Schlesinger all along had thought he should run. In the immediate hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he had made the instinctive judgment that his political and personal loyalty now lay not with Lyndon Johnson, the new president, but with Robert Kennedy. “Bobby obviously has no confidence in and no taste for Johnson and wants to be President himself,” he wrote two weeks after the assassination in Dallas, “(an ambition I thoroughly applaud and will support).”
In those first days, unwisely, he had even believed RFK should run for president in 1964. Now Schlesinger’s thoughts increasingly turned to how to convince him to go for it in ’68. He found an ally in his friend Dick Goodwin, and together the two men took Bobby to dinner in the summer of 1966 to urge him to rally resistance to Johnson and the war. “Bobby suffers from a sense of bafflement,” Schlesinger judged afterwards, but the two aides came away believing “for the first time [in] the possibility of RFK’s going for the nomination in 1968.” Johnson’s decision to widen the bombing campaign in Vietnam was the most visible wedge issue between the president and Kennedy. At another lunch in New York with Goodwin and their friend Ken Galbraith, all three men “decided to do what little we could to stir public opinion.” The result was a book from each of them, including Schlesinger’s The Bitter Heritage, that made the case against Johnson’s war policy.21
As the war went from bad to worse and Johnson’s poll ratings slumped throughout 1967, the stage seemed set for Bobby. Except that he continued to procrastinate. “The situation is perplexing and time is passing awfully fast,” Schlesinger wrote to him in November 1967, as Eugene McCarthy, senator from Minnesota, signaled that he intended to challenge the president but, crucially, would likely step aside for RFK. “Johnson is not going to come up with anything new or different and we must therefore have a new President,” Schlesinger told Kennedy. “Take a fresh look at the situation,” he pleaded, “I think you could beat LBJ.”
On December 10, RFK “finally summoned a council of war” to discuss the issue. Schlesinger led off by “putting the case for his running.” Almost inevitably, he found himself on the opposite side of the argument from his familiar rival Ted Sorensen, as well as Edward Kennedy, who both “put the case for waiting.” Each argued, “LBJ is sure of reelection in 1968 and . . . Bobby is sure of nomination in 1972.” Schlesinger and Dick Goodwin countered that, if reelected, Johnson would do everything possible to block Kennedy’s nomination in 1972. (“He would die and make [Vice President] Hubert [Humphrey] president,” RFK quipped, “rather than let me get it.”) The meeting broke up inconclusively, with Kennedy telling everyone to “keep brooding” on the problem. Consultations continued over the holiday. “The ordeal continues,” complained Schlesinger as the year ticked over from 1967 to 1968. Finally at the end of January the decision came down. “He is not going to do it,” Schlesinger recorded gloomily.22
Everything changed on March 12, though, when Eugene McCarthy enjoyed an unexpected moral victory in the New Hampshire primary, winning 42 percent of the vote and showing Johnson’s deep vulnerability among Democrats who opposed the war. The result threw Kennedy back into a paroxysm of indecision. Another “council of war” gathered at Hickory Hill, RFK’s house in McLean, Virginia. But having previously urged him to jump in, Schlesinger now joined Sorensen in urging Kennedy to stay out, particularly when word filtered back that McCarthy had rebuffed an overture from Edward Kennedy suggesting that the Minnesotan withdraw in favor of his brother. Asleep in one of the guest rooms, Schlesinger was soon awakened by Bobby padding in “rather gloomily” in his pajamas. “What should I do?” he asked Schlesinger. “Why not come out for McCarthy?” Arthur told him bravely, calling his bluff. “He looked at me stonily,” the historian wrote afterwards, “and said, ‘I can’t do that. It would be too humiliating. Kennedys don’t act that way.’ ” The next day RFK announced that he was running for president.23
“Are you glad I’m doing this?” Kennedy asked him immediately after the announcement was made. Schlesinger told him he was and now felt he had been wrong in telling him not to run in the early hours of Sunday morning. “Well, you were right earlier,” RFK said, “and I was wrong then.”24
By the time Arthur Schlesinger had this conversation he was fifty years old and adorned with every intellectual laurel. Yet for all that success, and a certain arrogance that accompanied it, Schlesinger still had a perspective on himself and his work that allowed him to remain an accomplished advisor. Not only did he have the courage to speak truth to those with power and influence, he understood the essential nature of the relationship. Writing in his diary on the day that Robert Kennedy declared, he cut to the heart of the matter. “So this has been his own decision,” Schlesinger wrote, “. . . which confirms my general theory that the principal knows better than his advisers, which is why they are only advisers and he is the principal.” This moment of remarkable insight helps explain why he still remained in the middle of the political huddle after more than three decades in the game.25
That same perspective also alerted Schlesinger to the dangers of staleness in politics, as the same old advisors, himself included, refought the battles of an earlier era using tactics that were no longer relevant. He put these thoughts down on paper for Kennedy in a long memorandum written in April called “The Old Politics and the New.” This note included an analysis of the impact of mass media, especially television. (“Underneath his nonsense,” Arthur pointed out, “[Marshall] McLuhan has a fundamental point.”) And the changed media environment, he went on, had practical implications for Kennedy.
