True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Bobby

  1968

  My second visit to Vietnam grew out of my conviction that an even greater gap existed between rhetoric and reality there than during my first trip, in 1965.

  I had dispatched a team of advance men to explore the terrain held by U.S. forces--villages, refugee camps, hospitals--and to scout for sources who could take me beyond "official" versions of what was happening. My traveling companion on the flight over was Dr. John M. Levinson, a physician who had spent time in Vietnam studying medical care and health issues.

  We arrived in Saigon on January 1--two days before Senator Eugene McCarthy stunned the Democratic Party by announcing he would enter the New Hampshire primary against Lyndon Johnson as a test of the Vietnam issue. Over the twelve dangerous and heartbreaking days we spent on the ground, I refused to settle for canned pronouncements and packaged tours. When a colonel greeted us with a schedule for a given day, I would demand double or triple the agenda. I made sure we kept on the move, and in one instance, at least, it was that constant motion that kept us alive. We'd been scheduled to have dinner one night in Can Tho at the residence of the heroic young pacifist David Gitelson of the International Volunteer Service, a sort of private version of the Peace Corps. Gitelson, who'd been an honor student at the University of California at Davis, was living like a peasant in Vietnam, teaching modern farming methods to people as he roamed the Delta region. He was just then involved in building a library at Ba The. As the hour approached, I suddenly decided we needed to be somewhere else, and canceled the dinner in favor of breakfast the next morning. A bomb, planted in a car outside the house, exploded at the dinner hour, blowing out the front of the building.

  Gitelson survived. But a month later, he was shot to death by the Vietcong.

  Memories from the trip: We raced at midnight across wild jungle roads in a car driven by John Paul Vann, the civilian adviser, in clandestine search of a notorious mental hospital where the inmates were forced to feed on garbage. We didn't find it.

  A young air controller sobbed as he described his job to me, flying around in a small plane looking for figures in black pajamas so that he could report their positions to fighter pilots. He had no way of knowing whether the figures were Vietcong or peasants.

  I found photographs of Jack on walls of tarpaper shacks in Saigon, and heard shouts of "Ken-uh-dee, Ken-uh-dee" in a refugee cemetery behind a church in the city.

  I met with President Nguyen Van Thieu, as well as U.S. military commander General William C. Westmoreland and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker on the day before departure back home. Their stonewalling of questions and their boilerplate optimism made me wonder whether they were speaking about the same torn nightmare of a country as the one I'd just seen. In response to my queries about refugees, whose festering camps I'd seen myself, they declared that the refugees were being well cared for. To my report that I'd heard of American artillery fire being directed into an area that might have held civilians, Westmoreland assured me that no civilians could possibly be injured or die from indiscriminate U.S. fire. Why not? Because there was no indiscriminate fire. The handbooks forbade it.

  I left Vietnam with one further thought in my mind: I could no longer support this atrocity of a war. I drank a great deal of liquor on the flight home.

  My mood was not improved by a briefing with President Johnson at the White House on January 24, not long after I returned. As the president's white-haired dog Yuki romped on the lap of my aide Dave Burke, covering him with dog hair, I began to outline my observations: that corruption was rampant in the government of the Republic of Vietnam to the extent that it was inhibiting our goals, and that President Thieu of South Vietnam showed no inclination to combat this corruption. The result was that morale among civilian-program workers was suffering. The president broke in to remark that he was aware of the corruption, and yes, it certainly had to be corrected. He asked me for an evaluation of U.S. civilian personnel in Vietnam, and I told him that although some in the mission were long-serving, dedicated, and able, too many others saw their work as a form of adventure and escapism, a chance to break away from their wives and earn some easy money.

  The president mulled this over and suggested that before I continued, Dave and I might like some tea, coffee, or a Fresca. We politely declined. The president persisted and asked Dave, "Aren't you going to have a Fresca with your president?" David said, of course, he would have a Fresca.

