Our organizational meetings shifted in tone from "further discussion" to "campaign mode." We assigned key people to campaign tasks--organizing volunteers, arranging an itinerary.
By the middle of March, Bobby was perhaps 90 percent resolved that he would run, but he held back, pending one final consultation with Eugene McCarthy, whose viability could not be dismissed. I flew to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to meet with the senator and deliver two messages from my brother. The first was that if McCarthy would pledge to speak out as forcefully about the crises in our cities and about urban policies in general as he was speaking out against the war, Bobby would stay out of the race. The second was that if McCarthy refused to make such a pledge, Bobby would listen to any ideas about a joint effort to defeat Johnson. If the Wisconsin senator spurned both options, Bobby would get in.
In the interest of discretion, I flew with a small group of aides to Green Bay at night and, instead of risking detection by taking an elevator, trudged up the back stairs of the Northland Hotel, where Gene and Abigail McCarthy were staying. I should have saved myself the climb. At the eighth floor, stationed in the stairwell with his cameraman, hovered the CBS correspondent David Schoumacher, who'd been assigned to travel with McCarthy. He asked me, "What are you doing here?"
Abigail answered my knock. I waited an hour and half for McCarthy to appear. It was a difficult meeting. As soon as he entered the room, it was clear to me that he was completely uninterested in what I had to say. I assume that he had watched my brother's interview with Walter Cronkite, and had a pretty good sense that Bobby was going to get into the race. He certainly got it from me that Bobby was going to get in unless the two of them talked. Gene was still riding the high of New Hampshire and felt he was pretty much in the catbird seat. The meeting was respectful, but I really hadn't expected much from it.
McCarthy had always had a little edge of anger, or perhaps contempt, for the Kennedys. I believe he'd felt himself more Catholic, more liberal, and more intellectual than John Kennedy. I'd maintained a decent relationship with him in the Senate, but there was never any warmth between us.
I said goodbye to McCarthy in the wee hours of Saturday, March 16. At which point McCarthy gave the whole story of our meeting to the waiting David Schoumacher, spinning the thrust of it in his own favor.
On Saturday morning, March 16, 1968, Bobby entered the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building and announced his candidacy for president. He stood in the same spot where our brother Jack had made his own announcement in 1960. "I do not run... to oppose any man, but to propose new policies," Bobby avowed. The divisions in the party and in the country made clear by Senator McCarthy's showing in New Hampshire took the race beyond a mere clash of personalities and made it a test of policies and the nation's moral character. He expressed personal respect for President Johnson and gratitude for LBJ's kindness toward the Kennedy family. But, "I must enter the race," he declared. "The fight is just beginning, and I believe that I can win."
Fifteen days after my brother entered the race, a weary and warhaunted Lyndon Johnson sat down in the White House television studio and delivered a stunning announcement. He began by renewing his calls for peace talks with North Vietnam. He promised a significant unilateral reduction in the bombing. And then he concluded with the words, "I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president."
By that time, Bobby was campaigning with all the energy and clear purpose that the president lacked. Photographs of him amid the crowds are part of the national memory. I still smile when I recall his lightning appearance in Boston the day after his announcement. It was St. Patrick's Day, the occasion of Boston's grandest parade. I was walking, as I did every year, and this time Bobby decided to join me. He arrived while the parade was in progress and walked by himself for a couple of blocks. I spotted him and hurried ahead to join him, but by then he'd noticed that he was getting a great reception. I have a terrific photograph that shows him sort of pushing me away with his right hand. He was saying, "I'm doing fine, Teddy. You don't have to join me. I'll see you later."
At the far end of the parade, in a manner of speaking, lay Indiana. The state now dominated our thinking. Its primary was scheduled for May 7; the filing deadline for candidates was March 28. Should Bobby enter? The risks were high. Indiana was a conservative and pro-war state, despite having elected two antiwar Democratic senators. It was the home to the Ku Klux Klan, a stronghold of the Teamsters, whose membership still resented my brother's investigation of Jimmy Hoffa, and a large conservative agricultural community. Its tough Democratic governor, Roger Branigan, had entered the primary as a stand-in for Johnson. Its two leading newspapers, the Indianapolis Star and News, reflected the anti-Kennedy opinions of their owner, Eugene Pulliam, a wealthy and right-wing Republican from Arizona.
Despite the odds, we decided that we had no alternative but to enter that primary. No one on the campaign seemed to have focused on the fact that Indiana would be the first test after Bobby announced, and that he stood a very good chance of getting licked there. The early polls did not look good. And if Bobby lost right away, before he got into the other states, it would amount to a devastating setback--especially given the small number of presidential primaries back then relative to today.
