Politics

Honoring RFK

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

November 20, 2001 / 4:45 PM EST / CBS

President Bush praised the late Robert Kennedy as a man who used power in defense of the powerless.

"Robert Kennedy devoted himself, he devoted the Department of Justice, and finally devoted his life to upholding justice for all Americans. He led an extraordinary campaign against organized crime that inspires us still today in the war against terrorism. He was unafraid to call his enemy evil and unapologetic about devoting all his resources, his energy and his passion to that evil's defeat. He saw a cause greater than himself: the defense of a nation and its citizens, and their freedom," the president said at a ceremony where the Justice Department headquarters was named for Kennedy.

The president said those traits are admired even more as the U.S. deals with its current crisis.

Political Paradox

CBSNews.com Legal Consultant Andrew Cohen takes a look at the irony of a Republican president naming the Justice Department building after a scion of a Democratic family.

"Today, we're not merely re-labeling this building in the memory of Robert Kennedy; we are rededicating this Department of Justice to the causes he served. We must rededicate ourselves to the protection of dignity, respect, rights and freedom of all Americans. We must rededicate ourselves to the preservation of our way of life."

Attorney General John Ashcroft has defended the administration's arrest and detention tactics -- and invoked memories of Kennedy's war on organized crime to justify them.

The ceremony was attended by various Kennedy relatives; including his widow Ethel Kennedy and brother Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.

Just hours before the ceremony Kennedy's daughter criticized the Bush administration for giving broad new powers to police and prosecutors to fight terrorism, saying her father would not have approved of such moves because they undermine civil liberties.

"My daughter, Cara, is here today," Kerry Kennedy Cuomo said at a ceremony honoring Darci Frigo, a Brazilian lawyer and land reform advocate who won this year's Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. "Cara, if anyone tries to tell you this is the type of justice your grandpa would embrace, don't you believe it."

Civil libertarians have harshly criticized some of the efforts by the Bush administration to prosecute terrorists. Among the: keeping secret the identities and status of those detained in the Sept. 11 investigation; new rules allowing the monitoring of communications between some detainees and their lawyers; and Mr. Bush's decision to try by military tribunals foreigners charged with acts of terror, a move even supporters acknowledge would mean fewer rights for the accused.

Cuomo said her father "was determined to use the law to bring criminals who threatened our country to justice. But that eagerness was always tempered by his commitment to protecting civil liberties even when it meant letting the accused ... go free."

Critics have said Kennedy was willing to restrict civil liberties if it served his purpose. For instance, he believed in wiretapping and authorized FBI wiretaps on Martin Luther King Jr., whom FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover thought was a communist.

Cuomo is an author and founder of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights. She is married to former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who is seeking his party's nomination for New York governor.

Robert Kennedy was named attorney general by his brother, President John F. Kennedy, and served from 1961-64. He was elected to the Senate from New York and was assassinated in Los Angeles while running for president in 1968.

Tuesday would have been his 76th birthday.