Bobby Kennedy

by Larry Tye

  Jack beat Humphrey by a comfortable 12 percentage points, but it was shy of a knockout blow in the eyes of a skeptical press and an angry opponent. Humphrey had won four of ten congressional districts and insisted he would fight on in West Virginia, the next major battleground. The Mountain State’s coal-based economy was as impoverished as the Badger State’s was affluent, its politics as ethically challenged as Wisconsin’s was righteous. And whereas one in three Wisconsinites was Catholic, in West Virginia it was just one in ten. The Kennedys’ private polls this time revealed a challenge steeper than any Bobby had conjured up in the Midwest: While surveys in West Virginia that winter had shown Jack ahead 70 to 30 percent, media reports filtering in from Wisconsin caused such hemorrhaging that Jack suddenly found himself trailing by 20 percent as the May 10 primary approached. Asked why, his advisers explained, “No one in West Virginia knew you were a Catholic in December. Now they know.”

  It is difficult today to conceive that Catholicism could have been such a stigma as recently as 1960. After all, one in four Americans was Catholic then, making it the biggest religious denomination in the country. John Kennedy was not the first Catholic nominated for president; Al Smith had been the Democrats’ standard-bearer thirty-two years earlier. But Smith was crushed by Herbert Hoover, a Quaker, and the anti-Catholic vote was believed to have been the reason. The same questions raised with Smith in 1928 resurfaced in 1960 in Charleston, Huntington, and the sweeping hills and coal-ravaged hollows of West Virginia. Could a Bible Belt state like this, where Protestants were the mainstream and Southern Baptists the biggest denomination, trust a Roman Catholic? And, as Bobby put it, would ministers “start telling people that they can’t vote for a Catholic because the Pope is coming over?” Kennedy aides in Washington advised ducking the explosive issue. Those on the ground in West Virginia said that that wasn’t an option. The candidate and his brother ended up making the call, the same way Barack Obama would half a century later when race rather than religion was the target of bigots. JFK did not just affirm his faith, he remade the primary campaign and the entire election into a referendum on how tolerant Americans were.

  It was a master stroke and the only option. The issue would have festered whether or not he addressed it. Rabid anti-Catholics stood ready to vote against him either way, and this strategy provided a chance to tilt wavering voters his way. His most famous address on the topic would come in September before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, but he gave a similar talk in a paid telecast in West Virginia, with Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., as his interlocutor. “When any man stands on the steps of the Capitol and takes the oath of office of President, he is swearing to support the separation of church and state,” Kennedy said, looking straight into the camera. “If he breaks his oath, he is not only committing a crime against the Constitution…he is committing a sin against God.” The candidate pushed every button that mattered to West Virginians—allegiance to country over pope, the notion that no sin was greater than one against God, and a reminder that FDR Jr., the son of an icon whose portrait still hung in the homes of many West Virginians, was in Kennedy’s corner. The use of symbols like those was a trademark not just of John but of Robert Kennedy, and later in the campaign, Bobby would make a speech of his own in Cincinnati that touched similar chords: “I can’t imagine that any country for which my brother Joe died could care about my brother Jack’s religion when it came…” He stopped there, tears visible to those with him on the podium, unable to get out the last words.

  The primary was not fought exclusively on such high ground. This was, after all, a state where buying votes was almost as common as paying election workers. Here, unions, party bosses, and other interest groups customarily handed out printed slates to remind voters who they’d promised to pick among the fifty candidates on the ballot. It was familiar terrain for the Kennedys, reared as they were in Massachusetts’s equally crooked system of ward bosses and influence trading. Early in the campaign an anonymous Minnesotan sent the Kennedy camp records suggesting that Humphrey had dodged the draft during World War II. The charge would surely set off sparks in West Virginia, which boasted the highest proportion in the nation of men serving—and dying—in the military. It was true that Humphrey had not served, but even Bobby and Jack knew that labeling him a draft dodger could backfire, since it stretched the facts: He had tried several times to enlist but was rejected first for family reasons (he was married and a father), then because he was an “essential civilian” (teaching Army Air Corps cadets), and finally because of his health (a double hernia, color blindness, and lung troubles). The Kennedys gave the records to a New York Times reporter on the condition that he use them only with their clearance. Their self-restraint wore thin as Humphrey attacked JFK’s record, his integrity, and, as the Kennedys saw it, his religion. (“Poor Little Jack!” teased Hubert, who was just six years older. “I wish he would grow up and stop acting like a boy.”) Finally the Kennedy side hit back, hard and low. “I resent any man who has claimed he was 4-F all the way through the war when he really stayed out at his own request until just before the end of the war,” FDR Jr. said as he campaigned for JFK in the coal mining county of Fayette. Roosevelt would later insist that Bobby pushed him to get tough, calling night after night “asking me, ‘When will you lower the boom?’ ” Larry O’Brien, the Kennedy aide who had received the leaked conscription files, said Roosevelt acted not under orders from either Kennedy but out of pique that Humphrey was taking swipes at him. Hubert said he would never forgive Franklin Jr. or Bobby.

