The Passage of Power

by Robert A. Caro

  Seeing the desolation in his wasted face when the smile faded, those closer to him remained uncertain about despair’s defeat. To look into his eyes was to know “the suffering he had endured,” a friend says. Though he was back in the office, his administrative assistant, Seigenthaler, says that “I didn’t have the feeling that he really was part of the world in which he was working. I mean he was doing the job, answering the correspondence.… When I say he was not functional, I don’t mean that he was not able to do what he had to do or that he didn’t know what he was doing.… It was more that he did what he did through that sort of haze of pain that he felt.” Calling on him in his office in February, the columnist Murray Kempton, an old friend, noticed that he hadn’t regained any weight, that his collar was still “a little too large … and his cuffs a little too close to his knuckles, not as though he had wasted but as though he had withdrawn.” The telephone rang, the caller happened to be a friend of Kempton’s, Bobby handed him the phone, and Kempton began to banter and laugh with the friend. Then he glanced over at Robert Kennedy. “The Attorney General was sitting and looking at his hands,” and his face was “a face horribly lonely for a time when it had been part of a community with a place in it for careless laughter.” New lines had been carved into his forehead and around his mouth. There was, suddenly, gray in the mop of ginger hair. “How his face had aged in the years I had known him!” a friend thought. “How do I look?” he asked Seigenthaler. “You look like hell,” Seigenthaler replied. “I can’t sleep. I can’t sleep,” Bobby said. He still, that February, drove at night to his brother’s grave, still wore the talismanic bomber jacket or the tweed overcoat. On St. Patrick’s Day, almost four months after November 22, he would be talking to Mary McGrory, whom, in the old days, he had once picked up and slung, the two of them laughing, over his shoulder. Trying to comfort him, she said, “You’re young and you’re going to be productive and successful.” Suddenly burying his head in her shoulder, he gave a cry of anguish and, she would recall, “burst into tears.” Time may have been blunting—slightly—the pain and desolation; it wasn’t curing it. Time would never cure it. Almost half a century later, when she was the only one of the nine Kennedy siblings still living, the author would ask Jean Kennedy Smith about her brother Bobby and his depression over Jack’s death. “When did he come out of that?” she repeated, and then said, “I don’t think he ever came out of that.”

  SOME EXPLANATIONS FOR GRIEF of such vivid intensity were obvious. The brother who had died was not just a brother, but a brother with whom Robert Kennedy had been so close that they finished each other’s sentences, or communicated without any words at all, in a “perfect,” “almost telepathic” understanding. Strong-willed though Robert Kennedy was, he had at an early age subordinated his own aims and ambitions to his brother’s, had subordinated them, submerged them, completely, investing himself totally in John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s destiny. “Now he is alone,” Kempton wrote. Bobby explained to a reporter “that he had to find a goal for the first time in his life because, for as long as he could remember, he had no goal that was not his brother’s.” Says a friend: “It was almost as if a part of him had died.” Nor, on a less subjective level, was it merely a brother he had lost. In an instant, in the crack of a gunshot, he had lost power, too. “What is different now and what makes me sad is that I see a problem or someone tells me about a problem and I can’t do anything about it,” he told Kempton. “There was this time when if people had something and couldn’t see my brother, they could always see me and I could pick up the phone and call him.… It’s strange to think that you can’t just pick up the phone.”

  Obvious as were these explanations, however, as weeks turned into months without the wound showing any signs of healing, friends began to wonder if there were less obvious ones as well. Seigenthaler was to say that he “sensed in the months after JFK’s assassination that Robert Kennedy seemed haunted, as if he was holding something back.”

  To those searching for other explanations, there may—or may not—have been clues. Though Robert Kennedy’s grief was “understandable,” his biographer Evan Thomas would write, “yet it seemed too overwhelming, so all-consuming.” McCone of the CIA, a close friend, remembered that, when he arrived at Hickory Hill not long after the terrible news, Bobby had asked him whether his agency was connected with the assassination; Bobby was later to say that he had asked McCone, a fellow Catholic, “in a way that he couldn’t lie to me,” and that McCone’s answer had satisfied him that the CIA had not been involved. In 1975, when, during a congressional investigation, the CIA’s assassination plots against Fidel Castro were revealed, McCone, suddenly recalling that question, had “a flash of recognition.” “He had felt at the time that there was something troubling Kennedy that he was not disclosing,” Thomas says. Operation Mongoose was still active on November 22; there had been eight separate CIA-sponsored assassination attempts on Castro’s life since the beginning of 1961. Whether or not Robert Kennedy had been personally involved, did Castro feel he had been—that the Kennedys had been? Did the assassination in Dallas have anything to do with the attempts in Havana? During that 1975 investigation, as he learned more about anti-Castro intrigues, McCone, as Thomas writes, “began to suspect that Kennedy felt personally guilty” for what had happened in Dallas. Friends remembered remarks Kennedy had made not about Cuba but about the target of his other unrelenting campaign. On December 5, Arthur Schlesinger asked Robert “perhaps tactlessly, about Oswald. He said that there could be no serious doubt that he was guilty.” But, he added, there was doubt—“argument” was the word he used—about something else: “whether he did it by himself or as part of a larger plot, whether organized by Castro or by gangsters.” Ben Bradlee remembered President Kennedy, “obviously serious,” telling him once that the Justice Department had discovered that an underworld enforcer had been given a gun fitted with a silencer and sent to Washington to assassinate the attorney general. When, later, the publicity-hunting New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison claimed to have discovered that the Dallas shootings—the two shootings—were part of an elaborate conspiracy, Kennedy asked his press secretary, Frank Mankiewicz, if he thought Garrison “had anything.” “No, but I think there is something,” Mankiewicz replied. “So do I,” Bobby said.

