At a dinner party in New York a few days after the announcement, Jacqueline Kennedy drew Schlesinger aside. “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?” He said no. She said, “The same thing that happened to Jack. … There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack. … I’ve told Bobby this, but he isn’t fatalistic, like me.” Romain Gary, the French writer, said to a startled Pierre Salinger, “You know, of course, that your guy will be killed.” Bobby was so uninterested in assassination that he could not get the name of his brother’s assassin straight, calling him “Harvey Lee Oswald, whatever his name is.”
Indiana was conservative, hawkish, and Republican, expected to go for Nixon in November. It had been a Ku Klux Klan stronghold and the white majority had little interest in blacks. The leading newspaper, the Indianapolis Star, was extremely right-wing and bashed Kennedy. Governor Roger Branigan was a stand-in for Johnson and brought the entire party establishment to Humphrey. The AFL-CIO, but not the UAW, moved with the governor. O’Brien thought that Bobby should not have entered in Indiana, but came on board too late to prevent it.
Nevertheless, Kennedy ran a strong campaign. He fought hard for the Democratic enclaves—the ethnic pockets in the north, Evansville in the south, the black communities, and college students. In Indiana’s heart, Booth Tarkington’s small towns, he trimmed his message to stress law and order, dislike for welfare handouts, and opposition to unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam. He barnstormed by rail on a resuscitated Wabash Cannonball. Kennedy carried the primary—42 percent of the vote to 31 for Branigan and 27 for McCarthy. He did surprisingly well in the rural counties. McCarthy seemed to have lost his way in Indiana.
It was a trial run for Nebraska—rural, conservative, very few unionized workers or blacks, Republican. Kennedy did not even want to try, but Sorensen, a cornhusker himself, insisted that he enter and his brother helped set up an organization. Bobby loved the farm families and hit it off with them immediately. In Beatrice the mayor presented him with a deed for an inch of land. Kennedy promised that, if he lost Nebraska, he would settle in Beatrice. “And I’ll bring Ethel and all 11 children.” (He had only 10; Ethel was expecting.) His solution to the farm problem: buying 26 bottles of milk a day for his kids. Humphrey contested Nebraska, but McCarthy moved early to the West Coast. The tally: Kennedy 52 percent, McCarthy 31, Johnson 5.6, Humphrey 8.4 (write-ins), others 3.5.
Oregon was not Kennedy country. Oregonians were exceptionally self-contained. In the other 49, if you asked someone where he planned to vacation, he would name another state. In Oregon he picked Oregon. They were also well-educated and extremely independent. Thus, they were hazy about national politics and national leaders. There were almost no blacks or Chicanos in the state. The Teamsters was the dominant union and its members remembered Bobby Kennedy as the ruthless prosecutor who put Jimmy Hoffa in jail. The war was probably most unpopular in Oregon. Democratic Senator Wayne Morse and Republican Senator Mark Hatfield were stalwart peaceniks. Gene McCarthy owned the Vietnam issue and Oregonians liked his relaxed style.
Kennedy, in fact, had trouble drawing a crowd. Barnstorming by train, the Southern Pacific Beaver Special, through the Willamette Valley from Portland to Eugene produced only a modest improvement. While he was eager, there were not enough hands to shake. He simply could not reach the urban centers. Results: McCarthy 45 percent, Kennedy 39, Johnson 12, Humphrey 4. This was the first electoral defeat any of the Kennedy brothers had ever suffered. Kennedy learned that McCarthy had the young activists locked up.
Everything turned on California. If Kennedy could carry the Golden State’s 174 votes with 190 from his own New York, he would have 28 percent of the 1,312 needed for nomination. Kennedy thought he must have an absolute majority, an extremely difficult goal in a three-man race. Attorney General Tom Lynch headed an administration slate, that is, for Humphrey. But California was Kennedy country, millions of Mexican-Americans, blacks, low-paid and unemployed workers, and students, most of them not politically active. Kennedy said McCarthy got the A students and he had a chance with the rest. The big urban centers in the Bay Area, Los Angeles County, and San Diego were magnets for a charismatic politician campaigning in the streets, often in minority areas.