In April, as my brother opened his Indiana campaign, I helped set up the state, along with several of our friends and Bobby's aides. We were starting with almost nothing. And so we scrambled. We barnstormed the cities and towns as in the old days for Jack in Wisconsin and West Virginia, collecting signatures for Bobby's entry, building an organization from the ground up. We tried to find out the people's impressions of our candidate. We found that Indianans didn't necessarily like Bobby's "super-hot" style. And they didn't like the similar style of some of his advance people who rolled into the state. Bobby softened his approach and smoothed over some of the local feathers that had been ruffled by over eager staffers, but he didn't slow down his pace.
Every evening in Indiana, after his day's round of speaking and appearances, Bobby would sit down at the hotel bar and have a drink with members of the press. They would talk until two in the morning, and only then would he go to bed. After a three-day run with this schedule, he'd be exhausted. Yet he kept it going. Bobby went beyond political "straight talk." He would talk about Albert Camus, and poetry, and literature that inspired him.
These sessions exacted an incredible physical toll on Bobby. Yet the rewards were great. By the end of the campaign, those press people--suspicious at the outset toward this "ruthless," "arrogant" figure--had formed a completely different view of Bobby. Richard Harwood of the Washington Post. Jules Witcover of the Washington Star. Jack Newfield of the Village Voice. Sandy Vanocur of NBC, who interviewed my brother in the early evening of June 4 in Los Angeles, and then reported live throughout that horrible night from the Ambassador Hotel. All of these fine reporters came to see Bobby as he really was.
After my brother's loss, these members of Bobby's press entourage organized themselves into a group that, each year, gives a press award for a high school essay or editorial on the subject of poverty or civil rights (they present awards to professional journalists as well). They hold an annual presentation in Washington, raising the money themselves.
I have another very personal memory of Bobby in Indiana. I was following him up a stairway to his hotel room, after a long day of campaigning. Bobby told me that he was worried about his then twelve-year-old son David, who had been caught throwing rocks at cars. My brother stopped and looked straight at me.
"Teddy," he said, "I want you to know that if I don't make it this time, I am not interested in running again. This all takes too much. I have to be there for David and the other children."
In the early spring of 1968, America found itself in shock from a loss that in and of itself would have marked the year as catastrophic. On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis.
On that same day, Bobby had arrived in Indiana to begin his campaign. He'd kicked it off with an address in Muncie. Then he boarded a flight to Indianapolis for a speech in one of the most troubled African-American neighborhoods in the city, at a children's playground at Seventeenth Street and Broadway. Before his plane left the ground, Pierre Salinger reached my brother by telephone with the news that Dr. King had been shot. Upon his arrival in the city, Bobby learned that King was dead.
Most white political figures would have made any excuse to avoid standing before a black crowd in a ghetto under any circumstances in the summer of 1968. My brother did not hesitate, even when cautioned against it by the Indianapolis mayor. Carrying with him the news of King's assassination, Bobby moved ahead toward a moment that I believe encapsulates his life entire: a moment of conviction, compassion, courage, and eloquence.
Standing hatless on the floor of a flatbed truck under harsh lights on a rainy, windy night, in an enclave of desolation and anger, above a crowd whose reaction could not be predicted, Robert Kennedy broke the news with the directness of a family member: "I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee."
Bobby invited the grieving people before him to make a choice: "You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, with a desire for revenge." Or, he said, "we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love."
He quoted Aeschylus: "'In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'"
And Bobby closed with another invitation, this one offering no options at all, other than hope: "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people."
Upon the news of King's murder, more than a hundred cities across America erupted in rioting and burning. Indianapolis remained calm.
I've always thought in very personal terms of the power of my brother's words that evening. I believe the people of Indianapolis responded to the sincerity of a man whose own life had been touched by such profound loss and grief, by a man who understood.
Sixty-one days later, it was my brother himself who was cut down by an assassin's bullet. Even as I write these words, they still seem almost unreal.
Those sixty-one days were mostly days of sunlight for Bobby; days when tens of thousands of Americans lined the streets of his campaign trail or watched him on television, and came to know him at last in the fullness of his personality, the fullness I'd known and loved since boyhood. He seemed to thrive on his exposure to crowds, although the crammed schedule, the constant travel, and the sheer intensity of it all deepened his exhaustion. As with the reporters in the hotel bar, his contact with the crowds paid dividends. Through his hesitations, his quick banter and self-parodying jokes, his humanity shone through.
He won Indiana on May 7, beating McCarthy by 42 percent of the vote to 27. On the same day he defeated Hubert Humphrey, who'd finally entered the race, in the District of Columbia, 62.5 percent to 37.5. Then on May 14 he won Nebraska. He lost Oregon to McCarthy, who had grown increasingly bitter. He campaigned in South Dakota, which would vote on June 4, and in California, which had its primary on the same day.