  LBJ seemed preoccupied with our soft drink needs as that meeting went on, Burke's especially. Every time Dave found an opening to voice his opinions on Vietnam, Johnson would interrupt to ask whether he would like another Fresca. It finally became clear that the president was trying to keep Dave off balance--and off the topic of Vietnam.

  The president gave me a little more leeway than Burke in speaking my opinions--but not much. After much fencing, I finally was able to turn the topic to how I would suggest reducing the war to more moderate levels, as was my stated wish. I urged him to change our strategy from "search and destroy" (essentially, going out gunning for the enemy) to one of "clear and hold" (securing territory). LBJ told an assistant to write out a memo along those lines. We all want to do the right thing, he observed.

  Finally, Johnson asked me whether I'd seen any progress in the war since my trip in 1965. I formulated as tactful a reply as I was able: perhaps I had seen some, I told him, but I was not sure the measures of progress we were using were in fact related to the real war, the war we should be fighting for the Vietnamese people. Lyndon Johnson thought that over for a moment, and then became philosophical. It is difficult to evaluate the war, he said. You have some progress when you have half a million men and all that equipment, but where and how do you start evaluating true progress? Two times zero is zero, he noted, but two times one-half is one. And that is some progress.

  Then the president leaned toward me. "I believe we are all trying to do the right thing," he said again, and added, "If we flop on this one, then Nixon will be in there, and we don't want that, do we, Ted?"

  On that note, the meeting ended.

  Two days later, in an address before the World Affairs Council in Boston, I abandoned all restraint. The Lowell Sunday Sun, among other papers, printed the text of my remarks, and added the comment, "This speech could mark the beginning of the end of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war."

  I acknowledged the limited optimism I had felt after my 1965 visit, but told my audience, "I am forced to report to you, and to the people of the Commonwealth, that continued optimism cannot be justified... that the objectives we set forth to justify our initial involvement in that conflict, while still defensible, are now less clear and less attainable than they seemed in the past." I praised the bravery and professionalism of the young Americans who were fighting for us. Yet, "I found that the kind of war we are fighting in Vietnam will not gain our long-range objectives; that the pattern of destruction we are creating can only make a workable political future more difficult; and that the government we are supporting has given us no indication, and promises little, that it can win the lasting confidence of its own people."

  This war was unlike the traditional wars the United States had fought, I said. "Our country was not attacked. Our cities were not threatened. We do not seek to overthrow an enemy government, capture ground, or achieve unconditional surrender. We seek only to allow the people a free choice. For these reasons the war is more nebulous, more vague in its ends, than the conflicts of our past... we must be careful in applying the traditional canons of patriotism, or the cliches of the past, in judging this war."

  I pointed out, in reference to America's concern with the spread of communism, that political ideology meant little to the suffering peasants of Vietnam. Their concerns and hopes were not identical to ours. I brought up the question of refugees: "twenty-five percent of that nation's population, all of whom are disaffected, all of whom hold a strong resentment for whatever side tore them away from...
their lives.... I found a great deal of resentment to the United States among these people."

  I spoke of the corruption among Vietnamese officials, and gave examples: the siphoning off of money to aid the refugees, for one.

  "I believe," I told my audience toward the end, "that if we cannot achieve negotiations in the very near future, we should begin immediately to moderate... our activities in South Vietnam to levels... more commensurate with our limited aims." Those aims, I suggested, should be defensive--protecting and holding heavily populated areas--and conditional on demanding and receiving more of a commitment from South Vietnam to defend and govern itself.

  With this speech, I was now on record, along with Bobby, that time and events had outpaced our original mission in Vietnam, and that the war was a perversion of our original ideals.

  On the issue of Vietnam, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with my brother. And yet as I watched his trajectory veer toward a bid for the 1968 presidential nomination, I continued to find myself unable to embrace it wholeheartedly.

