GLORIA STEINEM

Gloria Steinem is a writer, lecturer, editor, and feminist activist. She was a cofounder of the magazines New York and Ms. She has written many books and received many awards for her journalism. In 2013 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Someone sent my brother Joe a subscription to Ms. magazine, and, as a young adolescent I used to snatch it from the mailbox, race to my bedroom on the third floor of our home, and read it. Growing up in a society dominated by men (watch a few Mad Men episodes to see what it was like) in a single-parent household with a mother who espoused traditional roles for women but was mightier and more fun than all the men in her orbit, Ms. provided a source of insight and relief from confusing, mixed messages. As a human rights activist, I came to understand that the suppression of women and girls is the single greatest threat to justice and peace in our world. Gloria is the icon of women’s empowerment, and a kind, engaged, and loving friend.

Gloria Steinem: The first time I saw your father, he was attorney general, and he was speaking to a large group in Washington. He clearly did not enjoy public speaking, but he was doing it anyway; he was doing it, I would say, courageously. I never spoke in public until I was more than forty years old, and had devoted much of my life to avoiding public speaking. When I absolutely had to, and I would say to myself, “Okay, if Bobby could do this when he so clearly would rather have been anywhere else, maybe I can do it, too.” This is one personal way he was an inspiration to me.

Kerry Kennedy: I’ve watched many of his early speeches, and he’s clearly miserable in front of a microphone. He hates it; he’s not very good at it; he’s not charismatic; he can’t find the right words. He’s a mess. Then he changed.

GS: Yes, of course, he got much better. The most important thing about his speaking is that he was always authentic. I got the impression that because he cared so much about the subject, he overcame his disinclination to speak and just got out there and did it. His message was clearly coming from inside him. He wasn’t thinking about how he looked or whether what he had to say fit neatly into some political strategy. He just wanted to speak the truth—but he would have been just as happy if someone else said it.

The Village Voice writer Jack Newfield once confided to me that the secret of interviewing Bobby was to bring along someone who disagreed with him. Otherwise, if you asked him a question and he was aware you already knew the answer, he wouldn’t see any point in repeating it to you. I found this to be true when I was interviewing him. He was just so straightforward and practical that he would say, “You know the answer perfectly well.” I would say to him, “Yes, I know the answer, but you have to say it. I need quotes from you.” But if you brought along someone he didn’t know, or who would express an opposite opinion, Bobby would see a reason to explain his own view, and then you could get quotes!

KK: That does sound like him. You covered Nixon, McCarthy, and my father as a reporter during the primaries in 1968. How would you compare them in the field?

GS: The styles of the two Democrats, Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, were polar opposites. McCarthy was distant, cool, above it all, academic, a little disapproving. He very rarely stopped in black or poor neighborhoods. I saw him touch another person only once. He touched a little black kid and then wiped his hand on his pants.

It was truly a profound contrast. Bobby was especially warm with children. He would reach out and gently touch their faces. It seemed to me he always did that. He certainly did it frequently. He was most able to forget his shyness when he was absorbed in what other people needed.

KK: I remember that everywhere we went on campaigns we brought a football to throw around, and my father connected that way with the kids, through play.

GS: I don’t remember the football, but I vividly remember the touching, and the obvious way he cared about the kids, especially if they seemed to be in any kind of trouble, or if the neighborhood was a poor neighborhood, or if they were black children and vulnerable. Once on a campaign plane, Bobby’s staff objected when he wanted to make a stop at an Indian reservation—there weren’t enough votes there to make it worthwhile—and Bobby got mad and said, “You don’t really give a damn, do you? He made the stop anyway.

Many of the reporters on the campaign loved your father, so I think they overcompensated by writing critically about him. On the other hand, they found Nixon to be shifty and inauthentic, so I think they concealed their feelings by being super objective. The result was that many Americans didn’t know who those men really were until it was too late—until Nixon was in the White House—and until Bobby was no longer with us.

KK: Some journalists came to the campaign with extreme skepticism, and then they would start to admire him and say, “Well, I can no longer be objective, so I have to get a different assignment.”

GS: I think that’s ridiculous. It’s a fault that grows out of journalism school, for which we’re paying the extreme price with Trump. Objectivity is equated with a false equivalency. If you say something negative about one candidate, you have to balance it by saying something negative about the other. You give equal time to lies and to facts.

KK: Example number one is global warming. A scientist cites the facts; then, in the name of “balance,” an oil company hustler gives the “other side” as though there were a valid “other side” from reality.

GS: It’s a tragedy. Issues do not all have two sides. They may have ten sides, or three. It’s as if the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who divide everything into two and those who don’t. As a philosophical note, this is a function of dividing human beings into masculine and feminine, which is also bullshit because each person is unique, and also shares the human race. Dividing everything into two doesn’t allow for uniqueness and continuum and subtlety and individuality. Journalism schools need to cut out that binary thinking. The journalist’s responsibility is not to be evenhanded. It’s to be accurate.

One time, all the journalists who were following the campaign were sitting in the bleachers overlooking a mass Nixon rally. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was associated with Bobby—people knew it was his favorite hymn—and when the band played it, even those reporters who were striving to pretend they had no feelings, even they reacted emotionally because they associated it with Bobby. Someone said, “They shouldn’t play that song here. It doesn’t belong to them.” There was a game some were playing: a dollar for the person who saw the first black face in Nixon’s crowd. It was a tough game to win because the Nixon crowds were overwhelmingly white. They were so different from Bobby’s crowds.

KK: Daddy had mixed audiences because he reached out to a wide range of people. He was particularly concerned about farmworkers. You were an advocate for farmworkers in the sixties.

GS: My connection with the farmworkers started with Marion Moses, who was the nurse for the United Farm Workers union. She came from Delano to New York and she needed a place to stay. Cesar Chavez, in his way, had sent her off with $5 a week and orders to stop the grape shipments to the entire East Coast. She stayed with me, and she organized me, and once you’re organized by and for the farmworkers, you stay organized!

Later, Cesar sent an older Filipino man named George Catalan to New York to help with our street demonstrations. Many Filipino men had been imported as farmworkers, but they were forbidden to marry by the antimiscegenation laws of California, so there was a large group of lonely older men who could no longer work. Cesar had managed to construct some housing for them. George volunteered to come to New York because he had no family, and he would cook for all of us strikers in my tiny closet of a kitchen. Marion and I also organized a benefit for the farmworkers in Carnegie Hall, with everybody from Broadway performers to George McGovern. We also used every journalistic and union organizing tactic to get Cesar on the cover of TIME magazine, because it seemed that publicity would be his best protection against the violent threats from some of the growers.

Through Marion, who later became a doctor and worked on public health and environmental health as well as farmworkers’ health, I became aware that women were coming to the farmworkers’ clinic, pleading for contraception or for safe abortions. Cesar was saying no way. I felt he was wrong, and since I was raising money, I began raising it not for Cesar—the United Farm Workers did have support from some other unions—but for women’s groups. I think Marion had been secretly providing contraception, but there was no money—the clinic was operating out of a house trailer or some such place. I just directed the money I was raising—we’re not talking about big sums here—to support women farmworkers instead of other aspects of Cesar’s work.