California was crucial. I campaigned for Bobby among labor leaders there. McCarthy had stung us in Oregon, but it was Humphrey who led in national delegates. Humphrey was not running in California, where the winner would capture all 172 delegates. Thus, coupled with New York, whose primary was two weeks later, a victory here could give Bobby enormous momentum. We were scraping for every vote we could get.
The signs looked good. My brother's natural constituency--Hispanics, urban blacks, farmworkers--formed a great mass of California voters, and they turned out in throngs for Bobby, cheering his speeches as his train moved up the fertile farmlands of the Central Valley toward Sacramento. He encountered rough spots: a fractious meeting with black militants in Oakland, a spitting incident amid hostile students at San Francisco State College. But on June 1, my brother answered McCarthy's challenge for a televised debate. Nearly half the state's voters watched, and of these, nearly 60 percent thought Bobby had won.
California voters went to the polls on June 4. At a party for campaign workers in San Francisco that evening, I watched the TV networks track Bobby's rising numbers as he came from behind McCarthy en route to a 45 to 42 percent victory. I watched as my brother, with Ethel smiling at his side, received the cheers from his supporters near midnight in the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles. I watched him proclaim America to be "a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country."
And then I left the party and went to my room at the Fairmont Hotel. There, I turned on the television news again.
My mind went black.
Dave Burke was with me. He took care of the details.
A police escort to the airport, a hastily arranged military plane for the flight to Los Angeles, a helicopter ride to Good Samaritan Hospital. John Tunney and John Seigenthaler were there.
We arrived around 3 a.m., just before doctors began their surgery to remove what they could of the three bullets fired by Sirhan Sirhan. Bobby died at 1:44 a.m. the next day, June 6, 1968.
At the funeral mass for Bobby at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan on June 8, after a night of sleeplessness, I managed to deliver these thoughts:
"Love is not an easy feeling to put into words. Nor is loyalty, or trust or joy. But he was all of these. He loved life completely and lived it intensely.
"A few years back, Robert Kennedy wrote some words about his own father and they expressed the way we in his family feel about him. He said of what his father meant to him, 'What it really all adds up to is love--not love as it is described with such facility in popular magazines, but the kind of love that is affection and respect, order, encouragement, and support. Our awareness of this was an incalculable source of strength, and because real love is something unselfish and involves sacrifice and giving, we could not help but profit from it.'
"Beneath it all, he has tried to engender a social conscience. There were wrongs which needed attention. There were people who were poor and who needed help. And we have a responsibility to them and to this country. Through no virtues and accomplishments of our own, we have been fortunate enough to be born in the United States under the most comfortable conditions. We, therefore, have a responsibility to others who are less well off."
I read a brief speech that Bobby had made to the young people of South Africa on their Day of Affirmation in 1966, in which he acknowledged the world's evils--slavery, slaughter, starvation, repression--but then affirmed "that those who live with us are our brothers; that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek--as we do--nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness.... Surely this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something."
And I concluded my own remarks:
"This is the way he lived. My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.
"Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world.
"As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:
"'Some men see things as they are and say why.
"'I dream things that never we
re and say why not.'"
Life, and politics, went on. But not in the same way. Not for me. I was shaken to my core. I was implored to rejoin the political whirlwind less than an hour after Bobby expired. The activist Allard Lowenstein found me on an elevator at the hospital and blurted that I was all the party had left. In subsequent days and weeks, Mayor Daley of Chicago led the voices of those who sought to enlist me as a standard-bearer against Richard Nixon. I told them all no.
I understood very well the stakes of the forthcoming election. I simply could not summon the will.
Hubert Humphrey now dominated Eugene McCarthy in the delegate count, and seemed certain to be the Democratic nominee. The convention was scheduled to begin in Chicago on August 26. Four days before that, Hubert paid an early-morning visit to my house in McLean, and I spent about forty-five minutes with him. We had a warm conversation about my accepting the vice presidential place on the ticket. He understood my personal difficulties, but he wanted me to run with him. If I did, he said, the ticket would win. If I did not, he faced a very difficult uphill fight.
Hubert and I had always had a good relationship, even though he had opposed both Jack and Bobby in presidential primaries. The two of us worked easily together in the Senate. And yet as much as I liked him, I was not prepared to sign on. It was too much, too soon. I was not about to put my family through all this. And anyway, Humphrey had not distanced himself from the war, and I reminded him that a large part of the reason Bobby had decided to run for president was the Vietnam issue. I still felt myself to be a part of this cause that Bobby had created and championed and that had inspired millions of people. It was not necessarily Hubert's cause. If I joined him on the ticket, I would be betraying the whole effort and movement that my brother had stood for--had died for, really. And so in the end it was not even a close decision. I would not stand for vice president.
True Compass: A Memoir Page 28
