RFK Jr., page 3
Jacqueline Jackson, the wife of the Baptist minister and failed presidential candidate, had also been sentenced for trespassing. Jackson, the firebrand reverend, dominated the Vieques protests, insisting upon headlining press conferences even though he had not risked arrest on the island. Kennedy, who despised Jackson, spent much of his time avoiding him, he wrote.
Jackson was using Vieques for his own purposes. Months earlier, he had admitted to having an affair with a campaign worker at his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition offices in Washington. The affair with Karin Stanford, a professor of political science, had produced a daughter. Pontificating about Vieques at every press conference he could find proved to be a convenient distraction from the scandal after Sharpton, once a fawning protégé, broke with his mentor over the affair. As Kennedy noted, the scandal had weakened Jackson in the Black community and paved the way for Sharpton to emerge as Black Americans’ leader. “Jesse is trying to rehabilitate himself from the disclosure that he has an out-of-wedlock child,” he wrote on July 5, a day before his trial and incarceration. “I don’t really want to be the instrument of his rehabilitation.”
Or caught in between the epic battle of the reverends for dominance within the Black community. Although Sharpton was in prison, he raged against his former mentor through one of his supporters. “While arch-rival Sharpton languishes2 in a federal lockdown in Brooklyn for protesting the U.S. Navy’s bombing of Vieques, Jackson has been quietly buttressing an alliance with Dennis Rivera, leader of the powerful Local 1199 health care workers union, who is the cochairman of Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition,” wrote columnist Peter Noel in The Village Voice, an article that helped inflame the conflict between the two men even more. “Rivera is Jackson’s point man in the city. And privately, several of Jackson’s critics have asked Black activists to avoid Rivera at all cost.” In addition, he dubbed Jackson “the pimp of Vieques” and quoted a former campaign worker who had accused him of using his wife in a political stunt by “forcing” her to protest at Vieques. “Anyone who believes that this situation was not staged to take the spotlight off Sharpton must be crazy,” Noel wrote. Jacqueline Jackson received a ten-day sentence.
In Harlem, where Jackson’s affair was sharply criticized, Sharpton seized the spotlight. Like his former mentor, he was using Vieques for his own purposes. A day before he was arrested for trespassing there, he had announced that he was contemplating a run for president in 2004. “The condemnation of the Harlem ministers emboldened Sharpton to attack his teacher,” wrote Kennedy in his diary on July 5. “Sharpton presented himself as the new heir to Martin Luther King and came to Vieques.”
According to Kennedy, both Sharpton and Jackson had little interest in the issues behind the protests at Vieques and had embraced the cause in order to increase their exposure on national media. “I may be cynical about his motives,” he wrote of Sharpton, “but I believe he came to Vieques because he saw cameras here and determined to be in front of them.”
In a long passage in his diary, Kennedy explained that Jackson’s rise to power had been directly related to his own family and had taken place as early as 1979, when his uncle Ted Kennedy had challenged Jimmy Carter in the Democratic presidential primary. Carter’s people had seen Jesse on TV and hired him to travel across the country and “counterbalance Teddy’s popularity among Black voters,” he wrote, adding that in the long run it hadn’t worked for Carter, who had won the Democratic primary but lost the election to Ronald Reagan. But it had given Jackson national exposure as a self-styled civil rights leader and jump-started his own presidential campaign in 1984, which had ultimately failed.
Sharpton, who had begun preaching at age four and worked as a youth director for Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket in the late 1960s, had taken his lessons on developing a national base from Jackson. “When he came to New York, Al Sharpton would meet him at the airport and study him,” wrote Kennedy on July 5 in his diary. In 1996, when Jackson had introduced his Wall Street Project “to end the multi-billion dollar trade deficit with minority vendors and consumers,” Sharpton had begun a similar campaign among New York City advertising firms known as the Madison Avenue Initiative. “Both these guys give me the creeps,” wrote Kennedy, adding that Jackson had a “desperate and destructive addiction to publicity.”
