Bobby Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  Leaving Texas, the visitor felt that he’d accomplished his mission, carrying with him Johnson’s firm commitment on several scores: that he wouldn’t be a candidate in 1960, that he wouldn’t help any other candidate, and that he would do nothing to hurt Jack’s run. Bobby would never forget the fervor with which Johnson delivered those three promises.

  When the Kennedy for President effort kicked into gear in late 1959, its command center was in an office building near the U.S. Capitol. Now at the helm, Bobby was acknowledged as the leader. It linked to another base already operating in Jack’s suite in the Old Senate Office Building, where Ted Sorensen was in charge. Observing those early days, Dave Hackett could see the possibilities of conflict between the two power centers.

  After all, Sorensen had spent three years traveling across the country with Jack. He’d heard him speak hundreds of times, gauging the reactions. Working together, they’d refined his message. But when it came to launching the national enterprise, the relationship changed. Even Sorensen, whom Jack called his “intellectual blood bank,” knew Bobby’s greater skills as an organizer and enforcer. Most important, he knew that Jack’s trust in Bobby’s judgment could not be matched. As Dave Hackett put it, there was “absolutely no question who the campaign manager was and where the candidate went for advice. I think anybody who felt they were talking to Bob were talking to the senator. Ultimately, decisions were made by him.”

  One critical task, delegated by Bobby to Hackett, involved putting together as much information as could be gathered on those men and women likely to be Democratic delegates at the July convention in Los Angeles. It was the basic principle taken away from the Chicago vice presidential tumult four years earlier: the importance of identifying the true political power in each of the states. “What we basically did,” said Hackett, “was go state by state to, first, figure out how the delegates were selected and by whom. Then, second, to figure out who the most influential people in the state were and how that influence might affect delegates.” In the end, he and the campaign wound up with a working file of fifty thousand three-by-five cards on potential delegates.

  Another subsidiary but also crucial aspect of Hackett’s record keeping was Bobby’s insistence that his trusted old friend maintain a “loyalty index.” That meant adding to those records a one-to-ten scale estimate of the potential delegates’ steadfastness, the precise depth of their Jack Kennedy commitment.

  Hackett tried to leave as little to chance as he could. “To get a ten,” he explained, “we’d require that at least two people designated him as a ten. We’d never rely on one person’s judgment.” Jack and Bobby, after all, had seen how, when it came to the decisive stand-up-and-be-counted moment, Estes Kefauver had parlayed his long-standing personal connections into victory. The Kennedy system had reduced the intangibles of human behavior to hard arithmetic.

  Another rule from which the Kennedy for President campaign now was benefiting was a precept Jack had picked up running for Congress the first time. He’d seen then the importance of beginning to campaign as early as possible. This was why he’d been traveling throughout the country accompanied by Sorensen, introducing himself and making local connections, whenever he could get away.

  • • •

  Ohio governor Michael DiSalle was one of the big-state politicians the brothers had counted upon as an early backer. But given his continuing public silence, they began to doubt his commitment. DiSalle, though privately claiming he supported Jack, now informed them he wasn’t yet ready to endorse him. His explanation was that if he, a Catholic, was the first national figure to support Jack’s candidacy, it wouldn’t have the same value as it would were he from a different background.

  The Kennedy brothers knew if they had any hope of convincing powerful party leaders to start jumping on their bandwagon, they needed to win early and keep winning. This meant taking the New Hampshire primary first, then following it up with a victory outside New England. The options were Wisconsin or Ohio.

  The problem was, it needed to be one or the other, in terms of the campaign’s focus. If they split their effort, the effect would necessarily be weaker—and they couldn’t be sure of winning both. Added to this, there was the religion issue. If Jack took Ohio, it could well be dismissed as simply a Catholic winning in a largely ethnic state. However, if he beat rival Senator Hubert Humphrey in his neighboring Wisconsin, a farm state and largely Protestant, that would send a powerful message.

  By the end of the year, Wisconsin, not Ohio, was the one targeted. This meant wrapping up Ohio by other means. They couldn’t afford forfeiting the larger state’s wealth of convention delegates. The only way to get them was to convince Governor DiSalle to climb down off the fence. They needed him to announce publicly and soon that he intended to deliver Ohio’s delegation to Kennedy.

