Hubert told me that once he got the nomination, he could state more accurately his true position on the war. Given that Bobby had staked everything on an explicit antiwar candidacy, I did not find this inspiring. The conversation about the vice presidency ended cordially, and I invited him to breakfast.
The months following Bobby's death are a blur in my memory. One day I decided that going back to work would help relieve the emptiness. I got into my car and drove toward Capitol Hill. When the Senate Office Building came into view, I began breathing heavily. I turned the car around and went back home.
When I finally was able to enter the building, I found that I could not concentrate on my Senate work. I would go and visit my father on the Cape for a couple of days, and then I would go sailing. Sometimes I sailed alone. Sometimes I sailed with a friend. Sometimes I sailed for long distances. Sometimes I sailed to Maine.
I surrendered myself to the sea and the wind and the sun and the stars on these voyages. I let my mind drift, when it would, from my sorrows to a semblance of the momentous joy I have always felt at the way a sailboat moves through the water. I love sailing in the day, but there's something special about sailing at night. And on these nights in particular, my grieving was subsumed into a sense of oneness with the sky and the sea. The darkness helped me to feel the movement of the boat, and the movement of the sea, and it helped displace the emptiness inside me with the awareness of direction. An awareness that there is a beginning to the voyage and an end to the voyage, and that this beginning and ending is part of the natural order of things.
A sail from Cape Cod to Maine, with a southwest breeze, is a glorious adventure, and it's a trip that Bobby and I had enjoyed together in years past. About twenty miles from Hyannis, you see a sweep of sand dunes. And as the sun descends, only a few lights appear onshore, and so you head off into the darkness. Yet in the darkness you can see well into the distance, once you have learned where and how to look. The Cape gradually disappears, and the shore lights with it. After a while, new distant lights, small and bright, appear along the shoreline. And then the full darkness descends. Seldom is there another boat in sight.
And that is the truly magical time of sailing, because the North Star appears: the North Star, which has been the guiding star for all seamen through time. The North Star guides you through the evening. Its light is the most definite thing you can see on the surface of the dark water. And so you have the North Star, and the sound and swell of the shifting water. And sometimes the fog will come in and you must go by the compass for a period. But you are always waiting to see the North Star again, because it is the guide to home port; it is the guide to home. And so the voyage becomes all-inclusive; you are enveloped in the totality of it: you are a part of the beginning, you are a part of the end. You are a part of the ship and a part of the sea.
I gazed at the night sky often on those voyages, and thought of Bobby.
PART THREE
On My Own
Ken Regan/Camera 5
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Shock of Silence
1969
I returned to shore--to the Senate, to what was left of my world--consumed with the need to spur myself forward into activity. Devastation about Bobby's death--and with it, all my pent-up grief about Jack--threatened to overtake me. My only defense against giving in to it was to keep active, keep moving, keep churning forward. I feared that despair and darkness might overtake and smother me if I slackened my drive.
On New Year's Eve 1968, three weeks before the inauguration of Richard Nixon as the thirty-seventh president, I announced to Mike Mansfield that I would challenge Russell Long for his position as Senate assistant majority leader. It was a bold move, in terms of Senate tradition, and it surprised a lot of my fellow senators. Not many of them thought I had a chance to unseat the Louisiana icon, and some thought I had no right. I certainly could show no claim to seniority: I was just thirty-six and had been a senator only six years. I held no committee chairmanships.
The Louisiana incumbent whip cut a picturesque figure in the Senate, though hardly as picturesque as that of his towering father, Huey Long, back in the 1930s. As governor of Louisiana and later its junior senator, "the Kingfish" had blazed his way into folklore as a gifted rustic populist with oratorical tactics and presidential ambitions. I liked Russell: as a specialist in tax law with a conservative's antitax positions, he differed in his politics from me; but his racial views were far more moderate than those of his southern colleagues. More often than not, Russell and I would sit next to each other during Democratic Caucus meetings and he'd tell stories. He was witty, a great teller of jokes--one of the most entertaining senators I've known. There was never any hostility between us.