  Don't mistake me: I thought that Bobby should be president. And I thought that Bobby could be president. But I believed that 1972 would be a better year to run. If LBJ prevailed in the primaries but lost the election, Bobby would be blamed. But whether LBJ won or lost, I thought that Bobby would be the likely nominee in 1972. He would be the one to bring the party together.

  Bobby was torn by his personal desire to stay out of the race and his growing opposition to the war. Ethel and my sister Jean urged him to commit. Bobby edged toward running, but remained wary. "What bothers me is that I'll be at the mercy of events," he remarked.

  On January 31, less than two weeks after I returned from Vietnam, the Tet Offensive erupted. As Bobby breakfasted with members of the National Press Club in New York and told them he would not oppose Johnson "under any conceivable circumstances," more than eighty thousand North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops broke an announced religiousholiday cease-fire and rose up along a front throughout the South, attacking villages, towns, and cities. The communists eventually paid a terrible price in casualties for this surprise offensive, which had been conceived as an effort to stalemate the war. U.S. forces won the battle, but its initial severity outraged the American public. Coupled with an unrelated attack by North Korea on the U.S. intelligence ship Pueblo a week earlier, Tet spurred the Joint Chiefs of Staff to request more than two hundred thousand new troops.

  Not "under any conceivable circumstances," Bobby had declared at the Press Club. I was glad that the alert Frank Mankiewicz, his press secretary, prevailed on him to change "conceivable" to "foreseeable" for release to the press. In 1968, scarcely anything was foreseeable.

  Nor was Bobby as hardened against running as his declaration made him sound. On my return flight from Vietnam in mid-January, I had stopped over in Hawaii, intending to try and clear my mind in the sun there for two or three days. I was in my hotel room, getting undressed and ready to drop into bed and sleep off my fatigue, when the telephone rang. It was Bobby. "Come on back now," he told me. "We're going to meet out at McLean, either tomorrow or the next day." I climbed into my clothes again, checked out of the hotel, found a plane, and flew back. I felt that I knew exactly what I was going to find out upon my arrival: Robert F. Kennedy would join the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. I'd heard it in his voice on the phone.

  But Bobby was still not ready to commit himself. Not publicly. The meeting at Hickory Hill in McLean turned out to be a discussion of options, strategies, weighing political pluses and minuses. I continued to oppose his entry, but save for Ted Sorensen, I had no allies.

  On February 1, we knew who Bobby's Republican opponent would most likely be. Richard Nixon announced for the nomination. His only criticism of the Vietnam War was that it was not being waged efficiently enough.

  On February 8, Bobby abandoned what was left of his own restraints and ambiguities regarding Vietnam. At a book and author luncheon at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago, where he'd been invited to speak about his forthcoming book, To Seek a Newer World, Bobby unleashed a denunciation of the war, and ensured wide coverage of his remarks by instructing his aides to distribute copies of his talk to the national press corps in Washington. He excoriated all the war's facets, from muddled U.S. policies and prosecution to the corruption of the South Vietnamese regime--a regime that was an American ally "in name only." Declaring to the writers and editors that "it is time for the truth," my brother rebuked any official assurances of progress as "illusory." To the contrary, an American military victory was not in sight and probably would never come. I believe the Tet Offensive caused the last of his reservations to fall away.

  The fissioning dynamics of 1968 now accelerated. On the same day as Bobby's speech, George Wallace of Alabama announced he would run for president as an independent, and a peaceful demonstration by black students at South Carolina State University--they wanted a bowling hall in the town of Orangeburg to be integrated--triggered gunfire by state troopers. Three students were killed and twenty-seven were wounded.

  Bobby remained interested in my opinion on his candidacy. My brother and I had several direct soul-searching talks on the topic, starting with his phone call to Hawaii, summoning me to Hickory Hill. On or about February 13, Bobby asked me what I thought Jack would counsel him to do. I told him I wasn't sure about that, but I knew what our father would have said: Don't do it. As for Jack, he might have cautioned against it as well; but he probably would have made the run himself in similar circumstances.