Kennedy had soured on Jackson in 1993, when he had been a pallbearer at Cesar Chavez’s funeral. Kennedy’s family had had a special relationship with the California labor organizer since 1966 when his father, Robert Kennedy, then a senator with a seat on the Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, had reluctantly visited Chavez in California.
“By the end of the day3, Kennedy had embraced Chavez and La Causa,” wrote historian and RFK biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Kennedy père had famously broken bread with the labor leader in 1968 following Chavez’s twenty-five-day hunger strike to raise awareness of the slavelike conditions that farm workers were forced to endure. Later, when Robert Kennedy ran for president, Chavez and his United Farm Workers were crucial in organizing votes for him.
At Chavez’s funeral in 1993, which drew more than thirty-five thousand mourners, Jackson “pushed Cesar’s friends and family out of the way to make himself lead pallbearer,” wrote Kennedy on July 5 in his diary. He had attended the funeral with his mother and older brother, Joseph Kennedy II, then a congressman.
Kennedy’s disenchantment with the civil rights leader continued after Jackson opposed an initiative to clean up the Everglades three years later, in 1996. Kennedy had backed the Save Our Everglades campaign, which had proposed a penny-a-pound tax on sugar to finance the cleanup of the Florida wetlands. Jackson campaigned against the tax measure on the ballot—Florida Amendment 4—arguing that it would hurt minorities.
Kennedy wasn’t the only one who had issues with the reverends. Both Rivera and Hillary Clinton were fierce critics of the civil rights leaders, according to his prison diary entries, although they dared not go against them in public. In their private conversations with Kennedy, Rivera described Sharpton as “psychotic” and Clinton said that “she was tired of all the politicians running to him [Jackson] and wanting to see what he will do.” According to Kennedy, she was one of those politicians.
“Al Sharpton has done more damage to the Black cause than George Wallace,” wrote Kennedy on July 5, referring to the pro-segregation former governor of Alabama, whom he had met while he was a student at Harvard working on his senior thesis about Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr., who had ruled in landmark civil rights cases.
The day before Kennedy was sentenced, he wrote in his journal that he had lost respect for Sharpton after the Tawana Brawley scandal. In 1987, Brawley, a Black teenager in upstate New York, had falsely accused four white men of kidnapping and raping her. Sharpton had helped bring the case to national prominence, but a grand jury had concluded a year later that no rape had taken place. “Even the most deserving causes he has championed since then becomes suspect by his association with the Tawana Brawley stench,” he wrote on July 5.
Despite the media circus surrounding the two civil rights leaders in Puerto Rico, there was true solidarity among the other protestors. In Guaynabo, the Vieques prisoners were known as los disobedientes (the disobedient ones) and were beloved for their stand at Vieques. “We were greeted by about 60 cellmates—mostly disobedientes—who cheered us as we entered the cell block and played the drums and gave us abrazos [hugs],” he wrote on July 6, the day he reported to jail, where he was issued a set of prison clothing, sheets, pillowcases, a blanket, and “a ragged mattress.”
Despite the bare-bones living conditions, there was singing every night by his fellow prisoners and general excitement when one of their comrades was released after serving their time. Three days after he arrived at the prison, a fellow protestor completed his sentence and was on his way out when the other prisoners—there were forty Vieques protestors among the fifty-six prisoners in his cell block—shouted “Afuera Tito!” (“Out Tito!”) His fellow cellmates threw him a bon voyage party, and by the time he left, Tito was sobbing, according to Kennedy.
Among his fellow prisoners were the activists Rubén Berríos, the president of the Puerto Rico Independence Party, and another Tito—Tito Kayak—who was serving a year in prison for a daring act of civil disobedience in which he had climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty in New York City with a group of Vieques protestors to hang a Puerto Rican flag on the statue’s top deck in November 2000. Kayak, whose real name was Alberto de Jesús Mercado, had long been associated with the Vieques cause.
