe in. If you like it, great. If you don’t like it, vote for the other guy,” people respond to that with great hope and enthusiasm. They just want to be told the truth. And that is exactly what your father did.