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By Sara Jerome
In 1974, when my trip to Latin America through the Judiciary Committee was being arranged, we had to go to the chairman, Jim Eastland, the senator from Mississippi, to get that done. He was one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, and Ted Kennedy was one of the more liberal. And Jim Eastland, I'm sure, did not care a whole lot about whether the military regime in Chile was engaged in human rights violations, but Ted Kennedy had to go to him to get it done. I remember I waited outside Eastland's office at the end of the day as Kennedy went in to have a scotch or a bourbon with him. I knew what was going on, but I didn't have to be in there -- I'm sure I would've been a detriment had I been in there. And Kennedy came out with the letter I had drafted with Eastland's signature on it. Kennedy just knew how to make the Senate work.
The cardinal in Santiago, Raúl Silva Henríquez, came to Washington while I was working for Senator Kennedy. This was a time in Chile when there were a lot of human rights violations and torture violations, and he wanted to tell Kennedy to keep the pressure on. But because Kennedy was such a visible leader in favor of the anti-military junta, the cardinal did not want to be seen going to Kennedy's office. It would've been politically explosive for him. Now, at that time, I lived on Capitol Hill. So, at around midmorning one day during his visit, the cardinal arranged to come to my house. Kennedy left his office through the back door and came over to meet him. I still can picture him -- the cardinal. I introduced him to my young son at the time. My wife was a little bit nervous, but not too surprised. She offered him some coffee -- she had prepared coffee. But in Chile they drink a lot of tea, so my wife had to go scurrying off to find some tea. And the meeting never did get exposed for the cardinal.
Working for the senator was a pretty intense kind of thing. We worked very, very, very hard, and he was demanding. If he wasn't satisfied, well, you knew. And he worked -- that's the other thing. No matter what the image was of him, he took home the briefcase and read all the memos and commented on the side. And you'd get the memo back and take it to somebody who could interpret his scribbling. I realized I was there too long when I could interpret it. But it wasn't a case where you had somebody who just signed off. He was very much involved, and worked very hard on the weekends. There was a mad dash to his office every Friday to get the final memo and all the final things into his briefcase for the weekend. And he would go through each of them.