First, the candidate himself had to change. McCarthy “lets down” audiences who hear him in the hall, but “he comes over well on television” and “sounds reasonable, thoughtful, reassuring to the great audience.” RFK, on the other hand, already getting mixed reviews for speeches, on television can “seem emotional, pressing too hard, even demagogic in a two minute excerpt before the great audience.” This was a matter that “depends less on content than on style,” Schlesinger explained. RFK needed to be more “low-key . . . not retreating at all on issues but stating his views with sobriety and precision.”
Just as important, however, was the question of how to deal with the Kennedy old guard. “JFK won in 1960 in part because he brought in a group of young men unknown to national politics,” Schlesinger explained (in itself a self-deprecating point, because he had been one of the old Stevenson hands the new men had pushed out). But McCarthy was “threatening to win today for the same reason.” That represented a major challenge for RFK. “Obviously putting a campaign together from scratch in a short time requires people with previous experience,” he recognized. “But all of us—Schlesinger, Sorensen, O’Brien, O’Donnell—should stay in the background and work behind the scenes. . . . RFK must run on his own record and character. He must run as a contemporary figure. He must not appear to be surrounded by figures from the past.”26
That analysis was reinforced when Lyndon Johnson electrified the race by withdrawing at the end of March. (“He [LBJ] is a bully who likes to flex his muscles and beat up his inferiors,” Schlesinger spat contemptuously, “but avoids trouble with his peers.”) Yet even in this changed dynamic, Schlesinger continued to worry about the campaign misfiring. He just couldn’t put his “finger on what’s wrong.” In part, it was because McCarthy was running a high-energy campaign that emphasized his daring in having shaken up the race. Yet there were some deeper problems at work. “I am baffled by the intensity of feeling some people have against RFK,” he wrote on May 5, 1968. The problem, he concluded, was the way that Kennedy had entered the contest, which had “revived the earlier image of [RFK] which his senatorial performance had so successfully obscured, as an unprincipled and ruthless opportunist.” In retrospect, progressives would see this 1968 campaign as a moment of hope, admiring Bobby’s stance on the war, poverty, civil rights, and race relations (his famous speech after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. being a much-heralded case in poin
t). Schlesinger later would help create that narrative about RFK. But seen from inside the campaign at the time, his overwhelming emotion was one of deep alarm at the “bitterness” he witnessed everywhere, perhaps even “greater than the bitterness against JFK.” “Hysteria,” Schlesinger wrote at the end of May, “has turned this into real hatred.”27
That bitterness seems to have had little to do with the reasons why, a few days later, a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, shot and killed Robert Kennedy in the kitchens of the Embassy Hotel in Los Angeles. The febrile atmosphere of the election, however, might help explain why RFK—“unsettled and frightened even” by the “frenzied crowd,” suggests Thurston Clarke in The Last Campaign—surprised his security detail by exiting through the kitchen in the first place.28
Schlesinger was in Chicago (Kennedy’s next campaign stop) when he received the news. “It is beyond belief, but it has happened—it has happened again,” he wrote forlornly in his diary. While RFK lay in the hospital dying, Arthur mournfully returned home to New York, where he was due to give his inaugural lecture at City University. “I could hardly eat,” he wrote. “Bourbon was again the great means of getting through the day, as on November 23.” He gave the address, making some reference to events of the previous night. The next morning, June 6, he received the news that RFK was dead. In two days he would stand as an honorary pallbearer at Kennedy’s funeral. “As I rode up the Central Valley [California] with him on May 30,” Schlesinger reflected, “who could have known that nine days later I would be riding with him on another train, from St. Patrick’s Cathedral [New York] to Arlington Cemetery?”29