  The stakes were made higher by the fact that Jack had already laid claim to DiSalle’s state as a sign of muscle. Challenged by a reporter earlier on how he planned to demonstrate his not being “just another pretty boy from Boston and Harvard,” he’d raised the stakes with this retort. “Well, for openers, I’m going to fucking well take Ohio!”

  The task of backing up his brother’s words fell to Bobby—even though he was reluctant. According to Ken O’Donnell, Bobby wasn’t given much choice. “ ‘You’re mean and tough,’ Jack told him. ‘And can say more miserable things to Mike than I can. And if you get too obnoxious, then I’ll disown you and disavow what you said. I’ll just say to him, “he’s a young kid and doesn’t know any better.” ’ ”

  To which Bobby replied, “Thanks a lot.” But he went. And, in the end, Bobby prevailed. But he’d made no friend of Governor DiSalle, who regarded his techniques of persuasion as anything but diplomatic. One witness to the backroom conversation between the two men reported that Bobby’s side of it sounded practically like “mob threats.” The candidate’s brother/campaign manager had informed DiSalle he needed to be the first major governor to come out for John F. Kennedy . . . or else.

  On January 2, 1960, in the Senate Caucus Room, John F. Kennedy declared himself a candidate for president. On January 5, Ohio’s Michael DiSalle came out in support.

  Since that public endorsement meant the Ohio delegation was theirs, the Kennedy campaign’s attention now turned to Wisconsin. The first to arrive there, Bobby made quick work of a reporter’s open skepticism as to the possibility of a Roman Catholic being elected president of a largely Protestant country. “Did they ask my brother Joe whether he was a Catholic before he was shot down?”

  Still, he wasn’t taking any chances. His first act upon arrival in Milwaukee was a purely pragmatic one. He moved their state headquarters away from the Catholic cathedral just across the street.

  There were, naturally, more pressing issues. These included the fact that Humphrey supporters were spreading word about the candidate’s father’s financial support for Richard Nixon’s 1950 Senate run as well as making sure voters were aware of Jack’s own friendly connection to the late Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy.

  “First, I’m some kind of witch hunter!” Jack exploded to his speechwriter, Richard Goodwin. “Because I was in the hospital when the censure vote on McCarthy was taken. Then it’s the money Dad gave Nixon ten years ago. Hell, he’s a businessman. He gave to everybody. Then it’s Bobby out buying votes. Do you know how many votes there are in Wisconsin? I know we’re rich, but not that rich. He talks about me, about my family, about my friends, the only thing he won’t discuss are the issues. Son of a bitch.”

  What lay behind his anger was the essential truth of his rival’s charges. And the further truth was that what defined Hubert Humphrey was very different from what defined Jack Kennedy. One of the two was a party-line liberal, the other was not. From the beginning of his political career, Jack had offered himself as a different kind of Democrat, and one who valued his independence from all doctrinaire positions. This meant he had every right, as he saw it, to choose his friends as well
as his political stances. In truth, his maverick instincts were the ones he cherished most.

  • • •

  Soon, the religion issue claimed center stage. In a political ad that ran in over 250 local papers, Kennedy was attacked for benefiting from the state’s open primary rule. Under Wisconsin law, Republicans as well as Democrats were able to cast ballots in the Kennedy-Humphrey contest. The ad pointed to numbers showing Catholic Republicans lining up behind Kennedy. Was it fair, it asked righteously, that such voters from the other party should decide “who the Democratic nominee for president shall be?”

  The story behind the ad, however, wasn’t to be found in the data on Catholic Republican crossovers but in who’d paid for it. It hadn’t been the Humphrey campaign. Wisconsin’s attorney general would later determine that the money for the anti-Kennedy ad could be traced back to Teamsters connections. Jimmy Hoffa was still out to get Bobby Kennedy.

