Through all his agonizing over Johnson and the war, there was one high administration official to whom Kennedy remained close—Bob McNamara. It was a relationship that utterly baffled the young firebrands on his staff like Walinsky, who was filled with contempt for the leading intellectual architect of the war, a man the young Kennedy aide felt had sacrificed his conscience in the name of bureaucratic loyalty. As the war steadily escalated and Johnson kept promising there was a light at the end of the tunnel, McNamara grew quietly disenchanted. But he kept sending more troops and expanding the bombing campaign.
Even in McNamara’s final hours in office—as LBJ prepared to shuffle the increasingly tormented defense chief out of the Pentagon to the World Bank—Kennedy held out the hope that he would reject Johnson’s consolation prize and finally break with the president in public over the war. Kennedy knew it would make a major impact on the political establishment if Robert McNamara joined him in opposing the war. Kennedy met with McNamara after his departure from the administration was announced, and Edelman thought his boss even urged the once mighty defense czar to run with him on an antiwar presidential ticket.
But instead, McNamara—ever the company man—went along with what Johnson asked of him, exchanging one powerful Washington post for another. At his farewell press conference, choking back tears, he came to Johnson’s defense. “Many in this room believe Lyndon Johnson is crude, mean, vindictive, scheming, untruthful. Perhaps at times he has shown each of these characteristics. But he is much, much more.”
Walinksy was disgusted. “I mean, the country’s falling apart over a war that he’s pretty much started and has been running all this time—and then all of a sudden, he just walks away from it, without saying another word. Excuse me?” In response, Walinsky wrote a scathing analysis of the Johnson-McNamara relationship, which he suggested had perverse master-slave tones. Titled “Caesar’s Meat,” the essay was avidly circulated within the Kennedy circle, where Ethel was among those who praised its insights. McNamara had a choice, wrote Walinsky. “In a dozen ways, he could have preserved his dignity and his freedom; not just the freedom to speak out on the war, now or later, not just the freedom to join Robert Kennedy if that would be his choice: but his freedom as a man, freedom from manipulation, freedom from the domination of a meaner and pettier man. Instead he chose submission.”
By crushing McNamara’s spirit, Walinsky continued, LBJ was sending a message to Kennedy: “You think to challenge me. Then watch carefully what I am about to do. I will take this man—with all he means, all he is, all his power and ability and character—I will take this man and break him into nothing. I will reach in and tear out his spine, and he will say ‘thank you, sir.’”
Kennedy himself would not hear any criticism of McNamara. When a young speechwriter named Phil Mandelkorn who had just joined the senator’s staff dashed off a memo to Kennedy counseling him to distance himself from McNamara “because history was going to show he is to blame for killing an awful lot of people,” he was promptly told that Kennedy and McNamara were friends and that the senator did not need his unsolicited advice. The staffer who conveyed this message to Mandelkorn—Walinsky—had certainly been told the same thing.
To Bobby, McNamara still carried the aura of those years with Jack. For him, the defense secretary would always be the imposing intellect who stood up to the generals, the man who took the Kennedy brothers’ side during the Cuban Missile Crisis and helped keep a world that was spinning towards oblivion in the safe grasp of their humane logic. After Jack was gone, Bobby wrote McNamara a letter: “Dear Bob, I just want you to know that I don’t want to be in Washington when you are no longer Secretary of Defense or something even higher than that. You are the one that makes the difference for all of us.” Though he knew how poisoned the Johnson-Kennedy relationship was, McNamara continued to socialize with Bobby and his family and shared with him his growing doubts about Vietnam.
But now Bobby was on his own. The former defense chief would not risk his prestige by joining Kennedy’s insurgent campaign. Nonetheless, McNamara would make a lesser gesture on Kennedy’s behalf. Late in Bobby’s campaign, shortly before it came to its violent end, McNamara agreed to appear in a TV endorsement for Kennedy. In the spot, the former defense secretary offered praise for RFK’s cool-headed performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis. “I wasn’t stupid,” McNamara told me, recalling his decision to help Kennedy. “I knew that it would be taken as a political violation of my position at the World Bank. And in fact I later got all kinds of hell at the bank for doing it—there were calls for my resignation and so on. But I went ahead and did it. And thank God I did. It was filmed in early May 1968. And of course he was killed shortly after that. I would have felt awful if I hadn’t done it.”
HE STOOD IN THE ornate, chandeliered caucus room of the Old Senate Office Building on Saturday morning, March 16, 1968—the same room where his brother had announced his quest for the American presidency eight years before. “I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and difficulties of challenging an incumbent president,” declared Robert Kennedy, flanked by the familiar faces of past campaigns. “But these are not ordinary times and this is not an ordinary election. At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to moral leadership of this planet.”
And so began one of the most terrible and most beautiful journeys in American political history—the passion of Robert Kennedy. He saw his race for the presidency in missionary terms; he thought America’s salvation hung in the balance. But there was almost a weary resignation in his decision to finally join the epic battle.