Robert Kennedy’s death stunned Schlesinger, perhaps even more so than the president’s assassination five years earlier. “JFK was urbane, imperturbable, always in control, invulnerable, it seemed, to everything, except the murderer’s bullet,” he reflected. “RFK was far more vulnerable. One wanted to protect him.” What kind of a president would he have made? “I think very likely a greater one than JFK,” was Schlesinger’s instant judgment. RFK was “more radical” and would have “restored the idealism of America.” The “poignancy” of him being killed, “before he had a chance to place his great gifts at the service of the nation in the presidency,” was almost too much to bear. “My personal feeling is one of such outrage and despair that I do not want to get involved in politics again,” Arthur lamented. “Every political leader I have cared about is dead.”
His feeling of grief and despondency was natural enough after the assassination of two Kennedys whom he loved and admired so much. Yet there was also a sense that their deaths represented the destruction of a broader idea. As he brooded in his journal, those deaths, and that of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. just a few weeks before RFK’s, brought to an ugly, violent end the optimism that framed much of Schlesinger’s life—the New Deal, the “greatest generation,” and the confidence of the postwar era. “We have now murdered the three men who more than any other incarnated the idealism of America in our time,” he despaired. “Something about our social ethos has conferred a kind of legitimacy on hate and violence.” These events represented nothing less than “the decomposition of the system,” he concluded. “One shudders at future possibilities.”30
Schlesinger experienced much of that hate personally. He now increasingly found himself a target of the New Left, whose supporters often howled him down at events. He had always enjoyed courting controversy, and willingly entered the rough and tumble of debate. But this was something more disturbing. “At the end of the evening,” he wrote after an event with Herbert Marcuse, the New Left’s foremost theorist (and someone Arthur liked personally), “a bearded little man, stoned on something . . . came out of the audience and sat down beside me in an ominous way.”
“You know what you are? You’re a murderer, a murderer, and a traitor, and a mother fucker. It’s against the wall for you. Do you know what is going to happen? You are going to be executed.”31
For Schlesinger, this upsetting encounter, with a leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), was not untypical of his daily life. “Now I am hissed at practically every public appearance in this city [NYC],” he lamented in 1968. Walking to the newsstand on Third Avenue each morning to get his New York Times became a routine in which “inevitably someone harangued and denounced me.” Even cinema visits, a constant source of escape and sanctuary for Schlesinger throughout his life, led to confrontations. On one night at the movies, a man in the row behind, provoked simply by Schlesinger’s presence, began a tirade about Kennedy, the war, and Arthur being “one of the biggest fascists in America.” Schlesinger should not even be allowed to walk the streets. “We’re going to fix that, and very soon,” the man menaced him. “We’re going to rub you out.”32
“I think these people are crazy,” Schlesinger sighed, “but I do feel curiously isolated here.” Ironically, such confrontations had the effect of making him nostalgic for the ideological battles of his youth. “The Stalinists of the thirties were equally rigid, dishonest and fanatical,” he wrote, “but they did not have the cult of violence, nor the associated contempt for the mind.” It seemed no coincidence to him that it was a 1930s veteran of the Abe Lincoln Brigade and the Spanish Civil War who came to his aid during the altercation in the cinema. “I know what revolution is like,” the man told Schlesinger’s tormenter. “This man [pointing at AMS] is OK.” It was the saving grace of a highly disagreeable situation that the “shrill, incoherent anger” of such an encounter “occasionally brings together members of the old left who previously might have been deeply divided over the merits of things like communism.” (Not all his old opponents, however, felt the same: in 1969 the screenwriter and member of the Hollywood Ten, Dalton Trumbo, was still raging that a recent letter from the “intellectually disgraceful” Schlesinger was “sheer mindless gabble; garbage, as some call it; dreck, pure merde.”)33