  Although he may, as Thomas says, have been “worried that his own aggressive pursuit of evil men had brought evil upon his own house,” Robert Kennedy never went beyond such cryptic remarks, never told the Warren Commission of his suspicions about mobsters or Cuban exiles, never, in public, cast doubt on the single-gunman theory, never tried to have a more thorough investigation undertaken. “He never quieted his own doubts,” Thomas writes. Though his “restless mind continued to torment him, he [was unwilling] to go where the facts might lead.” He never pursued the question of who, or why. He “never really wanted any investigation,” Katzenbach says. He just wanted to close the book. He “wondered,” Schlesinger recorded in his journal after a talk with Robert Kennedy in 1966, “how long he could continue to avoid comment on the [Warren Commission] report. It is evident that he believes that it was a poor job and will not endorse it, but that he is unwilling to criticize it and thereby reopen the whole tragic business.”

  Such “clues” may, however, be clues to nothing at all. “I cannot say what his essential feeling was,” Schlesinger finally had to confess—and neither, perhaps, can anyone else. No one knows whether there are explanations for Robert Kennedy’s grief beyond the obvious ones. Half a century after John F. Kennedy’s death there is still speculation among his brother’s intimates about whether he was aware of any hard fact that might indicate that his crusades against the Cuban dictator or the underworld (or the Teamsters’ boss) had backfired against his brother, about whether his grief was intensified by a sense of responsibility, even of guilt, about his brother’s death. The fact that this speculation has never stopped is testimony not to any hard fact about his grief but rather to its unusual
depth and duration, and to its effect on the man so many of them worshiped. For those who knew Robert Francis Kennedy well, the men and women who spent a lot of time with him, do not feel that he ever again became “his old self.” Interview these men and women over and over, and one hears, over and over, the same phrase: “He changed.”

  EVEN TO DATE the change in Kennedy to the assassination may be misleading. It had been during the Cuban Missile Crisis a year earlier that the men sitting around the Cabinet table had seen the once “simplistic” Robert Kennedy behave “quite differently.” But now, after the assassination, the evolution from Kennedy’s old Manichean “black and white” view of life became, suddenly, much more noticeable. “It’s an impressive thing now how well he grasps the gray areas,” an old ally said. When, not long into the Johnson Administration, four Cuban fishing boats were seized just two miles off the Florida Keys, hawks in a National Security Council meeting wanted Johnson to view the incursion as a “test” of the new President, one that must be met by a show of force. Bobby advised viewing it instead as a mistake, “like a speeding, parking ticket … just tell them to get out of there and go home … if you wanted to fine them a couple of hundred bucks, fine them, but the idea of locking them up and creating a major crisis about it was foolish.” (The fishermen were fined and sent home.)

  In other respects, too, the “change” was more the continuation of an evolution.

  The hints that there had always existed, beneath the rudeness, the anger, the belligerence, the “mean streak,” the cruel streak; beneath the bottle over a student’s head in the Cambridge bar, and the abandonment of a friend on a boat he couldn’t sail—the hints that there had always been very different qualities in Robert Kennedy had always been just that: hints. Although vanden Heuvel, who went to work for him in 1955, says, “There was always something very vulnerable about Bobby,” before November 22 there had been few signs of an awareness in Robert Kennedy that he himself might not be immune to the storms and terrors of life. Shielded by his father’s wealth and calloused by his father’s philosophy, and thrust at an early age into the roles of prosecutor and political campaign manager, he had lived a professional life more aptly described by the detested adjective “ruthless” than by the one vanden Heuvel chooses. If there was an awareness within him of, or any empathy for, the vulnerability of less protected human beings to the storms and terrors, the signs he displayed of it—tenderness, gentleness—had mostly seemed restricted to members of his family and to children. But now, following his brother’s assassination, the hints began to become broader—in scenes that men and women who witnessed them never forgot.

  About a month after the assassination, he attended the annual Christmas party at a Washington orphanage. Peter Maas, one of his journalist friends, had walked over from Justice with him.