A sense of warmth and camaraderie existed among the Vieques prisoners and the prison workers. When Kennedy went for a routine checkup with the prison medic, his caseworker allowed him to use the phone in his office to call Mary. “I said ‘thank you,’” he wrote on July 11 in his diary. “He said, ‘no, thank you for what you did.’ This is pretty typical of everyone who works in this joint.” At night, troops gathered outside the prison to wave to the Vieques prisoners through the fence and picket their incarceration, he wrote. When protestors were released from the prison, they were sent off with singing and hugs, with those remaining in the cell block shouting the rallying cry of the movement, “Vieques o muerte!” (“Vieques or death!”)
To them, Bobby Kennedy was a hero who had risked his life for their cause. Months earlier, he had participated in his own daring invasion of Vieques. On April 28, he had boarded a thirteen-foot fiberglass panga fishing boat at Esperanza on the southern coast of Vieques and sped to the bombing range where the US Navy was exploding five-hundred-pound bombs. Olmos, Rivera, and the Puerto Rican pop star Robi Draco Rosa had accompanied him on the risky mission, trailed by a boat “packed with journalists and photographers.”4
For Kennedy, who by then had worked for eighteen years as a lawyer and environmental activist, his trespassing on Vieques—the first act of civil disobedience in his life—came after he and others had “exhausted every legal and political avenue” to end the navy bombings, which had resulted in thousands of pounds of exploded bombs each year, eventually dwarfing the explosive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, he wrote in an article about the adventure for Outside magazine. The bombs had destroyed the island’s rainforests and poisoned fish and wildlife, interfering with the local fishing industry, he said.
The battle to remove the navy from Vieques had been going on since the bombings had begun in 1941 and was tied to the movement for Puerto Rican independence. It gained momentum in the early 1970s when the lawyer and human rights activist Berríos staged a protest on Culebra, an island east of the Puerto Rican mainland, which was also used for navy target practice. In 1971, Berríos and twelve other protestors entered a major navy bombing target area on Flamenco Beach and set up an encampment, where they remained for several weeks. The protestors had also convinced a white-shoe Washington law firm, Covington & Burling, to represent them for free in federal court. By December 1975, the protest and the legal challenge had worked, and the navy ceased all military operations on Culebra.
On Vieques, protests continued, led by a grassroots group of local fishermen who regularly risked arrest by launching flotillas in restricted waters around the island in order to interfere with the bombings following the death of the Puerto Rican independence leader Angel Rodriguez Cristobal in a Florida prison in 1979. The thirty-three-year-old member of Puerto Rico’s Socialist League was found dead in his Tallahassee cell while serving a six-month sentence for trespassing on navy land in Vieques while military maneuvers were taking place. The official cause of death was suicide, but in a “fiery” graveside speech, the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party’s secretary general, Juan Antonio Corretjer, said that he had been murdered and the movement would avenge his death by driving the navy from Vieques. “The sounds and odors of gunpowder5 will prevail until the Navy has been driven from Vieques and the U.S. from Puerto Rico,” he declared at Rodriguez Cristobal’s funeral.
Two months later, in January 1980, a bomb exploded at the Puerto Rico Bar Association, destroying its glass doors. Alex Joseph de la Zerda, a navy lieutenant serving as a liaison between the military and the residents of Vieques, was arrested for the crime. He was also charged, along with two anti-Castro Cubans, with attempting to bomb a commuter plane that ferried passengers between San Juan and Vieques. Both the commuter plane company and the bar association were considered sympathetic to the movement to remove the navy from Vieques.
Protests continued and reached a fever pitch on April 19, 1999, when navy planes accidentally dropped bombs during a nighttime training mission. The blasts killed David Sanes Rodríguez, a Puerto Rican security guard who worked as a civilian employee for the navy. According to a congressional report, a Marine Corps F-18 on a training mission dropped two five-hundred-pound bombs that struck the security post, killing Sanes and injuring four others. By December, President Bill Clinton had ordered a temporary stop to the explosions on the island, and the navy ceased their bombing exercises. Two months later, in February 2000, more than 150,000 people took to the streets of Puerto Rico to protest any further military exercises on Vieques. The protests drew everyone from lawmakers to the singer Ricky Martin, the boxer Félix “Tito” Trinidad, and the daring activist and environmentalist Tito Kayak, who had been fighting for the removal of the US military from Vieques for years.