It was the Tet offensive at the end of January 1968 and Senator Eugene McCarthy’s near upset of President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary on March 12 that finally forced Kennedy into the race. The sweeping Viet Cong assault on American strongholds, timed for the country’s lunar new year, dramatically exposed the Johnson administration’s empty promises of imminent victory. And McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in the first Democratic primary exposed the president’s political weakness. With the Johnson White House unalterably wedded to its disastrous course in Vietnam, and another Democratic dissident threatening to steal his antiwar base, Kennedy could no longer sit on the sidelines.
There was no euphoria around RFK’s announcement. He was entering the race late, and by the time he got in, McCarthy had already captured much of the rebellious energy in the party with his youth-driven “children’s crusade” against Johnson. The McCarthy camp bitterly resented the sudden intrusion of their more glamorous rival. The pro-Johnson Democratic Party establishment was also unnerved and enraged by Kennedy’s entry. And the political pundits were deeply skeptical of his motives. As he announced his daunting bid for the highest office, Robert Kennedy seemed more isolated than ever. Even some key Kennedy loyalists, like Dick Goodwin, were missing, after joining the McCarthy campaign in frustration while Bobby had dithered.
And then there was the awful air of danger that hung over his announcement. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential bid was not only politically risky, it was physically perilous. Kennedy knew how many lethal enemies he had, he knew that the men who had plotted his brother’s murder were still at large. He was surprised, after Dallas, by the fact they hadn’t killed him instead of Jack. Since then, he had been the target of numerous death threats.
A few days after RFK’s announcement, Jackie Kennedy took Arthur Schlesinger aside at a party in New York. “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby? The same thing that happened to Jack.” In fact, she pointed out, Bobby aroused more hatred among his enemies than Jack did. “I’ve told Bobby this,” she said, but he had brushed aside her fears.
After watching Kennedy’s announcement speech on a hotel room TV in Portland, Oregon, where he was campaigning for the Republican nomination, Richard Nixon turned off the set and then stared at the blank screen for a long time. Finally he spoke, shaking his head. “We’ve just seen some very terrible forc
es unleashed,” Nixon told the four or five aides in the room. “Something bad is going to come of this.” He gestured toward the screen. “God knows where this is going to lead.”
At a meeting of FBI officials that was held as Kennedy’s campaign got off the ground, Clyde Tolson—Hoover’s longtime intimate and assistant—shocked the group by spitting out his hatred for Bobby. “I hope that someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.”
Kennedy sensed the danger, but he plunged forward with his campaign, unshielded from the crowds’ manic energy and whatever else was coiled and ready to greet him. “Living every day is like Russian roulette,” he told Newfield. He had taken to heart an Emerson maxim, copying it down in his notebook and underlining it: “Do what you are afraid to do.”
Though the political establishment was deeply wary of Kennedy, the crowds that poured into the streets and packed auditoriums to see him as he took his campaign through the Midwest, and out to the West Coast that spring, were frantic in their need to touch him. It was more like religious ecstasy than political celebration. They clawed at him, they tore at his hair and clothes, they even pulled his shoes from his feet. After years of death, of riots and war, they wanted to hope again.
JFK, with his body always tightened against pain, had flinched from the physical hurly burly of campaigning. He did not like to be grabbed and embraced. But Bobby exulted in it. His pain was of a different sort. And it found release in the crush of the crowd. He wore the scratch marks, the split lips, the shredded shirtsleeves like a holy scourge. As he waded into the screaming, shoving melees that inevitably greeted him—into this wounded heart of American democracy—Kennedy sometimes had a stricken look on his face. But he never held himself back from the crowds. He knew that this torrent of popular energy swirling around him was the only force that could overcome the political machinery stacked against him.
His aides were sick with fear about the physical risks he was taking. One day in suburban Sacramento, Kennedy climbed on a ladder inside a shopping mall to address a sprawling, boisterous crowd. His speeches were never stemwinders in the old Boston fashion; they were more halting and reflective. But he knew how to touch emotional chords with his audiences, and that day he touched the hearts of the rambunctious crowd by evoking the personal tragedies of the war. “Which of these brave young men dying in the rice paddies of Vietnam might have written a symphony,” he said in a quiet voice. “Which of them might have written a beautiful poem or might have cured cancer? Which of them might have played in the World Series or given us the gift of laughter from a stage, or helped build a bridge or a university? Which of them might have taught a small child to read? It is our responsibility to let those men live.”
The eloquent speech elicited a long, sustained wave of applause. But afterward, as Kennedy made his way toward the shopping mall exit, the crowd “suddenly became a live and dangerous thing,” in the words of a reporter who was there. Navigating his way through the surging mass of people, Kennedy had to reach down to rescue children who had been toppled to the ground. When he finally made it back to his open convertible and climbed on the trunk, he was almost yanked off the car. Kennedy bodyguard Bill Barry, a former college football star and FBI agent, fell to his knees and locked his strong arms around Bobby’s waist to keep him from being swallowed by the crowd.