  In the end, on the 5th of April, Jack Kennedy won the Wisconsin primary. But along the way his campaign had, like Humphrey’s, wooed voters with material that wasn’t what it seemed to be. One gambit had been devised by an intriguing figure, Paul Corbin, whom I came to know in a later campaign. He was the one distributing anti-Catholic literature where it would do the most good: Catholic neighborhoods.

  It was a dirty trick. With its denunciation of the Catholic Kennedy, aimed supposedly at Protestant voters, it had the effect of tempting wavering Catholics—including those Republican ones—to overcome their doubts and cast their vote for their fellow communicant now under assault for his religion.

  I know firsthand how it would have worked, remembering my mom’s anger when a group of zealous canvassers knocked at our door to warn us of the imminent danger of a Catholic in the White House. Always sensitive to the Protestant rejection, it confirmed Mom’s worst suspicions: here was the specter of Al Smith all over again.

  On election night in Wisconsin, CBS’s Walter Cronkite queried Jack about the role the “Catholic” vote had played in his victory. Bobby saw this as a deal-breaker. Cronkite’s producer had agreed, he said, to lay off the religion issue. By not doing so, Cronkite was seen by Bobby as breaking a deal made with the Kennedy campaign—not to bring up religion.

  Afterward, according to Cronkite, “Bobby stormed through the studio saying, ‘You violated an agreement! We had an agreement that no question be asked about Catholicism and the Catholic vote. I’m going to see you never get another interview.’ ”

  The casting of the Wisconsin victory in religious terms, with the margin of Jack’s win attributed to crossover Catholic Republicans, had the effect of tainting his success. What should have been a triumph pure and simple—a senator from Massachusetts had just beaten a Midwesterner on his home turf—wound up a disappointment. If not exactly a setback, it was very definitely a spur to redoubled effort in the state that came next.

  This was West Virginia, where the vanquishing of Hubert Humphrey would now need to be decisive. But in a surprise to the Kennedys, the old issues of religion surfaced from the start. In an early meeting with volunteers in Charleston, Bobby quizzed them. “What are our problems?” he wanted to know. The reply was Jack’s religion. Bobby was more shocked than anyone. Hadn’t the campaign’s numbers shown him leading Humphrey in West Virginia by 70 to 30 percent?

  Not anymore. Once that extra biographical detail—Jack’s religion—was added, a new poll showed him getting just 40 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 60 percent. Rose Kennedy recalled the way the younger son had bluntly broken the news to his older brother. “The people who voted for you in that other poll—the 70–30 one—have just found out that you’re a Catholic.”

  Bobby decided to meet the religious issue in West Virginia head-on, with Jack coming out openly about his religion to the strong Protestant majority of West Virginia voters. When asked reasonable questions about his religion, he’d answer them plainly. He also appealed to the voters’ patriotism. “Nobody asked me if I was a Catholic when I joined the United States Navy,” he told audiences of voters.

  At the same time, Hubert Humphrey was devoting his energies to reminding voters where their natural religious loyalties lay. His campaign theme song suddenly became the Southern gospel classic, “Give Me That Old Time Religion.”

  Both Kennedys said and believed the campaign there should focus on economic issues. Jack, observed Arthur Schlesinger, “was genuinely appalled by what he saw . . . hungry, hollow-eyed children, dispirited families living on cornmeal and surplus lard, gray, dismal towns, despair about the future.” Watching Bobby when he went out to meet coal miners leaving their shifts, Pierre Salinger, the ex-reporter Bobby had brought with him from the Rackets Committee, remembered how Bobby’s hands were blackened by dust after he’d shaken theirs. He’d greet them simply, saying only “My name is Bob Kennedy. My brother is running for president. I want your help.”

  The Kennedys had come to resent Humphrey’s continuing candidacy. They believed he was staying in the race merely to prevent Jack Kennedy from an early victory. It seemed to them that the Minnesotan was keeping the door to the White House open just wide enough for his Senate leader Lyndon Johnson eventually to squeeze through. They decided to lower the boom.

  “From an anonymous source in Minnesota,” Goodwin recalled, “the Kennedy camp received copies of correspondence between Humphrey and his draft board, letters revealing that Hubert had tried on several occasions to postpone his military service. It was decided that the material should be made public by Franklin Roosevelt, Jr.”

