Home »

[TiCam]

Spirit of JFK looms large

History was in the making as Hillary Clinton awaited the Super Tuesday results on the third floor of the New Yorker Hotel.

The question was what history exactly was being made.

Would the Democrats be further on the way to having their first woman candidate for President or to having their first African-American?

A big uncertainty was the ultimate impact of Caroline Kennedy's endorsement of Obama in the voting booth.

The tipping factor in Caroline's decision to back Obama appears to have been a drama that involves both their fathers. And this drama's political dimension happened to culminate almost a half-century before in the very hotel on W. 34th St. where Clinton spent last night.

The story goes back to 1959 and a Sept. 11 that takes a much happier place in American history than the one we remember too well.

On this earlier 9/11, 81 students arrived here in New York from Kenya. Various universities had provided scholarships, but the airfare had been a problem and the U.S. State Department had refused to assist.

Thanks to private fund-raising by the students at home and stateside by Jackie Robinson, the students managed to fly into Idlewild Airport. They trooped off the plane with beaded hats of the Luo tribe as fellow Africans on the tarmac chanted, "Uhuru!" meaning "Freedom!"

Among the 81 was Barack Obama Sr., who continued on to the University of Hawaii, where he met and married the future mother of the present candidate.

This first Obama and the others made the program such a success that the sponsoring African-American Students Foundation of Madison Ave. lined up 243 scholarships for the following year.

But that made airfare even more of a problem and the State Department again refused to help despite entreaties from Robinson as well as actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.

Kenyan nationalist leader Tom Mboya sought out then-Sen. John Kennedy.

Kennedy agreed to fund the airfare through a family foundation. Kennedy was the new Democratic nominee for President, but he chose not to make the gift public to avoid politicizing the program.

When the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, got wind of it, he tasked his "truth squad" to spread completely false reports that the rich kid Kennedy had "out bid" the State Department to score black votes.

Kennedy denounced the smear from the Senate floor as "the most unfair, distorted, and malignant attack I have heard in 14 years in politics."

On Sept. 14, 1960, two plane loads of African students landed in New York thanks to the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation. They held a press conference at the New Yorker Hotel and one of the students described the fund-raising at home.

"People who could not give money sold their goats and sheep," the student said.

The students had put into action the old African proverb that Hillary Clinton would use decades later for the title of her famous book, "It Takes a Village." Hillary also ascribes to the political proverb "It Helps to Have a Kennedy" and she sought Caroline's endorsement last month.

But the young people swept up in the Obama for President fever included Caroline's three children and they got Mom to a big rally in Washington Square Park to hear Obama speak.

Even so, some feel what finally tipped Caroline was the story of the African airlift. Obama would not even exist were it not for the student program that took a village and then a Kennedy.

Caroline could look at Obama and imagine destiny at work. Caroline smiled exactly like her father when she endorsed Obama.

The outcome was a surge in the polls, but when the results began coming in last night Obama did not do quite as well as he might have had the audacity to hope. The Kennedy magic did not carry to working-class Massachusetts or generally to Latinos.

Even so, Hillary Clinton was certainly no longer the prohibitive favorite.

However it ultimately goes, we were all winners last night if you thought back to the African airlift.

Back then, America was in a tizzy over the prospect of electing its first Catholic President. The Rev. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream Speech" was still four years away. And people could have no more believed the son of one of these Kenyan students might become a contender for the White House any more than they could have imagined a woman might someday become President.

Amid the shouts of "Hillary!" and "Obama!" we can all call out together, "Uhuru!"