the times | Saturday September 5 2020 1GM 47
Wo r l d
30 hours without food or water or get-
ting them out to do their business,” he
said. He flew the dogs in seven hours.
Next week Mr Rork will visit Merced
in central California to collect dogs
bound for Oregon and Seattle. There’s
also a “bunch of golden retrievers being
flown in from China that were rescued
from an Asian dog meat factory and I’m
flying them to their rescue organisa-M
onths after the Second
World War ended a
skinny, bright-eyed
young man with a
megawatt smile
appeared on a magazine cover
beneath the headline: “The New
Generation Offers A Leader”. John F
Kennedy was running for Congress
in Massachusetts.
“The message resonated,” said
Thomas Whalen, a professor at
Boston University and an author of
several books about President
Kennedy. More than 70 years and
three generations later Joe Kennedy
III offered Massachusetts the sameWhat can the Kennedys do for you? Not much these days, say voters
promise of change as he tried to
dislodge Edward Markey, a
74-year-old Democratic senator who
has been in Congress since 1976.
Joe Kennedy III is thin,
lantern-jawed and not yet 40. Yet he
lost the Democratic primary by 11
points, in a state whose constituents
have elected Kennedy after Kennedy.
“Joe Kennedy III ran the same
campaign but the generation he’s
talking about wants nothing to do
with him,” Professor Whalen said.
His defeat appeared to sound the
death knell for a dynasty. Many
thought it natural. “It’s hard to have
a dynasty of any kind... because
people recede into mediocrity,”
Laurence Leamer, who wrote a
trilogy of books on the family, said.
Others had seen Joe Kennedy III
as the fellow who could keep the
show on the road. Apparently these
people included his grandmother
Ethel, the widow of Bobby Kennedy.
“I think she thinks that Joe Kennedy
III was the most like her belovedBobby Kennedy of anybody,” said
Larry Tye, who interviewed her for
his book Bobby Kennedy: the
Making of a Liberal Icon. “He has
Bobby Kennedy’s chutzpah but also
his sense of compassion.”
Bobby Kennedy and his brother
bore the weight of expectation,
obliged to fulfil or confound the
aspirations of their father, the
financier and US ambassador.
“The most intimidating of all
the Kennedys was Papa Joe
Kennedy,” Tye said.
John F Kennedy, his favourite
for high office, seemed a
playboy during his early
years in Washington.
The family story of
Irish immigrants who
came good seemed tooverride the fact of his wealth and
privilege. In 1952, as the influence of
Irish-Americans was beginning to
tell at the ballot box, he beat Henry
Cabot Lodge, scion of an old
Protestant dynasty, in a Senate race
in Massachusetts. His campaign, run
by Bobby, courted women with tea
parties featuring his sprawling
family. The Saturday Evening Post
said that “every woman who
met Kennedy wanted to either
mother him or marry him”.
Massachusetts has been
Kennedy turf ever since. Tye saw
in Joe Kennedy III a young man
who embodied the family’s
public spirit but also one
who had been shielded to
some extent from the
pressures of his surname
by his divorced mother.
He served in the Peace
Corps, attended Harvard
Law School and was a
prosecutor on Cape Cod
before joining the House ofRepresentatives. “I think he had the
potential to be not just the best of
his generation but the best we had
ever seen,” Tye said.
Against Mr Markey he seemed to
struggle with the baggage. The
senator had a long history of
legislative victories and backing
from the liberal heroes Elizabeth
Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez. In one jazzy advert Mr
Markey turned JFK’s famous slogan
on its head. “With all due respect,
it’s time to start asking what your
country can do for you,” he said.
In response Mr Kennedy began to
draw on his heritage. “I never got to
meet my grandfather,” he said in a
speech recalling Bobby Kennedy’s
efforts to ease segregation in the
1960s, trying to link it to his own
activism. But he never quite
managed to explain to voters “how I
combine the best of my family
legacy and here’s why I want to be
your senator”, Mr Tye said. Being a
Kennedy was no longer enough.Will
Pavia
new york
The dynasty that
put John F Kennedy
in the White House
may be entering its
last daysWhen Peter Rork’s wife died suddenly
in 2012 he quit his job as an orthopaedic
surgeon and sank into despair. “I was a
broken man,” he said. “I just retreated
for months. And then someone reached
out to me about doing a rescue flight”.
