When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.
—Ralph Ellison
During the late fall of 1987, I was content. At the age of thirty-five, Mark, whom Daddy had appointed as a circuit court judge in Montgomery County, was already halfway to retirement with no real worries about the future elections he would have to win. And Daddy’s lifetime of politics was in the past.
The house we had always talked about building was soon to be finished. Leigh was nine years old. I could finally breathe. No more looking over my shoulder. The best days of my life were in front of me. Even the voice of “This is too good be true” had fallen silent.
That November, Mark decided to run for the supreme court of Alabama. Supreme court races in the past had been gentlemanly and restrained, with most advice on who to vote for coming from practicing lawyers. But the times were changing as big business and trial lawyers squared off against one another in a philosophical and financial battle relating to large civil judgments being handed down in courtrooms and most often upheld in the appellate courts. It was the era of tort reform. With significant stakes on the table, judicial races were about to change: high profile, big money, and perhaps a launching pad to the U.S. Senate or maybe the governor’s office.
On my thirty-eighth birthday, January 24, 1988, Mark and I stopped by Daddy’s house before meeting friends for dinner.
“You need to remind him today is your birthday,” Mark said as we walked through the kitchen door.
“Guess I should have bought a card for him to sign for the scrapbook,” I replied.
“Daddy, today is my birthday,” I said as we walked into his bedroom.
“That’s mighty fine, sugah,” he replied.
Daddy turned his attention to Mark. “Now about this supreme court race. I gave you a good job,” he said, referring to Mark’s appointment to the circuit court. “And you are going to stay there. You are not going to run for anything else. Put that out of your mind.”
“Well, Governor,” Mark replied. “I appreciate what you’ve done for us. But I think I can win, and if I’m elected, I think I can do a lot of good in the state.”
Daddy pointed his finger at Mark. “Folks are saying that all you have to do is get in with the Wallace crowd around the state, and you won’t have to do a thing. But there is a lot of difference between you and me and your last name is Kennedy, not Wallace.”
“Daddy, who told you that?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter who told me anything. You two do as I say.” And with that, he turned his attention back to the television. “Turn that volume up for me.” In Daddy’s mind the conversation was over.
I walked to the head of the bed. “You are going to listen to me,” I said. “I have been a Wallace longer than I have been a Kennedy, and I have enough of Mama in me to tell you that Mark is going to run for whatever he wants to and you can’t stop him. And if you try, I have enough of you in me to make your life miserable.”
Daddy looked at me. “Isn’t today your birthday?”
“Don’t you change the subject,” I replied. “You never knew when my birthday was before now.”
“Well, dahlin’,” Daddy said, “sometimes you have to say things because that’s what other folks want you to say. So now I can tell them I said it.”
As we were about to leave, Daddy said, “You do have a lot of your mama in you.”
In March 1988, when letters from Daddy wound up in Wallace folks’ mailboxes asking them to support Mark in his race for the supreme court, it wasn’t much, but at least it was reason enough to catch up with the old crowd.
In June, Mark won the Democratic primary, and in November he was elected to the Alabama Supreme Court. At the age of thirty-six, he became the youngest supreme court justice to be elected in Alabama history. And in between, on August 21, our son Burns was born.
“My dad does Justice.” —Leigh Kennedy. Justice H. Mark Kennedy on the Alabama Supreme Court (back row on the right), January 1989.
“You timed that just right,” Mark’s mother said.
“Well, that’s the least a politician’s wife should do!”
Mark’s 1994 reelection campaign will always be remembered as one of the dirtiest judicial campaigns in American history. Although he won, he would never be the same. His belief in the dignity of public service as a judge was gone. The politics of the election of members of the judiciary belied the character of what a judge should be, much less uphold.
Mark’s republican opponent, Harold See, was a graduate of the University of Iowa College of Law and a professor at the University of Alabama Law School. His name recognition among average voters was, for the most part, zero. “Never heard of the man,” most said.
But Professor See’s campaign advisor was Karl Rove, who first had to crush the reputation of Texas governor Ann Richards, with a whisper campaign claiming that she was a lesbian, so that his client George W. Bush could win the Texas governor’s race and secondly crush Mark’s reputation, with a whisper campaign alleging that he was a pedophile, so that his client Harold See could win Mark’s seat on the Alabama Supreme Court. Karl Rove won one race and lost the other. And Rove’s “scorched-earth” style of politics would later be called “Make America Great Again.”
In 1983, the Alabama legislature passed the Alabama Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Act. The act established a new state agency, the Alabama Children’s Trust Fund, to address “the state’s growing problem of child neglect and treatment.” Mark was appointed as chairman of the board.
Most of Mark’s spare time was dedicated traveling the state to encourage nonprofit organizations serving women and children at risk for violence to embrace the philosophy of prevention rather than treatment after an incident occurred. He spoke what he preached when he was a juvenile court judge: “All of our resources are spent after the fact, when the abuse and neglect of children has already occurred. We need to be focused on programs that provide services, protection and hope for at-risk families who can be saved before the damage is done.”
Mark’s campaign material in his second race for the Supreme Court displayed photos of him with children, as a reminder of his work as chairman of the Children’s Trust Fund. But Karl Rove saw the photos in a different vein.
“This is an opportunity to create a whisper campaign. We can use law school students to spread the word back home that Mark Kennedy is a pedophile. No news reports, no ads. Just family talk mixed in with “How are you doing in law school?” Rove probably said. Because that is the way it happened. And it was all a lie.
Two years later, Harold See won his second race for the Supreme Court against a different incumbent and won. Every week, the justices gathered in the Supreme Court conference room to discuss pending cases. Harold See sat across the table from Mark.
Several months after See took office, he spoke to Mark in regard to the smear campaign he ran against him. When Mark came home that evening he told me Harold See said he had been totally unaware of “ ‘that whisper campaign,’ as he called it. ‘I would never have condoned such a thing.’ ”
“Was that all that he said?” I asked.
“That was about it,” Mark replied.
“So, he never apologized? Is that right?”
Mark nodded his head. “That was all he said.”
I thought to myself, Harold See did what Daddy did on the day state troopers attacked John Lewis on Bloody Sunday in March of 1965. “I never told Al Lingo to attack those marchers on that bridge.” It was not Daddy’s fault.
Hard to take, to say the least. You would have thought I had been put through the wringer enough times with my father’s political life. Now here it was, perhaps even closer to home—the same opportunism and gutter politics. But one thing was different: Mark always put me and our sons first. He was always, always there for us. And that made all the difference.
On June 11, 1999, after serving twenty-one years on the bench, Mark retired. He was doing something for me, Leigh, and Burns that Daddy never did—he was coming home to us.