Teddy's Idealism

Kennedy’s longest connection with any foreign issue was over Northern Ireland. It began almost casually. He was taking a walk in a London park in 1971 when a woman came up to him and demanded to know why Kennedy, an Irish-American, was silent when the British locked up Irish Catholics without trial and stood by when Protestant paramilitary groups attacked Catholics. His first reaction was a simplistic “Brits out” message, demanding that the six Northern countries be united with Catholic Ireland. But after he met with John Hume, a Social Democrat from Derry, in 1972, he was quickly convinced that was impractical, and that he should support efforts for equal treatment in Ulster.

On St. Patrick’s Day, 1977, he joined with Tip O’Neill, Pat Moynihan, and New York Gov. Hugh Carey to urge Irish-Americans to stop sending money to support the violence of the Irish Republican Army. And he persuaded the Carter administration to promise economic aid if a settlement could be reached in Northern Ireland. On subsequent St. Patrick’s Days, he would meet with leaders from all factions in Washington, urging accommodation.

In 1993, he persuaded President Clinton to appoint his sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, as ambassador to Ireland. When he visited her in Dublin the next year, she urged him to support a United States visa for the IRA’s Gerry Adams, who was banned as a terrorist. When Hume told him that Adams might now be force for peace, Kennedy agreed and, over the objections of the British and the State Department, Clinton ordered the visa to be issued. The inclusion of Adams and other IRA hard-liners proved necessary to the eventual success of peace talks in 1998.

The oppression in Chile was less arguable, and the United States’ role was clear. A 1973 military coup overthrew the popularly elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende, whom the United States worked against. Admiral Augusto Pinochet’s new regime shot hundreds of Allende’s supporters in the National Stadium, although the United States Embassy whitewashed the new regime. By 1973, Kennedy had assembled enough support in the Senate to enact a ban on all arms sales to Chile, and in 1981 secured a ban on all aid to that nation until it provided basic human rights. In 1986, he visited Chile, and despite government-run demonstrations against him, met with and encouraged opposition politicians and mothers who came with pictures of children who had been “disappeared” by the military.

In 2008, President Michelle Bachelet of Chile, herself tortured and exiled by the Pinochet regime, presented Kennedy with the Order of the Merit of Chile, saying “you were there for us when human rights were being massively and systematically violated, when crime and death was around our country. You are one of the great, good, and true friends of Chile.”

He also heartened the opposition in South Africa. He visited that country in 1985, after Archbishop Desmond Tutu persuaded him that his presence would draw attention to apartheid through the American television crews that followed him. He visited slums and resettlement areas. His trip was denounced by the South African government and by the United States ambassador, Herman Nickel. Kennedy staged an illegal protest outside Pollsmoor Prison, where Nelson Mandela was being held. He said, “Behind these walls are men that are deeply committed to the cause of freedom in this land.” Years later, Mandela said he knew Kennedy had been at the gate of the prison and that “gave us a lot of strength and hope, and the feeling that we had millions behind us both in our struggle against apartheid but in our special situation in prison.”

On his return, Kennedy led an effort to impose economic sanctions on South Africa. In 1986, Congress overrode a veto by President Reagan and enacted a ban on all new investment by Americans in South African businesses and on the importation of such products as steel, coal, ammunition, and food from South Africa. “The time for procrastination and delay is over,” Kennedy said. “Now is the time to keep the faith with Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, and all those who believe in a free South Africa.”

In the '70s and '80s, Kennedy made four unusual visits to the Soviet Union, going not as a committee chairman or as part of a delegation (unless you counted the relatives who sometimes went along), but as an individual senator whose brother had been president. All four trips had led to the release of families and individuals, mostly Jewish refuseniks including Natan Sharansky. The 1974 trip also led to an exit visa for the renowned cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, to leave the USSR.