Mr Rork, 67, had no enthusiasm for
anything, but his late wife, Meg, had
been passionate about animal welfare
and he had been flying planes since his
youth. He knew a bit about the plight of
America’s vast shelter animal popula-
tion. So he thought: “We’ll try it.”
Eight years later Mr Rork and the
organisation he co-founded have saved
the lives of nearly 16,000 dogs and cats
by flying them around the country from
shelters that use euthaniasia as a popu-
lation control tool, even on healthy
animals, to places that don’t.
“Once they’re on the plane, these
dogs have the golden ticket. They’re
going to live out a good life,” he said.
About 1.5 million shelter animals are
killed each year in the United States, ac-
cording to the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Part
of the problem is that they are often
housed far from potential adopters.
Mr Rork’s charity, Dog is My Copilot,
addresses this by transporting crates of
unwanted pets and strays from areas
with overcrowded shelters and high eu-
thanasia rates, primarily in California,
Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, to res-
cue groups in the Rocky Mountain and
Pacific northwest states.
After the first three
years the project out-
grew the old four-
seater plane given to
Mr Rork by his father.
The group bought a
Cessna 208B Grand Car-
avan plane, known as
the Big Dog, which is
so large that “you
could put a bowling
alley in the back of
that thing”. From fly-
ing 1,000 animals a
year they were now up
to 4,000.
Until last year Mr Rork
piloted every flight himself.
On Thursday he picked up95 dogs in
Laredo, Texas,
and flew them to
Jackson, his home
city in Wyoming.
“That would be
26 hours in a car
without any stops.
You don’t want to
crate a dog for up toMurder of
white farming
couple stokes
crime fears
South Africa
Jane Flanagan Cape TownA farming couple were shot dead along
with their dog as it tried to protect them
in an apparently random ambush at
their home in South Africa.
The murder of Glen Rafferty, 63 and
his 60-year-old wife Vida in KwaZulu-
Natal province stoked fears in white
rural communities of rising violence.
The attacks were described by family
and friends as senseless since the killers
fled only with a car that they later aban-
doned. They left cash and keys to a safe
untouched.
Tamsyn Rafferty described her
parents-in-law as progressives who
spoke the regional Zulu language flu-
ently. “It didn’t matter if you were white
or black to them,” she said. “They were
the cornerstones of their community.”
This week the opposition Democrat-
ic Alliance party led a parliamentary
debate on the scourge of rural crime. It
said that it had recorded 21 murders and
147 attacks in the past four months, a
considerable rise in violence since the
easing of lockdown measures.
The MP Dianne Kohler Barnard
called for a summit on farm attacks,
claiming farmers were leaving the
country “in droves”.
Hours before the couple were killed
with their Australian cattle dog, 40,000
motorcyclists converged on Pretoria to
demand greater action. Similar events
took place in Cape Town and Durban.
Bheki Cele, the police minister,
visited the couple’s property in Newcas-
tle to appeal for calm and reassure the
community his officers had “strong
leads” to follow.
Violent rural crime is a fraught issue
in South Africa. Attacks that lack an
obvious motive or include gratuitous
acts of violence towards white victims
are often cited by right-wing groups as
evidence of a “white genocide” that is
being ignored by the government.
The latest figures record 49 murders
in 46 incidents on farms and smallhold-
ings in the 12 months to March, two
more than the previous period but few-
er than the 66 murders recorded in the
2016-17 period. With an average of 58
murders a day, analysts say there is no
evidence that rural, white people are
disproportionately affected.They rescued me, says pilot who
saved lives of 16,000 cats and dogs
United States
Ben Hoyle Los Angelestions”, he said. “It’s never ending.” The
rewards are worth it, however. “I
wouldn’t wish grief [from] the loss of a
partner on anybody, not even the
people who don’t spay and neuter their
animals,” he said. “People say ‘you’re
rescuing the dogs, what a great thing’
and I’m thinking, ‘You have no idea.’ If
it weren’t for them I don’t know what I’d
be doing. It absolutely rescued me.”BEN DANN/DOG IS MY COPILOTPeter Rork has saved 16,000 dogs and cats by flying them to shelters that do not use euthanasia