He also knew how to get things done. He had perfected a trick of persuasion that reminded me of Lyndon Johnson: he would lean into you during a discussion, bringing his face in close to yours and draping a heavy arm around your shoulders, pulling you to him against your will. He'd get inside your space, your comfort zone. Senators would find themselves agreeing to whatever he wanted, just to get away. And when he was at the top of his game, he was a master. He'd take four weeks to push one bill through, not letting it be finished until he was finished lining up his votes. He was unique in that way.
But Long, who'd first been elected to the Senate in 1948, was running out of gas. He was beginning to be more interested in pursuing his oil interests than in attending to the duties of the whip. I sensed that he was vulnerable. I made up my mind before Christmas that I would make the challenge, and on January 3, I ousted Long as whip by a vote of thirty-one to twenty-six.
I continued to drive myself as hard as I could. But sometimes things happened that made me realize that my deepest fears were closer to the surface than I wanted to believe.
As I walked in a St. Patrick's Day parade in Lawrence in March 1969, a burst of popping firecrackers caused me to freeze in my tracks and prepare to dive to the pavement. I stayed upright by an act of will. Years later, on another occasion, I was enjoying a walk in the sunshine near the Capitol with Tom Rollins--then my chief of staff--when a car backfired down the street. Tom recalls that I was suddenly nowhere to be seen. Turning around, he saw me flattened on the pavement. "You never know," Tom recalls me saying. His memory is probably true.
Even now, I'm startled by sudden noises. I flinch at twenty-one-gun salutes at Arlington to honor the fallen in Iraq. My reaction is subconscious--I know I'm not in danger--but it still cuts through me.
In the months and years after Bobby's death, I tried to stay ahead of the darkness. I drove my car at high speeds; I drove myself in the Senate; I drove my staff; I sometimes drove my capacity for liquor to the limit. I might well have driven Joan deeper into her anguish, but the sad truth is that she needed no help from me. Bobby's assassination had devastated her.
We suffered together. And we suffered apart.
I generally managed to keep my public duties and my private anguish separated. Whatever excesses I invented to anesthetize myself, I could almost always put them aside in my role as senator. Almost, but not always.
Among my subcommittee chairmanships was Indian Education. The previous chairman had been Bobby; I'd taken it over after his death. On April 8, 1969, I led a delegation to Anchorage for visits to schools in Eskimo and Indian villages. The other members included Senator Walter Mondale, four other Republican senators, and one GOP representative. The trip was marred at the outset by political tension: after a long day of touring remote villages with newsmen and photographers in tow, three of the Republicans decided that I was exploiting the event for publicity and with great fanfare pulled out of the visit and returned to Washington. Mondale, Senator Ted Stevens, and Congressman Howard Pollock--the latter two of Alaska--and I continued our investigation, and in fact we were later able to pass legislation that improved conditions for the schoolchildren.
The aurora borealis, the northern lights, burned brightly while we were in Alaska. The
lights burned especially bright one night during a side visit by Ted Stevens and myself, via a small airplane, to a locale so ancient and so remote as to almost seem suspended in time: Arctic Village, a tribal settlement of fewer than two hundred people and more than forty-five hundred years old. It lay, and still lies, in the lonely far north tundra of the Yukon.
The only landing strip lay several hundred yards from the hamlet, and so Senator Stevens and I, accompanied by some reporters and guides, traveled to it by dogsleds from the plane. We inspected the pitiful facilities, talked to people, made notes on what had to be done, and began our trek back to the airplane. Not far outside the village, I spotted something illuminated dimly by those green and red flashes of light from the heavens. What I saw made me halt my dogsled, disembark, and walk down a path that cut through a nearby woods. I had spotted a child, shivering in the cold, with no shoes and no bottom to his clothing. I unzipped my parka, lifted this little fellow, and tucked him inside against my chest. I could feel his icy skin begin to grow warm as I set out, with Ted Stevens, in search of his mother. We found her, in an igloo in that hamlet. She hadn't realized that her toddler had wandered off.
