For a few moments, I thought I was reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page, not that of the Boston Sunday Globe. The headline of the May 26 piece seemed straightforward enough: “Venezuelan crackdown presents challenge to Citizens Energy Corp., Joe Kennedy II.” The deteriorating human-rights situation and crackdown on opponents by President Nicolas Maduro does, as the Globe points out, pose pronounced questions for Kennedy’s Citizens Energy Corp. because of its long-standing relationship with Venezuelan oil. Under brutal dictator Hugo Chavez, Venezuela provided some 200 million gallons of oil for Kennedy to distribute to Massachusetts residents – generally the elderly and the working poor – in desperate need of help for the fundamental need to stay warm in winter.
While acknowledging the good that “Joe for Oil” has done, the Globe editors quickly shift gears to suggest that Kennedy pressure Venezuela to improve its abysmal human rights record or else “sanction” that nation’s low-cost oil. It appears naïve to imagine that Joe Kennedy’s disapproval could force Maduro to rethink his policies. It is also naïve to suggest that Kennedy simply look elsewhere for oil to help the local poor. In fact, he has tried. He told the Globe: “I have asked every single oil company, and not one of them has given me a gallon to help the poor.” The editors chose to bury that salient point deep in the piece – the sixth paragraph.
Kennedy did not help matters by equivocating: “Is the Venezuelan government worse than the Saudi Arabian government? Is it worse than the Russian government? Don’t be telling me I’m in collusion with the Venezuelan government when they’re the only ones who have showed some willingness to help the poor.”
The Globe ignored that hard truth about Saudi and Russian oil to opine that “it is an embarrassing irony. An impoverished and deteriorating country supplies charity oil to the United States.” Apparently, if Venezuela were a flourishing oil supplier with serial human-rights violations, its “charity” would be more palatable.
Despite where one’s views about Joe Kennedy rest, the words that should most concern the Globe and anyone with a shred of compassion in and around Boston are these, to repeat: “I have asked every single oil company, and not one of them has given me a gallon to help the poor.”
Did Kennedy make a so-called “deal with the devil” with Chavez and now renew it with Maduro? Yes, but would we even be talking about Venezuelan oil for the poor if even one of America’s oil titans or such “friendly” foreign companies as BP had show any pang of corporate conscience? Don’t be fooled by the slick (no pun intended) commercials of BP, Shell, or other petro players. As Kennedy contends, they have not stepped up to help. Fueling such programs as Citizens Energy Corp would prove a literal drop in the bottomless barrel of “Big Oil.” Kennedy asks, they say no.
The Globe editorial is long on condemnation of Venezuela, and rightfully so. The piece’s paucity of condemnation toward American oil producers, however, is puzzling. If Kennedy were to refuse Venezuelan oil on moral grounds, would the Globe’s editorial board find it equally immoral that seniors and families, for whom the low-cost oil has been a lifeline from winter to spring, would be without heat? One wonders, given that the editorial zeroed in on Kennedy and Venezuela – not on the fact that no one would even be mentioning that country’s “charity oil” if American oil companies simply took care of their own. Unlike them, Kennedy is not in it to make a buck.
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Another dismaying story on the Boston Irish scene has been the evolving furor over Boston College’s controversial “Belfast Project.” The short-lived arrest of Gerry Adams for questioning in the murder of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 who was abducted in West Belfast in 1972, cast an even harsher spotlight on the program (according to the IRA, which took responsibility for her killing, they suspected she was an informant). As former Congressman Marty Meehan noted, “He’s [Adams’s] got a real connection to Massachusetts, which makes the fact that all of this came from the tapes at BC somewhat ironic.”
The Monday-morning quarterbacking and demands for answers about the ill-conceived “oral history” project are both predictable and necessary. Peter Weiler, a professor emeritus of history at BC, writes in a letter to the Globe, “To date, no one at the university has accepted responsibility for a project that has badly damaged the school’s reputation and harmed its prized relationship to both Ireland and Northern Ireland. Is nobody going to be held accountable?”
Professor Weiler and his colleagues are correct that accountability in the academic realm is necessary. So, too, however, is accountability beyond Chestnut Hill. As flawed as the project turned out to be, it is a safe bet that its architects’ intention was not to hand the British government and US federal courts and law enforcement a means to use the “oral histories” for questionable and cloudy “cases.” Why were US jurists and agencies so accommodating to British demands that could impact and even do damage to the still-difficult political climate in Northern Ireland? History will be the ultimate judge, and while that is small solace to the McConville family and so many other victims of The Troubles, the truth does have a way of surfacing – without the heavy-handed opportunism surrounding the “surrender” of the BC tapes.