For those like Trumbo, the excoriation was rooted in their belief that Schlesinger and the non-Communist Left had betrayed essential First Amendment rights during the McCarthy era. Schlesinger’s participation in the Kennedy administration compounded their sense of him as a mealy-mouthed Establishment stooge, too tepid on central issues surrounding Vietnam and civil rights. Schlesinger responded in turn that the “noxious rubbish” of the likes of Marcuse, who elevated violence and espoused “repressive tolerance,” was a direct “assault on rationality in politics.” The New Left’s belief in its own doctrinal purity, he warned, was promoting “an atmosphere which destroys the process of democracy itself” and which in due course would only benefit “those who use violence best”—the far Right. The challenges ahead for America were not easy, Schlesinger argued, but the answer to them could not be found in violence, cynicism, and intolerance. “Let us not yield to that awful despair which dissolves all distinctions in thought and reason and hurtles us on to the politics of apocalypse,” he pleaded. “In the long run, any sane society must rest on freedom and reason. If we abandon this, we abandon everything.”34
This 1968 cri de coeur was written in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Schlesinger, now in his early fifties, would never again return to the political role he had played as advisor since at least 1952, first for Adlai Stevenson, and then for Jack and Bobby Kennedy. In July 1969 Ted Kennedy drove his car into a tidal channel at Chappaquiddick on Martha’s Vineyard, saving himself but leaving his companion, Mary Jo Kopechne, to die. The resulting national scandal blunted, at least until 1980, the Massachusetts senator’s presidential aspirations, and with them any possibility that Schlesinger might become the éminence grise in a Kennedy Restoration. “With some reluctance” he was dragooned into drafting the acceptance speech for his friend George McGovern at the 1972 Democratic Convention, but Schlesinger was never to be in the thick of the action again. Instead, his reaction to the events of the sixties—“the worst and saddest decade of one’s life,” he called it on New Year’s Eve, 1969
, “the decade of the murder of hope”—was primarily intellectual. The result would be the last two major books of his career as a historian, which together would capture both his grief for a passed age and his fury at the world that had replaced it.35
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A LONG TIME AGO
A month after Bobby Kennedy’s murder, his widow, Ethel, asked Schlesinger to write her husband’s biography. It was a request that Arthur had anticipated, although not relished, telling a friend in the days after Kennedy’s death that “I do not think that I would have the heart” to undertake such a book. But other factors weighed too, not least that he had already been through the mill with A Thousand Days. He had faced the sensitivity of dealing with Jacqueline and the family, and then the political storm when Life magazine published controversial extracts. Did he really have the stomach to go through all that again? “You know how much I loved and admired your husband,” Schlesinger told Ethel, whom he regarded as more volatile and emotional than Jackie. Could she tolerate “things in the book . . . [the family] might think unnecessary or inappropriate”? Playing for time, he warned that it might be better to forestall “complaints about ‘instant history,’ ” pointing out that in any case, “I would not be able to work on it until I complete the fourth volume of The Age of Roosevelt,” which would “probably” take another two years. “Remember [William] Manchester,” he advised, recalling the controversy surrounding The Death of a President, “and do nothing rashly.”1
He soon changed his mind. It is tempting to say that an old rivalry kicked in. “Have you heard that Ted Sorensen is planning a book about JFK and RFK,” he told Jackie later that July, aghast. It was true, as with A Thousand Days, that he thought no one could do the job better. But he also sought and got reassurances about greater authorial control. Burke Marshall, who had been an assistant attorney general under RFK, handled the delicate negotiation on this point. “I took the liberty of telling her [Ethel] that you would not write the book on the basis that the manuscript had to be acceptable to the Kennedy family,” he told Schlesinger, “and that I thought you were right about that.” It was, he said, a situation that “will be most difficult to her,” but eventually she agreed to the principle of authorial independence.
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