  “The moment he walked into the room [at the orphanage], all these little children—screaming and playing—there was just suddenly silence,” Maas recalls. “Bob stepped into the middle of the room, and just then, a little black boy,” six or seven years old, “suddenly darted forward and stopped in front of him, and said, ‘Your brother’s dead! Your brother’s dead!’ ”

  The words “knifed to the hearts” of the adults in the room. “You could hear a pin drop,” Maas says. Some of the adults turned away. “There wasn’t any place in the world any of us wouldn’t have rather been than in that room,” he says. “The little boy knew he had done something wrong, but he didn’t know what, so he started to cry.” Were there any words that could be said to him? “You wouldn’t have thought so,” Maas says. But then Robert Kennedy, picking him up “in kind of one motion,” and holding him close, said, “ ‘That’s all right. I have another brother.’ ”

  There were other hints.

  Appearing at the dedication of a Catholic home for the aged in Kansas City, Bobby moved through the wards followed by a throng of television cameras and reporters. Feeling they had enough pictures and quotes, all of them, with the exception of Ben Bradlee then of Newsweek, had left before he walked upstairs to a ward for the terminally ill. “He went from bed to bed, rubbing their hands, touching elbows, putting his head to their foreheads, comforting,” Bradlee was to recount. Then he sat down “alone at the bedside of a woman whose eyes were tight shut, whose death rattle was the only sign [of] life,” and for close to an hour “I watched with tears in my eyes as the ‘ruthless’ Bobby Kennedy stroked this unknown woman’s hand, and spoke to her in a near whisper.”

  The gentleness and tenderness, the vulnerability, had always been present in Robert Kennedy, and yet had been subordinated to other, conflicting qualities, and had been hidden—“his most tenaciously maintained secret.” But now he had had to look at that face that had once been so vibrant and charming but on which “not a good job” had been done—how could he not have learned more about vulnerability, realized that no one was invulnerable? How could he not identify more deeply than before with the injured, the wounded, of the world, after feeling himself such terrible pain? And, in a way, powerful though he still was, with the powerless of the world as well? His power now, though still considerable, was nothing beside his former power—much of that had vanished in an instant, in the moment he picked up the phone that day at Hickory Hill and heard J. Edgar Hoover’s voice. He was still attorney general, he noted. “I have influence … but the influence is just infinitesimal compared to the influence I had before.” After his return from Aspen in January, the deep wellsprings of compassion in Robert Kennedy, always present but heretofore only intermittently visible, began to rise to the surface in the objectives he pursued in government.

  Some of his old objectives, ends to which he had devoted years of obsessive pursuit, seemed to interest him not at all. In March, a harpoon would sink into Jimmy Hoffa at last; found guilty of conspiring to fix a jury, the Teamster boss received an eight-year sentence. Bobby sat silent, melancholy, at the “Get Hoffa” team’s celebration. Ken O’Donnell felt he understood. “There’s nothing to celebrate,” he said. “He had [had] enough tragedy of his own now.” Several members of the team felt that he was, one says, “unhappy” that the Teamster boss had received such a long jail term. “He didn’t like the idea of eight years,” another says. From time to time thereafter, he would ask, “How’s Jimmy doing?” Otherwise, “he had lost all interest in Hoffa,” Murray Kempton was to say. “I never heard him say anything about Hoffa that really indicated much more than boredom with the subject in the last years of his life.” The same was true of the Mafia. When the telephone rang at Hickory Hill that day, he had just been planning offensives against the underworld with District Attorney Morgenthau. “I saw him often after that, but he never mentioned organized crime to me again,” Morgenthau says. Those intent on finding clues speculate that the subjects of Hoffa and the underworld were avoided because of an unwillingness “to go where the facts might lead,” but Kennedy himself had a simpler explanation: “I’m tired of chasing people.”

  Even before the assassination, he had begun to take a more active role in the pursuit of social justice rather than of criminals, and it was to social problems, such as juvenile delinquency, that he turned now.

  In part, he couched his interest in terms of his brother’s legacy, of programs begun but not fulfilled because time had been cut short. Talking in his office with Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Goodwin that December, he explained why he wanted them to stay in their jobs. “What’s important is what we were trying to do for this country. The thing is we worked hard to get where we are, and we can’t let it all go to waste. My brother barely had a chance to get started—and there is so much now to be done—for the Negroes and the unemployed and school kids and everyone else who is not getting a decent break in our society. This is what counts. The new fellow doesn’t get this. He knows all about politics and nothing about human beings.… A lot of people in this town … didn’t come here just to work for John Kennedy, an individual, but for ideas, things we wanted to do.… I
don’t think people should run off.” The power of the “Kennedy wing” of the party, he said, “will last for just eleven months”—until the election. Until that time, Johnson would need its support to win reelection. “After November 5th, we’ll all be dead.” But until November 5, he said, they would have enough power so that “when I talk to him, I am ready to be tough about what we must have” in return for that support.

  His brother’s programs would certainly have passed if he had lived: if they weren’t passed during the remaining years of his first term, had he not been killed, they would certainly be passed during his second term. That was the mantra Bobby Kennedy repeated to his brother’s men; that was the mantra they would repeat, in oral histories and interviews and speeches, as long as they lived. That was the mantra they would repeat in books—memoirs, biographies, scores of books. Those who wrote the books that originally influenced history, that set the template for the image of John F. Kennedy that has endured, would be reinforcing it in the books they wrote more than forty-five years later.