Congress, Alice McGoff and her neighbors concurred. But before long they detected a not so subtle shift in the rhetoric of civil rights. No longer were politicians, professors, and editorial writers talking merely about giving Negroes an equal shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By the mid-sixties, they were proposing to take real things—money, jobs, housing, and schools—away from whites and give them to blacks.
This notion of preferential treatment for blacks originated with a young Irish-American, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan. When Lyndon Johnson agreed to deliver the commencement address at Howard University on June 4, 1965, Moynihan drafted the text. “Freedom is not enough,” the President said that day. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity, not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
The more Alice McGoff heard about this doctrine, the less she liked it. The government picked several races and called them minorities, but the Irish, they weren’t a minority; the government was saying the Irish were well off, they’d never had a hard life. Sure, slavery had been a great injustice, but she didn’t see why whites who weren’t even alive during slave times should be penalized for it. How could you make slaves of the majority to free the minority? Was that justice?
Moreover, she knew full well which whites would pay the price for all of this. It wouldn’t be those who worked in the big corporate and law offices downtown, the ones who dined in those Back Bay clubs and lived in the comfortable, all-white suburbs. No, as usual it would be the working-class whites who shared the inner city with blacks, competed with them for schools and jobs and housing, and jostled with them on the street corners.
Before long, the issue of compensatory rights had helped to drive a wedge between the Townies and the remaining Kennedy brothers. Nobody proved a more impassioned advocate of the new doctrine than Robert Kennedy. And Bobby was among the first to point his finger at Northern cities like Boston. “In the North,” he told one reporter, “I think you have had
de facto
segregation which in some areas is as bad or even more extreme than in the South. Everybody in those communities, including my own state of Massachusetts, concentrated on what was happening in Birmingham, Alabama, or Jackson, Mississippi, and didn’t look at what needed to be done in our own home, our own town, our own city.”
For Alice McGoff, that was sheer political posturing, designed to curry favor with Martin Luther King and the “limousine liberals” at the expense of working-class whites. But Bobby was an increasingly remote figure in Massachusetts. To Alice, the Kennedy survivor who really mattered was Ted.
When Ted first ran for Jack’s old Senate seat in 1962, there were those who regarded him as grossly unqualified for the job and resented the Kennedys’ “arrogance” in forwarding his candidacy. But Alice and most other Townies had no such reservations. Indeed, so fierce was Charlestown’s loyalty to the President that it gave his brother a whopping 86.8 percent of its vote, the highest of any neighborhood in the city. Two years later—with JFK’s assassination fresh in most minds and Ted in the hospital after a near-fatal air crash—the Townies tendered him an incredible 94.8 percent.
But Alice’s enthusiasm waned as Ted took up the cudgels for minority rights. In June 1965—just months after the Selma march and Martin Luther King’s address on the Boston Common—Ted put himself squarely behind efforts in the Massachusetts legislature to withhold
This notion of preferential treatment for blacks originated with a young Irish-American, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan. When Lyndon Johnson agreed to deliver the commencement address at Howard University on June 4, 1965, Moynihan drafted the text. “Freedom is not enough,” the President said that day. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity, not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
The more Alice McGoff heard about this doctrine, the less she liked it. The government picked several races and called them minorities, but the Irish, they weren’t a minority; the government was saying the Irish were well off, they’d never had a hard life. Sure, slavery had been a great injustice, but she didn’t see why whites who weren’t even alive during slave times should be penalized for it. How could you make slaves of the majority to free the minority? Was that justice?
Moreover, she knew full well which whites would pay the price for all of this. It wouldn’t be those who worked in the big corporate and law offices downtown, the ones who dined in those Back Bay clubs and lived in the comfortable, all-white suburbs. No, as usual it would be the working-class whites who shared the inner city with blacks, competed with them for schools and jobs and housing, and jostled with them on the street corners.
Before long, the issue of compensatory rights had helped to drive a wedge between the Townies and the remaining Kennedy brothers. Nobody proved a more impassioned advocate of the new doctrine than Robert Kennedy. And Bobby was among the first to point his finger at Northern cities like Boston. “In the North,” he told one reporter, “I think you have had
de facto
segregation which in some areas is as bad or even more extreme than in the South. Everybody in those communities, including my own state of Massachusetts, concentrated on what was happening in Birmingham, Alabama, or Jackson, Mississippi, and didn’t look at what needed to be done in our own home, our own town, our own city.”
For Alice McGoff, that was sheer political posturing, designed to curry favor with Martin Luther King and the “limousine liberals” at the expense of working-class whites. But Bobby was an increasingly remote figure in Massachusetts. To Alice, the Kennedy survivor who really mattered was Ted.
When Ted first ran for Jack’s old Senate seat in 1962, there were those who regarded him as grossly unqualified for the job and resented the Kennedys’ “arrogance” in forwarding his candidacy. But Alice and most other Townies had no such reservations. Indeed, so fierce was Charlestown’s loyalty to the President that it gave his brother a whopping 86.8 percent of its vote, the highest of any neighborhood in the city. Two years later—with JFK’s assassination fresh in most minds and Ted in the hospital after a near-fatal air crash—the Townies tendered him an incredible 94.8 percent.
But Alice’s enthusiasm waned as Ted took up the cudgels for minority rights. In June 1965—just months after the Selma march and Martin Luther King’s address on the Boston Common—Ted put himself squarely behind efforts in the Massachusetts legislature to withhold
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