  National attention whipsawed from campus unrest back to the war again on February 27, when Walter Cronkite, at the end of his CBS newscast, famously editorialized that the war was likely to end in a stalemate.

  The following day, the moderate Republican governor of Michigan, George Romney--who'd converted to a critic of the war after saying he'd been "brainwashed" into supporting it a year earlier--dropped out of the race.

  Lyndon Johnson's incumbency, and the power and prestige that flowed from it, had stood paramount among the strategic reasons for Bobby's hesitation to declare. (During an early strategy meeting, I'd wondered aloud what would happen if Johnson should pull out of the race. No one took the question seriously--myself included.) But on March 12, America woke up to more stunning news about McCarthy: he had come within seven percentage points of upsetting the president in New Hampshire.

  Overnight, Johnson had become beatable. He'd won the balloting, and won it entirely on write-in votes; he'd not even entered the primary. Still, McCarthy's showing, propelled by his antiwar stance and the idealistic college students who canvassed for him, made it clear that the president's worst fears might be realized.

  That afternoon, Bobby taped an interview with Cronkite for airing on the CBS Evening News a few hours later. A group of us were waiting for Bobby at Jean and Steve Smith's house to explore the implications of McCarthy's near-upset on Bobby's prospects. At 7 p.m. we tuned in the news and watched the interview. At the end of it--though my brother still had stopped short of declaring his candidacy--I knew, along with everyone else in the room, and everyone who'd watched the broadcast, where his intentions lay. When Bobby himself arrived at the Smith house and walked into the room, sleeves rolled up and grinning his best sheepish grin, we all stood and gave him a great rousing cheer. None of my misgivings mattered anymore. My brother was running for the presidency, and I intended to do everything in my power for him.

  Historians like to analyze Bobby's decision to run for president almost exclusively in the context of the Vietnam War and his opposition to it. But Bobby's concerns about America extended far beyond the war. He was bothered by the deterioration in our cities: the poverty and decay, and the growth of gun violence. He did not see Eugene McCarthy paying any particular attention to these problems. I am convinced that had McCarthy begun to talk about the cities and put forth plans to restore them, Bobby would not have run. But McCarthy had demonstrated no interest whatever in these issues. And when one
examines the record, one finds that his interest in the war came pretty late as well.

  Nor can one fully understand Bobby's candidacy without recalling his engagement with rural hunger and poverty: his emotional interlude with the near-comatose, starving child that he held in his lap inside a shack in the Mississippi Delta, and his vow as he arose that "I'm going back to Washington to do something about this." (The occasion was a visit to the state by a Senate subcommittee on poverty in March 1967; my brother asked Charles Evers to take him on a tour of the Delta.) There was his visit to California for a meeting with Cesar Chavez, the great farmworker activist, who was then on a hunger strike. There was his chairmanship of the Indian Education Committee, in which he held hearings about boarding school abuses being visited on children on western reservations.

  Even his war concerns went beyond the fighting, and engaged the issues of what the war was doing to American society. The inequities of the draft, for example. My work on the random-selection revisions in the draft was spurred by his criticisms of the status quo. I remember walking into his house in 1966 and him launching into an attack on the way Selective Service worked: how it was disproportionately the poor and the black who were fighting and dying, while the sons of the white middle class took advantage of the education deferment, the marriage deferment, the skill deferments.

  It was not just the war that made Bobby decide to run. It was the war, and how the war was propelling the direction of America, especially the young people, the underprivileged, the underserved, those struggling for their civil rights. It was the inflaming of the cities and the failure to deal with the root causes of the flames. It was the cutting back on appropriations, the underfunding of the Office of Economic Opportunity, for example, because funding for the war took priority. Bobby felt that we were witnessing the deterioration of President Kennedy's legacy. And when people came to Bobby as they did, saying, "You can change this. You can do it. It's possible. It's feasible. We're prepared to help you do it," he felt an obligation to do something.