  The surrogate did as asked. “There’s another candidate in your primary,” the junior Roosevelt told one crowd. “He’s a good Democrat. But I don’t know where he was in World War II.”

  Jack denied any responsibility for what, in fact, had been a well-choreographed insinuation. “Any discussion of the war record of Senator Hubert Humphrey was done without my knowledge and consent,” he stated. “And I strongly disapprove of the injection of this issue into the campaign.” Without defending Humphrey’s deferments, he reminded the voters there were more important issues in the campaign.

  In fact, Humphrey had been rejected for military service because of medical reasons. Later, FDR Jr. would explain his having been pressured by Bobby, whom he described as being obsessed with winning at all costs, to raise the issue. From Humphrey’s perspective, any and all Kennedy denials were meaningless. They “never shut FDR Jr. up, as they easily could have,” he pointed out.

  Watching events from Washington, Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson easily guessed who’d armed Roosevelt with the smear against Humphrey. “That’s Bobby,” he asserted.

  Then, too, there were other grievances Humphrey was smarting under, most significantly the amount of cash being spread around by the Kennedy campaign. “I don’t think elections should be bought,” he openly complained. “I can’t afford to run through with a checkbook and a little black bag. Bobby said if they had to spend a half million to win here they would do it. Kennedy is the spoiled candidate, and he and that young, emotional, juvenile Bobby are spending with wild abandon.”

  He summed up his growing sense of victimization at the hands of the Kennedy brothers with what amounted to a playground gibe: “Anyone who gets in the way of papa’s pet is going to be destroyed.”

  It was becoming a tense and not very pretty fight, with Bobby staying on top of both the front and backroom tactics. He made the decisions where to spend the money and to whom it went. Gone were the old volunteer days in Massachusetts. It was Bobby, Roosevelt recalled, who made the choices as to “which local county slate we should get Jack on. He’d go into a county, analyze it, talk to everybody he could talk to going directly to the point, and his judgment turned out to be exactly right.”

  Still, Bobby worried from the start that his brother was going to lose West Virginia. If that turned out to be the case, they needed an insurance policy. They needed another primary they could count on. The answer was Maryland, scheduled for the
week after West Virginia’s. There, Governor J. Millard Tawes had hoped to run as a favorite son, win the state’s primary, and then arrive at the convention with Maryland’s delegates at his personal disposal, to award to the candidate of his choice.

  But Bobby had another idea. Once again, he made it happen. After a session closeted alone with him, Governor Tawes emerged agreeing to what the Kennedy forces wanted: not to run as a favorite son but to give his blessing to Jack in the Maryland primary. If Jack lost West Virginia, he was now primed for an uncontested victory a week later.

  On the night of the West Virginia primary, Jack Kennedy wanted to be elsewhere. No candidate likes to be present at a loss, thereby giving photographers and camera crews the opportunity to catch them in the eye of defeat. Instead, he spent the evening back in Washington, waiting nervously for the news as the polls closed. “He’d get up every twenty minutes to call Bobby in West Virginia,” his friend Ben Bradlee, then a reporter for Newsweek magazine, remembered.

  But the news was good: a big win.

  In Charleston, where it had been raining all day, the other side of Robert Kennedy now came into play. He headed off onto the wet streets to offer his respects to the race’s loser. Joseph Rauh, a Humphrey supporter, has painted a vivid portrait of his arrival at their headquarters. “I said to myself, ‘Oh, my God, it’s Bobby,’ really the devil as far as our camp was concerned. . . . He was the one all our people were so bitter about.”

  Rauh watched, amazed, as the winner’s brother and campaign manager made his way toward the defeated Humphrey and his wife. “Everybody walked backwards, and there was a path from the door to the other side of the room where Hubert and Muriel were standing. I’ll never forget that walk if I live to be a hundred.”

  Bobby’s generous gesture was of the moment and received as such. It couldn’t make up for the “ruthlessness and toughness” he’d displayed throughout the contest. That aspect of him, said Humphrey, “I had trouble either accepting or forgetting.”