Barry was the only protection Kennedy had that day, as he was during most of Bobby’s tumultuous campaign. “I loved him intensely as a human being, and for his qualities,” Barry later said. “I wanted him to be president of the United States for the sake of my children and generations to come. It was not just a professional job with me. It was something my life qualified me for. This would be my juggler’s gift.” The candidate had made it clear to his staff that there were to be no cordons of guards around him, no barriers between him and the crowds. Poor Barry was Kennedy’s only full-time security person. It was a terrible responsibility to put on one man. And it would haunt Barry for the rest of his life.
Kennedy’s closest political confidants told him that Bill Barry was not enough—he needed more protection. Ed Guthman, as usual, was one of them. Taking a break from the Los Angeles Times, he went out to Indiana to observe the primary campaign there for a couple of days. “I was amazed at what I saw, no security at all,” Guthman told me. “I called Bob up and he said, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ Well, I knew what that meant. The next morning, we got up at 6 a.m. and went for a walk in some field behind the motel where they all were staying. And I told him, ‘I was watching last night, Bob—you didn’t have a lot of protection.’ And he said, ‘Aw, I don’t want a lot of cops around.’ I told him, ‘Look, let’s put aside the fact that you have a wife and ten kids, with an eleventh on the way—you’re very important to this country.’ But he wouldn’t do anything.”
In early April 1968, the Kennedy campaign headed for a series of major rallies in Indianapolis to build momentum for the important Indiana primary election. As a Kennedy advance man made preparations for Bobby’s upcoming appearances in the city, federal documents later revealed, he was being spied on by the FBI. On April 3, the FBI official in charge of the local office noted ominously in a memo that “the Kennedy rallies scheduled for April 4 in Indianapolis might be subject to some violence simply to embarrass Senator Kennedy.” The heavily blacked out document—which was obtained by scholar Joseph A. Palermo under the Freedom of Information Act—suggests that the Kennedy campaign was being targeted by the same well-documented FBI dirty tactics that were being used against Martin Luther King’s organization and other activist groups.
But it was a far greater calamity that disrupted Kennedy’s campaign plans in Indianapolis. As his plane landed in the city that evening, the candidate was informed that the Reverend King had died, after being shot through the jaw by a sniper while the civil rights leader was standing on a motel balcony in Memphis. King had gone to Memphis to lead a march of striking black garbage workers, part of his growing campaign to link the race problem with the issue of economic exploitation.
When Kennedy got the news, he was headed for one of the poorest black neighborhoods in Indianapolis, where he was to formally open the state’s Kennedy for President headquarters at an outdoor rally. The chief of police warned him not to go into the ghetto. Fiery riots sparked by King’s murder were already spreading across the country, including in the nation’s capital, where flames lit up the sky just blocks from the Capitol building. But Kennedy insisted on going ahead with his appearance. When he arrived at his destination, it was dark and cold. He made his way through the crowd and climbed onto a flatbed truck illuminated by floodlights that cast a flickering, funereal glow in the blustery wind. It was Kennedy who brought the people the terrible news that night—the crowd expelled a loud moan as if punched in the gut. And it was he who consoled them. He was the only white leader in America they would have allowed to do it.
There was no speech making that night—when an aide rushed up to him beforehand with a sheet of talking points, Kennedy crumpled the notes and stuffed them in his pocket. He talked to them from his heart, softly and slowly, like he was comforting them in their living room after giving them news of a loved one’s death. And they listened quietly in the evening gloom because, as he reminded them, he too had suffered the death of a loved one.
“For those of you who are black and tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.” It was the first time Kennedy had ever invoked the death of his brother in a public speech in the United States. And then he shared with the crowd how he had learned to bear what was unbearable. Quoting the Aeschylus passage he knew by heart, he reminded them what they already knew, that only time would turn their misery into something higher: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget f
alls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” Finally, he urged them not to lash back in anger, but to honor King’s message of peace. “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”
Unlike many other U.S. cities, Indianapolis was not set on fire that night. The crowd listened to him because they knew it was not just more words, that Bobby would continue King’s crusade.
But Kennedy himself knew how impossible his task was, how torn and bleeding the country was. One night after King’s death, Bobby dropped by the Los Angeles home of Pierre Salinger, high atop Coldwater Canyon. At one point during the evening, Salinger’s sixteen-year-old son Stephen found himself alone with Kennedy, and the teenager put one of his favorite songs on the living room stereo to play for Bobby. The song was Simon and Garfunkel’s “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night,” a bitter juxtaposition of jarring news headlines backed by the soothing strains of the Christmas carol. While a radio announcer briskly reports a grim barrage of news—Vietnam, civil rights battles, mass murders, celebrity drug overdoses—the duo sweetly sing that “all is calm, all is bright.” As the song played in the Salinger living room, Kennedy stared silently out the picture window at the twinkling lights in the San Fernando Valley below. “After it was over, Bobby turned around,” said the younger Salinger, recalling the moment many years later. “And his eyes were filled with tears. He didn’t say anything.”
“WE WANT TO KNOW who killed President Kennedy!” a young woman in the crowd screamed. Other students picked up her cry, yelling, “Open the archives!” Bobby tried to ignore them at first, but finally he relented. “Your manners overwhelm me,” he quipped irritably. “Go ahead, ask your question.”
Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) Page 50