On the homeward flight to Seattle, I drank too much in an effort to numb myself. The accounts that eventually surfaced, of my resulting rowdiness and leading everyone in childish chants of "Eskimo power!" were on target. Someone later quoted me as saying, in the course of one of those legs, that if I were to run for president, "They're going to shoot my ass off the way they shot off Bobby's."
My family, especially my children, provided hope and balance in those hard months. I focused on the responsibility that now had fallen to me, at age thirty-seven. My father would remain our paterfamilias for as long as he drew breath, but the family now looked to me for guidance and leadership in a new way.
I accepted my new role, insisted on it, and discharged its duties as though Dad's blue eyes were still watching me from the window of the Cape house. I became closer to the children of my brothers and sisters: those of Jack and Jackie, Bobby and Ethel, Peter and Pat Lawford, Sarge and Eunice Shriver, Steve and Jean Smith, Joan and myself; and, later, Caroline and Curran, Vicki's daughter and son. Thirty-two total, just from that group alone. I wanted to do for them what my family had done for me when I was young; what all the Kennedys always did for one another: cherish them, look out for them, show them hope and joy and the delights and miracles of this world.
Memories of how I'd received these gifts came flooding back to me. I recalled the way my parents made the household and the dinner table places of inclusion and learning; the dolls and soldiers that Dad brought home from his travels; the endless larking competitions on the lawn and by the shore and out in the open waters of Nantucket Sound; the way we'd joke as children that none of us would marry because we were having such a good time with one another. I recalled those walking tours with Mother around Boston to see Milk Street and the Common and Paul Revere's home, and the trips with her to Plymouth, to Walden Pond--excursions that Honey Fitz had led for his eldest daughter Rose at the twentieth century's turn; excursions he later led for me.
I recalled how Jack and Bobby, who were altar boys, trained me to be an altar boy--and how that training tightened the fraternal bonds among us.
I recalled watching Jack as he used to take the hand of his small son John and lead the boy to the shore in front of the Cape house; watching the two of them bend over an elegant miniature sailboat, a gift of the Italian government, I think. How Jack would actually trim the little boat's sails and rig its steering.
Then memories came rolling in: all of Bobby's children filling the sunlit waters offshore with swimming and sailing, their cries of excitement floating along in the wind, their father splashing among them.
And I knew that my role now was to ensure a continuum in this beautiful process, this precious tradition of the Kennedy family, regathering itself, replenishing its young with knowledge and love.
And so I became the family uncle. I was counselor, skipper, and mentor to the sailors among them. I organized an annual hiking and camping trip in western Massachusetts, and we kept it going, with a revolving cast, for probably fifteen years. I got a Winnebago and we toured the Massachusetts countryside, the Berkshires, always with a stop in Stockbridge, where we visited Norman Rockwell's studio and the summer studio of Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of Lincoln's figure at the memorial in Washington. Then on to Pittsfield, where we visited Melville's Arrowhead house. Then on again to the Riverside amusement park and its spine-tingling Cyclone roller coaster. As the nephews and nieces grew older, I rented a bus and expanded my itinerary to include the great Civil War battlefields, the ones where Jack had taken me. Over the past fifteen years, the circuit has variously included Manassas, Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Baltimore, Richmond, and Harpers Ferry, among many others.
I traveled constantly, almost compulsively, in the early months of 1969. In mid-May I flew to Los Angeles for a ceremony honoring the great organizer of migrant farmworkers, Cesar Chavez. Cesar had formed a powerful friendship with Bobby. This was my first return to the city since June 1968, and every boulevard, every palm tree took me back to that awful night.
My first impulse had been to decline the invitation. Both Chavez and I would be out in the open, among large crowds, and would be easy targets. But at the last minute I decided the hell with it, boarded a flight, and went.