Kennedy became involved in April 2000, traveling to the island to meet with fishermen, scientists, and local leaders who represented the 9,300 residents. He was accompanied by Rivera, who had made Vieques an urgent issue among his union members in New York. On that first trip, Kennedy donned scuba gear and dived to examine the effects of the bombings on the ocean floor. He found what “looked like an army-navy store, the reef bristling with dud bombs,” he wrote in his story for Outside magazine, adding that he had immediately agreed to represent local leaders in the battle against the navy. “The bombardment of Vieques is bad military policy and disastrous for public health and the environment. But the most toxic residue of the Navy’s history on Vieques is its impact on our democracy. The people I met there are United States citizens, but the Navy’s abusive exercise of power on the island has left them demoralized, alienated, and feeling that they are neither part of a democracy nor the beneficiaries of the American system of justice.”
In addition, the Vieques bombings were causing other long-term problems. The 1999 Special Commission on Vieques report for the Puerto Rican governor’s office found that Vieques had the highest infant mortality rate in the commonwealth. The report also cited a Puerto Rico Department of Health study that had found that between 1980 and 1989, the risk of developing cancer was higher on Vieques than in any other part of Puerto Rico.
During his civil disobedience on Vieques in April 2001, Kennedy hid from navy police under a demolished truck. But he worried that if bombing resumed, he might take a direct hit. When he fled from his hiding place, he heard a soldier call his name. He was arrested and joined Rivera, who was already in handcuffs. Later, the navy police officers who had arrested him and Rivera asked to have their pictures taken with Kennedy and even asked for his autograph, Kennedy said.
But the authorities soon dispensed with the celebrity treatment. “Our captors drove us all to the naval compound at Camp Garcia, where they turned us over to a less refined crowd,” he wrote in his article. “Our new guards made us kneel upright on sharp gravel, searched us, and took our shoes, socks, and belts. Then they marched us toward a chain-link enclosure containing 24 other male protesters.” Hours later, they were transported by boat and bus to Guaynabo, where they were strip-searched and “marched to our cell block.” Two days later, on April 30, they were released on $3,000 bail each.
Neither Kennedy nor Rivera had thought to resist arrest. For his part, Kennedy was determined to go to prison, even as friends and supporters arranged for Mario Cuomo, New York’s governor from 1983 to 1994, to handle his and Rivera’s defense at trial. Cuomo, a skilled attorney and the father-in-law of Kennedy’s younger sister Kerry, who was married to Cuomo’s son Andrew at the time, had brokered a deal whereby Kennedy would plead guilty to trespassing charges and waive all defenses and appeals. The judge would then likely sentence him to a short time in prison after Mary had her baby. She was due in mid-July. “I rejected the deal—much to Mario’s chagrin,” wrote Kennedy on July 5, the day before his court appearance in San Juan. “I need to go to jail. Now! If I don’t it will look like I made some backroom deal. I need to go to jail. If I won my case on some other technicality, it would look like I was being treated differently from the others [and] that would discredit the movement.”
He was already prepared to serve his time behind bars. Before flying to San Juan, he had gone shopping at Barnes & Noble with Bobby, his eldest son from his marriage to his first wife, Emily Black. He had bought Spanish grammar and yoga books and packed the ointment that he needed for a skin condition that caused pustules and sores on his face. Bobby jokingly warned his father not to do any yoga poses where anyone could see him and asked him to continue the skin care regimen “to make my face look scary” and to tell his roommate that he was suffering from AIDS, syphilis, and dysfunctional bowel syndrome. “He’s getting a perverse enjoyment about my predicament,” wrote Kennedy on July 1. “He keeps talking about my girlfriend Tito.”
Three days later, he spent the July Fourth holiday with his children and Peter Kaplan, his former roommate at Harvard and the editor of the New York Observer, at Van Cortlandt Manor, a museum in Westchester County. “We watched revolutionary war reenactments and Conor and Finn drilled with a minuteman squadron and we watched an artillery team shoot a cannon across the Croton River,” he wrote on July 4.
