Kennedy Graham: global citizen

As Kennedy Graham drives away from the Waiheke Island ferry terminal, there’s a tussle with his EV; ‘a petulant adolescent’ ahead applies the brake as Kennedy accelerates. It’s a fitting scenario for a man who has forged a path before others were ready for change.

That path, covering 105 countries, carves into some of the world’s hottest issues: apartheid, nuclear arms, climate change and global security.

Originally, the diplomatic path was not in Kennedy’s sights. His childhood dream was to be an All Blacks halfback; his career plan was accounting. Both had promise, but neither was to pan out. While an undergraduate at the University of Auckland, he lost his best friend. “I stopped playing rugby and began to take life seriously,” he says.

He completed his BCom (accounting) in 1968 but, in a snap decision, veered into political studies, first at Auckland, then Wellington. His interests and aspirations became international, then global.

In 1971, Kennedy wrote his honours thesis ‘New Zealand on Apartheid’. That was a decade before apartheid tensions were boiling over around family dinner tables and rugby sidelines. He was 23, married with kids, studying part time and a year into a secondment with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Kennedy had access to sensitive government and activist group files, and subsequently his thesis wrestled with the Official Secrets Act. It was never published.

By the mid ’80s, Kennedy had completed his masters in international law and diplomacy at Fletcher School, Boston; an internship in the UN secretariat; two Foreign Affairs postings to Canada; and then his doctorate, at Victoria University of Wellington, on the nuclear-weapon-free zone. Back inside the ministry again, he was negotiating the Rarotonga Treaty, the blueprint for a nuclear-free South Pacific. Next, posted to Geneva, he continued diplomatic wrangling.

“I was the manic theorist, writing about global security. New Zealand was the recalcitrant. I was being taken to lunch by the Soviets, never the Americans. Perestroika and glasnost had kicked in,” he recalls.

“I was a fish happily swimming in the diplomatic sea – but that duly came to an end.”

Kennedy says the actions of New Zealand’s public movement protesting nuclear testing, nuclear-armed ships in our harbours, and the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior were “hugely symbolic”. But it was the legal and governance dimension where Kennedy put his efforts: promoting the theoretical rejection of nuclear deterrence. The then-Prime Minister David Lange articulated this at the Oxford Union Debate in 1985 and, days later, at the UN Conference on Disarmament.

It didn’t sit well with our allies. The US and UK were aghast that Denmark might follow New Zealand’s lead. A nuanced but deep change of policy followed. “The rejection of nuclear deterrence was no longer ‘for export’. So, I left.”

After the ministry, Kennedy found his intellectual freedom as secretary-general for Parliamentarians for Global Action (New York), two blocks from the UN. He bounced around the world, meeting heads of state and dignitaries, including Nelson Mandela.

New York was also the scene of his life’s ‘meet cute’, at the 1990 election party held in his Manhattan flat. His brother Doug entered Jim Bolger’s cabinet and Kennedy met Marilyn, his second wife. “We knew that evening. It’s been 35 years of a very happy marriage.”

While in New York and at Cambridge University, he edited a book called The Planetary Interest, which contained contributions from 20 MPs from around the world, including David Lange, and a foreword by Kofi Annan. He was subsequently appointed director of the UN University’s Leadership Academy in Jordan. “Taking the UN oath is one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done: ‘Don’t take instructions from any government, including your own; you are serving humanity’.”

He later served nine years in parliament for the Green Party, focusing on climate change.

Outside of parliament, he founded a global studies institute for New Zealand – a concept he had advocated for nearly two decades earlier. Today, Kennedy, 79, manages the U3A-Waiheke, with six study groups, chairing philosophy. He lunches with his founding class (1952) from Victoria Avenue School and St Kentigern College mates. Then, there’s the book chapter he is writing on the Antarctic Treaty and the 21st-century global order.

“I’ve gone from the national to the global, back to national, and now, for the first time, to communal. It’s all good.”

- Megan Fowlie