In my hotel room at Los Angeles, I wrote a letter in longhand to the Los Angeles district attorney, requesting that the life of Bobby's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, be spared. Sirhan was then awaiting sentencing for his act, and the gas chamber appeared to be his fate. I told the presiding judge that Bobby would not approve the taking of a life in retribution for the taking of his own. The sentence, I argued, should be decided with respect for compassion, mercy, and God's gift of life. The next day I had copies of the letter made and sent them to Ethel Kennedy, to our mother, and to Eunice, Pat, and Jean. All of them agreed with me. I mailed the original letter to the judge, Herbert V. Walker, a week or so after returning from Los Angeles.
Walker disregarded the letter and sentenced Sirhan to the chamber. His life was spared by the California Supreme Court. As he sat on death row in 1972, the court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. Sirhan's sentence was changed to life in prison.
Meanwhile, the Vietnam War had just reached its peak of escalation, with 543,400 troops in country at the end of April. The mad futility of that escalation was just then on display once again: a ten-day battle of breathtaking, needless carnage. I took the Senate floor on May 20, the concluding day of the slaughter that came to be known as Hamburger Hill, and gave my outrage full cry. It was "both senseless and irresponsible," I declared, that U.S. Army generals "continue to send our young men to their deaths to capture hills and positions that have no relation to this conflict."
The day of my speech marked the twelfth and final infantry assault upon the lethally fortified Ap Bia Mountain in the jungles near Laos. Our troops inflicted and absorbed heavy casualties. After the American survivors had taken the hill, the generals--as I'd predicted; as they so often had--abandoned the mountain as being "of no strategic value."
In subsequent days, and folding the abandonment of Ap Bia into my argument, I repeated my denunciation of the battle to the New Democratic Coalition in New York and to other groups.
On June 2, Everett Dirksen unleashed a strong and lengthy rebuke to me in the Senate. I was absent from the chamber on that day, delivering a commencement speech in Arizona. Senate protocol requires that a senator notify a colleague if he intends to refer to that colleague by name on the floor, but Dirksen was clearly not in the mood for niceties. He declared that my criticism of the generals "jolted" his estimation of my wisdom and judgment and that I had no doubt undercut troop morale and discipline. Radio Hanoi was already broadcasting my dissent to the North Vietnamese populace. Moreover, battlefield tactical decisions are never the province of "homefront critics"
--they must always be left to the generals.
Given that Dirksen spoke only after a well-publicized meeting with congressional Republicans attended by Nixon himself, it was hard not to conclude that this was part of a consensus strategy to avoid responding to war criticism on its own terms.
The strategy failed. The sacrifices of American boys on Hamburger Hill and in similar battles that week, condemned by me and many others, outraged many citizens. The public outcry led General Creighton Abrams to fundamentally revise the U.S. prosecution of the war from one of massive force against North Vietnamese troops to one of "protective reaction" against attacking troops. The policy of "Vietnamization" soon took hold--in public, at least.
There was an increasing perception in the country that Vietnam was no longer "Johnson's war," it was now "Nixon's war"--a scalding rebuke to a president who'd campaigned on the promise that he had "a secret plan" to end the war. I always doubted Nixon ever had such a plan. But as American casualties mounted in the spring of 1969, he began to improvise secret tactics. One of them was the bombing of presumed enemy supply lines in neighboring Cambodia. This operation did not remain "secret" for very long, as leaks to the press began around the same time as Hamburger Hill. Nixon's outrage over leaks and supposed leaks escalated his impulse toward surveillance: telephone taps, procurement of personal records, and, ultimately, the bugging of the Democratic offices at the new Watergate apartment and office complex in Washington.
Speaking of Watergate, not long after Nixon's inauguration in 1969, I took over the chairmanship of an obscure Senate subcommittee, Administrative Practices and Procedures. I could not have anticipated, at the time, how pivotal this subcommittee was destined to become.
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