I used my trusty Boston Globe subscription to access their online archives and refresh my memories of this. Ah, we have to warm up the Way-Back machine though to do this.
Sen Kerry gave a speech at Yale University back in late March of 1992. The Rodney King incident had happened the year before that. Charles Stuart had played on widespread racial stereotypes when he murdered his pregnant wife and then blamed it on a black resident of Boston's Mission Hill neighborhood in late 1989. (Stuart committed suicide when his fraud was uncovered in 1990.)
John Aloysius Farrell, then Boston Globe writer (and contributor to the biography of Sen. Kerry that the Globe came out with in 2004) was in attendance at this speech along with about 100 Yale students. He wrote an article 3 1/2 weeks after the speech that summed up the event.
April 19, 1992
WASHINGTON -- It was vintage John Kerry: outraged and impatient, beguiled by risk and clumsy with the political niceties, plowing ahead as friends groaned and struggled to keep up. Disdaining the advice of staff and advisers, the junior senator from Massachusetts says he followed his gut when deciding to tackle the volatile issue of race and politics in making a major policy speech on affirmative action last month at Yale University. As when choosing to address the POW-MIA issue last year, Kerry made this call by himself, against -- or without -- the advice of his staff. Despite a year of writing, Kerry essentially leapt before looking -- with few solid answers and no firm direction, startling some allies whom he was asking to come along as an act of faith.
And if Kerry had any doubts he was raising expectations about his ability to solve such intractable problems as racial politics and the crisis of urban America, they have vanished in the tumultuous weeks that followed his well- publicized remarks.
"This is unfinished. Unfinished. There is clearly more to be said and a hell of a lot more to be done," Kerry states. "This is something I want to make a difference on."
At least on this point, Kerry and his critics agree. "He has to establish alternatives," says state Sen. Bill Owens, (D-Boston), who chairs the Legislature's Black Caucus. "If he is not posing alternatives, then he's just adding to the fire that already exists."
As for Kerry's own affirmative-action efforts, of the 36 members of his Senate staff, most are women and six are members of minority groups. Last year, a spot check conducted by The Boston Herald of the staffs of all 13 members of the Massachusetts delegation placed Kerry slightly above average in a ranking of his colleagues as regards hiring minorities. Like the overwhelming majority of the delegation, he has no minority staffers in executive positions.
In a recent two-hour interview, Kerry said that his speech is no one-shot deal but the start of a long-planned assault on the crisis in America's cities and the policies of "rationalization . . . avoidance . . . and exploitation" that have doomed previous efforts.
In the long run, the clamor over Kerry's speech may save him. If Kerry's political strengths stem from his image as a risk-taker, his weaknesses result from the belief he's opportunistic. The sheer din surrounding his speech will ensure that Kerry's attention doesn't wander. Intentionally or not, he is now committed to the issue, and planning his next talk on the subject, at a yet- to-be chosen venue in Boston.
Since returning for his second term, Kerry has voiced a desire to become more of a national leader. That ambition, along with the scare he got from James Rappaport, his well-financed Republican opponent in 1990, and the frustration he feels with the political gridlock in Washington, have stirred a certain derring-do in him.
There are more themes -- about Democratic myopia on economic issues, for example -- that have also been in the works for months and may soon make their way into speeches. He recently cast a pro-business vote on cable TV legislation and has been pushing his own version of a capital-gains tax cut.
"This totally comes from within Kerry," says his pollster, Thomas Kiley. "He has always chafed under the stigma of being labeled just another Massachusetts Democrat, in the long shadow of Ted Kennedy. He's working to publicly assert what those who know him already know, that he is independent- minded on issues, wanting to challenge Democratic orthodoxy. That's been there: a desire to exercise his intellectual side."
In this case, says Kiley, "there is no question he irritated black leaders and black voters . . . I don't think he would claim that it was perfectly crafted, or that he shouldn't have spent more time talking to folks up here to fully understand what buzzwords and phrases could be misinterpreted. But I don't think any of the damage is permanent, and it struck me in general that it prompted a healthy debate."
When asked about the fallout, Kerry acknowledges that he angered liberal activists and hurt some black supporters with blunt talk about the costs of affirmative action. He also says he could have done a better job preparing admirers for his challenge to liberal orthodoxy.
"I know some people who are friends of mine are disappointed I did it," Kerry says. "I think a lot of people on the staff were questioning what I was doing, and why." But "I never ran it by the political side" because "this is not a political speech," he says, adding that he played his cards close to the vest in part because he feared cautious advisers might try to modify his passion on this issue.
Kerry does not budge an inch on his central thesis: That to advance the civil rights agenda, Democrats must supplement support for affirmative action with ideas and programs that stress law and order, individual responsibility, the work ethic and other values that enlist the support of the white majority.
"This speech was given because we have a crisis in this country, and I'm tired of hearing about a crisis and seeing no response," says Kerry. "I think the dynamic is locked, frozen."
Part of that paralysis stems from an excessive focus on affirmative action, Kerry says, which in some cases creates the "reality of reverse discrimination" and alienates many white supporters of civil rights.
"I know people who don't have a racist bone in their body who think the system is rigged; that it's crazy," Kerry says. "The stereotypes have become dangerous and embedded, and the leadership has become craven. You need to deal with the reality that there are more whites than blacks on welfare; you also need to deal with the reality of a third generation on welfare," he says. "And you have to deal with why America refuses to deal with these realities."
"I think John simply felt this was his responsibility to speak out," says Larry Rasky, a Democratic consultant and sometime Kerry adviser in Boston. "To that extent, it is an example of John at his best . . . at the cutting edge of difficult, controversial issues, whether as a peacemaker or a warrior. He could have obviated some criticism by discussing the matter with more people in the community before he gave the speech. But so what? It's John's role to be a leader, not a follower. I don't think he needs to ask permission, and we shouldn't want him to."
Kerry's speech had its genesis in his personal background, which, he acknowledges, is largely white and privileged. "I don't think any white man in America can completely know" what it's like to be a minority, he says.
Kerry suggests his feelings on race were shaped by his parents; by an admired black member of the faculty at his prep school, St. Paul's, in Concord, N.H.; by the inspiration of the civil rights movement in the '60s; and, above all, by his own exposure to black comrades in the armed forces during the Vietnam War. In a 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a veteran against the war, Kerry decried the racist nature of the war and the draft.
"The largest exposure I've had came in the military," says Kerry. "That was when I was on a working level with blacks on a day-to-day basis. I had a black gunner on my boat. We bled the same color."
In preparing his speech, Kerry says he read widely: from the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. to the work of recent authors such as Yale law professor Stephen Carter, who questions the wisdom of affirmative action, and Thomas and Mary Edsall, who argue that the Democratic Party's inability to forge a broad consensus on race has helped cost it the White House.
Despite the flak generated by the speech, Kerry says: "I stand by it. I stand by this effort. And I stand by my description of the predicament."
This is why the Senator said he had "his head handed to him" about this speech. Rarely do topics stay in the news for nearly a month or provoke a firestorm like this did.
There are ideas in this that were ahead of their time. There are arguments in here that are being made today, 16 years later. There are certain "bitter" discussions that indicate both that we have changed in terms of discussing this topic and have not. Maybe it's better. I do think we are better off discussing race and backlash than not discussing it.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
