Ted Kennedy

In 1994, James Carroll, a former Catholic priest who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his harrowing Irish-American memoir “An American Requiem,” published a novel called “The City Below.”

“The City Below” is about two Boston Irish brothers who journey from the innocence of the 1950s to the lunacy and violence of the 1960s and 1970s.

In the book, one brother is bad, and runs with various Irish and Italian-American thugs. The other, however, is good. 

His name is Terry. Terry thinks about becoming a priest but splits with the church, and later finds a place for himself in the Democratic Party.

Terry eventually gets a job with Senator Ted Kennedy.

It is at this point in “The City Below” that Carroll dramatizes one of the most painful episodes in Irish American history.

The moment when Kennedy – the object of so much understandable praise in recent days – visits South Boston in 1974, at the height of racially-charged unrest over the issue of busing in Boston schools.

In the novel, Terry is traveling with Kennedy, who is scheduled to give a speech to a crowd of South Bostonians who are skeptical of the busing plan.

Carroll writes that Terry “had expected a few hundred people, but the vast space was jammed with thousands.”

When the crowd sees Kennedy, they shower him with racist expletives. “Get Kennedy!” a boy in the crowd cries, as they push toward the senator.

Referring to the assassins of Ted’s brothers, Carroll writes, “They were would-be Oswalds and Sirhans. But like (Terry), they were Irish.”

September 9 will mark the 35th anniversary of Kennedy’s infamous visit to South Boston. It is, to say the least, interesting to re-read Carroll’s fictional account of the Boston mayhem in the wake of Kennedy’s death.

People can agree or disagree about whether the good or bad in Ted Kennedy’s life should have been emphasized. The man certainly deserved credit for doing the grunt work of American politics. 

He crafted bills and legislation for the needy and vulnerable, the old and young, much of which we take for granted these days. 

It is particularly annoying to hear those who benefit from Kennedy’s work – such as the elderly who receive “government health care” – criticize him.

Kennedy’s obituaries did not hide the fact the man had many flaws. He was also lauded as man who fought, controversially, for peace in Ireland, and whose devotion to immigrants from Ireland and elsewhere was unmatched.

Not much, however, was said about Kennedy’s much more complex relationship with certain sectors of Irish America. Nothing illustrates this more vividly than that episode in South Boston 35 years ago.

A little history. Coming out of the 1960s, African Americans had finally attained legal civil rights. 

But many noted that they still lived in second class conditions, in part because they suffered from educational neglect. 

Some advocates urged busing black children to predominately white schools to achieve a better balance when it came to educational achievement.

Irish South Boston was having none of this. They felt they, too, had faced discrimination. Why should their children be displaced, bused to some other school outside their much-beloved neighborhood? 

You can disagree with this, but their anger was not only bigotry. When Kennedy showed up at that rally, they saw a rich guy who had big ideas and no clue about the real world. No one cared that Kennedy was Irish, or even that he had spent his life trying to make government work for them, rather than the wealthy.

None of that mattered. Maybe it should have. 

However, Kennedy, and those who admired him, also could have done more to understand what drove opposition to busing and other issues. 

Yes, of course, Kennedy was later reelected by a wide margin. But a few years later, so was another Irishman – conservative icon Ronald Reagan. 

To fully appreciate Kennedy’s legacy means to grasp not just what he did, but also the opposition he unleashed.

One final moment is worth reading from “The City Below.” As police fight back against the violent crowd targeting Kennedy, someone says, “Don’t hurt them.”

Carroll writes, “To his amazement, he realized it was the senator.”