Kennedy had a strong organization and a number of important local figures, notably Jesse Unruh and Cesar Chavez. But this enormous state demanded a massive and expensive television campaign. Earlier McCarthy had challenged Kennedy to debate and was rejected. Now Kennedy needed the exposure and issued the challenge himself. McCarthy, even more in need of recognition, grabbed the invitation.
The debate was held on the Saturday before the primary in San Francisco with three reporters posing the questions. For most viewers neither candidate landed a heavy blow and the affair was a wash. In the last days Kennedy whipped himself into a frenzy of campaigning almost to the edge of collapse.
On Monday night the Kennedy family took over the sumptuous Malibu beach house of Hollywood director John Frankenheimer. On election day Kennedy slept late and then swam in the Pacific and played with his kids on the beach. On election night Frankenheimer drove them to the Royal Suite of the Ambassador Hotel. The polls closed at 8:00. It turned into something of a cliffhanger and it was late before the decisive results were in: Kennedy won, not by a majority, but by 46 percent to McCarthy’s 42; Lynch took the rest.
As midnight approached the huge crowd in the Embassy Room became restive and demanded to see their man. At this time McCarthy had not conceded, but Kennedy’s handlers were sure that he had won. At 11:45 he went down in the service elevator, walked through the kitchen shaking hands with cooks and waiters, and then along a narrow corridor to the ballroom. He was greeted by a triumphant crowd. He made a victory speech, brief in deference to the oppressive heat. He was next scheduled for a press conference in the Colonial Room. There were two routes from the ballroom. William Berry, his security man, and Fred Dutton expected him to leave by the swinging doors to the kitchen corridor and started to clear the route. Instead, the assistant maitre d’hotel, Karl Decker, led him through a back exit into a dark corridor which led to a well-lit area that opened into the Colonial Room. Berry and Dutton rushed to catch up. At 12:13 a.m. a radio reporter asked him how he would deal with Humphrey and Kennedy started to reply: “It just goes back to the struggle for it “7
Sirhan Sirhan had been born to Bishara and Mary Sirhan, a Palestinian Christian couple, in Old Jerusalem. There were five boys—Adel, Munir, Sharif, Saidallah, and Sirhan—and one girl—Aida. Bishara beat his children. After the 1948 Israel War for Independence the parents, Sirhan, and two of his brothers as well as his sister migrated to America, settling in Pasadena. The other boys followed later. Bishara hated the U.S. and returned to Palestine after six months.
Sirhan graduated from John Muir High School in Pasadena and spent two years at Pasadena City College. A boy of modest intelligence, he performed poorly. He kept to himself and seemed to have no friends of either sex. Very small, Sirhan had the ambition to become a jockey. He got a job exercising mounts at a horse ranch in Corona, southeast of Los Angeles. But in September 1966 a horse threw him and he was injured, ending his possibility of becoming a jockey. Some thought the fall caused brain damage, but this seems unlikely. In 1968 he appeared to be unemployed.
The notebooks in which Sirhan confided his intimate thoughts leave little doubt that he was disturbed. Several of the psychiatrists who later examined him thought him schizophrenic.
Sirhan was a fanatical Palestinian Arab. He hated Jews and thought the “Zionists” had not only stolen the land from the Palestinians, but had ground them with their heels into the dirt. He believed that the Jews controlled the U.S. and helped those in Israel to suppress the Arabs. While he did not say that Robert Kennedy was a Jew, he was convinced that Kennedy was a tool of the Jews.
The fact that Kennedy was holding his victory celebration at the Ambassador was widely reported by the Los Angeles media. It was a larg
e, prominent hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in the midtown district, easily reached from anywhere in the metropolitan area.
Sirhan’s brother had bought an Iver-Johnson .22 caliber eight-shot revolver some time before. Sirhan took it over. When told that it was not much of a gun, he lied by saying he bought it because it was cheap, only $25. He first used it in March 1968 and practiced with it on June 2, two days before the assassination, at the San Gabriel Valley Gun Club.
Sirhan, carrying his Iver-Johnson, was in the crowd in the Ambassador kitchen when Robert Kennedy came very close to him. He fired the first bullet from a distance of one to six inches and it entered the senator’s head behind the right ear. It was the killer. But Sirhan, in a frenzy, fired all seven of the remaining bullets. No. 2 passed through Kennedy’s coat at the shoulder without entering his body and struck Paul Schrade, a UAW official, in the forehead. No. 3 hit Kennedy in the rear of the right shoulder and was recovered from the sixth cervical vertebra. No. 4 entered the senator’s shoulder an inch to the right of No. 3 and struck the ceiling. No. 5 was lodged in Ira Goldstein’s left rear buttock. No. 6 passed through Goldstein’s left pant leg without penetrating his body and was on its way into Irwin Stroll’s left leg. No. 7 struck Irwin Weisel in the left abdomen. No. 8 hit the ceiling and bounced down to strike Elizabeth Evans in the head.
The crowd in the kitchen went into a state of shock, but a number of the men, including Roosevelt Grier, the giant defensive lineman with the Los Angeles Rams, and Rafer Johnson, the Olympic decathlon gold medalist, jumped Sirhan. He fought like a tiger and took some time to subdue. The police then hauled him away.
Kennedy, with his wife at his side, was taken to Central Receiving Hospital 18 blocks distant. Once there, she sent for a priest, Father James Mundell, who gave Kennedy absolution. Father Thomas Peacha, who heard of the assassination on his car radio, drove directly to the hospital and gave the senator extreme unction. The doctors moved him to Good Samaritan Hospital, which had surgical facilities. For a while there were encouraging signs. But at 1:44 a.m. the next morning Robert Kennedy’s heart stopped beating. He was with his family—Ethel, two of his sisters, his brother-in-law Steve Smith, his sister-in-law Jackie, and his brother Teddy.
The casket was flown to New York and placed in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. At the final mass Edward Kennedy made a moving speech and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was sung. The casket was then put on a train which moved slowly to Washington before enormous grieving crowds alongside the track. Bobby Kennedy was then buried in Arlington National Cemetery under a full moon near his beloved brother Jack.
Sirhan Sirhan was provided with outstanding lawyers and psychiatrists, several among them Jews. There was a heated debate over whether he should receive life imprisonment or the death penalty. Evelle Younger, the Los Angeles district attorney, asked Senator Kennedy whether the family wished to express its view on this question. It certainly did and Teddy wrote a letter in longhand. “My brother,” he wrote, “was a man of love and sentiment and compassion. He would not have wanted his death to be a cause for the taking of another life. … If the kind of man my brother was is pertinent we believe it should be weighed in the balance on the side of compassion, mercy, and God’s gift of life itself.” Sirhan pleaded guilty to murder and received a sentence of life imprisonment.8
On March 16, 1968, Richard Nixon in a hotel room in Portland, Oregon, had watched Kennedy announce for the presidency. When the TV was turned off, he stared at the blank screen, shook his head, and said, “We’ve just seen some very terrible forces unleashed. Something bad is going to come of this. God knows where this is going to lead.” Nixon had no stomach for a campaign against another Kennedy.
His vulnerability to defeat in 1960 was a bitter memory for Nixon. Nevertheless, he was determined to make another run for the presidency and his target year was 1968. He had assumed that John Kennedy would win reelection in 1964 and would leave the political stage in 1968. He positioned himself carefully. He would capture the governorship of California in 1962 to gain national exposure as the chief executive of the nation’s most populous state. After his four-year term expired in 1966, he would make his move for the Republican nomination for President in 1968.
But the plan went awry. Pat Brown defeated him by a comfortable 300,000 votes in the 1962 gubernatorial election. As if losing was not bad enough, Nixon capped it with an extraordinary and distasteful press conference. He had refused to concede publicly on election night and had kept an increasingly restive and hostile press corps waiting till the next morning. At that time his press man, Herb Klein, under great pressure from the reporters, insisted that he come down. But Nixon said, “Screw them.” Finally, they agreed that Klein would read a brief statement and Nixon would slip out of a back door of the hotel into a waiting car. Klein went down to meet the press.
But, as Jules Witcover described the scene, Nixon appeared suddenly. “He looked his worst. … He brusquely interrupted Klein, took the microphone and face flushed, hands jammed into coat pockets, literally spit out the words heard round the political world.” This most controlled of politicians now exploded and spewed out the venom of his real feelings. He attacked the press for failing to report what he had said. While he praised Kennedy for his handling of the Cuban missile crisis, which had just occurred, he said he had not been tough enough about the President on his general Cuban policy. He turned back to the press. “As I leave you I want you to know—just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
There were two general reactions to this performance. The first was that Nixon was a born loser who could not be elected President. The other was that, even if he had a chance, he had taken himself permanently out of contention. Both were wrong.
Nixon moved from California to a stronger base in New York and became a partner in a law firm which provided him with a large income and gave him the time to execute his plan. It still called for the same target year: 1968. Even though John Kennedy was gone and Lyndon Johnson was President, 1964 remained hopeless. He was pleased that Goldwater was offered to the butcher rather than himself. Meantime, he labored long and hard for four years to unify and strengthen the Republican party and to make himself available for speeches to virtually all the party’s candidates and supporters. “Not since the Democrats in 1932,” David Broder wrote, “has a party come back so far and so fast as did the Republicans in 1968.” Events played into Nixon’s hands. The Republicans made large gains in the 1966 elections. Johnson got into trouble over the war and the Democratic party began to splinter.
None of Nixon’s rivals for the nomination proved a serious contender. Governor George Romney of Michigan made an early entry and a rapid exit. Governor Rockefeller was much too liberal for most Republicans and seemed uncertain even about running. The most committed candidate, oddly, was Governor Ronald Reagan of California. But he had been in politics less than two years and his extremely conservative views alienated Republican moderates and seemed to assure defeat. Reagan’s conservatism, however, was also his strength; he had great appeal to right-wing Republicans, especially in the South.
Nixon recruited a staff consisting mainly of lawyers and advertising men. While they were intellectually feeble, innocent of experience in government, colorless, humorless, and in some cases dishonest, they were fiercely loyal to Nixon.
As was his custom, he worked out what Stephen Ambrose called “his basic all purpose campaign speech,” which he used with minor local variations everywhere and which was effective with the conservative audiences he drew. It gave the impression of great conviction on irrelevant issues and he fudged on the important questions, like the war and race. He enjoyed a very large bankroll to finance the campaign, much to the envy of the Democrats.
Nixon did exceptionally well in the primaries. In Republican New Hampshire he received 84,000 votes to Rockefeller’s less than 12,000 write-ins and Lyndon Joh
nson’s 29,000. In Wisconsin he got 79 percent to Reagan’s 11. He won easily in Indiana and Nebraska. The big test was Oregon, with its many moderate Republicans led by Governor Tom McCall, who was for Rockefeller. Nixon triumphed with 73 percent of the vote to Reagan’s 22 and Rockefeller’s miserable 4. He skipped California because Reagan was the favorite son. Meantime, Nixon scoured the non-primary states to dredge up commitments for the convention. He seemed to have put his image as a loser behind him.
The 1,333 delegates to the Republican convention gathered in Miami Beach on August 4. That “Wizard of Ooze,” Everett Dirksen, was chairman of the platform committee and was faithful to his sobriquet. He promised a “pungent” document which said nothing and he delivered the goods. Example: “We pledge a program for peace in Vietnam—neither peace at: any price nor a camouflaged surrender of United States or allied interests—but a positive program that will offer a fair and equitable settlement to all.” Dirksen crafted a platform that every candidate could stand on.
Despite his successful campaign, Nixon came to the convention with a razor-thin majority. He had to win on the first ballot or it would drift away. The very conservative Republicans preferred Reagan. Nixon, therefore, had to deal with the southern boss, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. He had been a Democrat, more properly a Dixiecrat, until 1964, when he switched to Goldwater and the GOP. He controlled his own delegation and could influence several others from the South. Thurmond adored Reagan. Nixon countered with attractive promises: a big defense program to fight Communism and a slowing of the pace of racial integration. Thurmond came over.
It took 682 votes to win. Nixon barely made it on the first ballot, 692 to Rockefeller’s 277, Reagan’s 182, and the remainder split among favorite sons. Nixon picked Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland as his running mate. This was an astonishing choice because Agnew was widely considered incompetent and, perhaps not known at the time, was also a crook. George Ball, who knew his way around, described the selection as “preposterous” and called the governor “a fourth-rate political hack.” On the other hand, Theodore White wrote that the Nixon-Agnew ticket would “offer the nation a sober alternative to the leadership of the Democrats.”
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