  Humphrey was equally outraged by the Kennedy money pouring into the state, which in the end affected the voting more than the back-and-forth over his draft record. “I don’t have any daddy who can pay the bills for me,” the Minnesotan complained. Allegations flew, too, about the Kennedys’ paying off local officials, journalists, and voters. “No one would prove it,” wrote Harrison Salisbury of The New York Times, “but everyone knew that a vote for Kennedy was worth $5 in 1960 money. The district leaders had stacks of cash and spread it around.” Larry O’Brien acknowledged that he had “cash at hand” and said that one time, he called his secretary “and whispered, ‘Bring me five.’ Phyllis kept the money in the suitcase under her bed, and in a moment she appeared in the lobby and slipped me five hundred dollars, not the five thousand I’d agreed to.” O’Brien said the money went to pay poll workers and other “legitimate Election Day expenses,” that “neither Jack nor Bob Kennedy knew what agreements I made,” and that “our total outlay statewide was about $100,000 including radio and television, less than a candidate for Congress in any one congressional district would expect to spend.”*3 Bobby was both adamant and elliptical on the role of Kennedy largesse: “There may have been some vote buying for some people with whiskey, money, or both, but they weren’t votes for us and it wasn’t our whiskey and it wasn’t our money.”

  Certainly, the Kennedy money carried weight, but most analysts agree it never was as much as claimed by the candidates Jack clobbered. When the mudslinging was through and the votes were counted that May evening in West Virginia, the balloting turned out just the way Bobby had plotted. JFK won 61 percent of the votes to Humphrey’s 39 percent, a margin ten points wider than in Wisconsin and enough to bury the idea that a Catholic couldn’t prevail in a Bible Belt Protestant stronghold. Bobby understood that this was the last difficult primary they would face and, while the victory didn’t ensure the nomination, it gave them reason to celebrate for the first time in those grueling months. He did so that very night, with a gesture that, while not entirely appreciated, revealed him as something more than a gutter warrior. After midnight, he called Humphrey saying he wanted to come by his headquarters. Humphrey didn’t want to see him but said he would. Joseph Rauh, a Humphrey adviser, described the scene:

  The door opened. Bobby walks in. It was like the Red Sea opening for Moses. Everybody walked backwards, and there was a path from the door to the other side of the room where Hubert and M
uriel were standing. I’ll never forget that walk if I live to be a hundred. Bobby walked slowly, deliberately, over to the Humphreys. He leaned in and kissed Muriel. I’ve always wondered whether she had on her mind at that moment that she was going to poke him because she was really not very happy about the outcome. Anyway, he was very nice and gracious and it was the right thing for him to have done. But at the moment, it sure was something.

  After West Virginia, Humphrey bowed out of the race, leaving JFK to face mainly token opposition from favorite sons in the remaining contests. But only fifteen states and the District of Columbia held primaries in 1960; the stop-Kennedy movement still saw hope in the vast number of unpledged delegates, and in Lyndon Johnson, the powerful Senate majority leader. Johnson was savvier and richer than Humphrey, and more willing and able to slug it out with Kennedy. LBJ had been taking Jack’s measure for the eight years they served together in the Senate, and he was convinced the Massachusetts Democrat was too young and green to entrust with the White House. While he waited until a week before the Democratic convention in July to officially announce his candidacy, he had been maneuvering behind the scenes at least since Bobby visited his ranch the previous autumn, and now he put his wiles to work.

  Sure that the Kennedys were planting doubts about whether he was healthy enough to serve after a near-fatal heart attack in 1955, LBJ beat them to it. Jack is a “little scrawny fellow with rickets,” he whispered to a reporter from the Chicago Daily News in a late-night conversation aboard his private plane. Making a tiny circle with his fingers, Johnson asked, “Have you ever seen his ankles? They’re about so round.” His sleuths in the pharmaceutical and medical communities, meanwhile, confirmed that Kennedy had Addison’s disease, a serious condition in which the adrenal glands don’t produce enough hormones. “Doctors,” a senior LBJ aide announced at a press conference a day before LBJ confirmed he was running, “have told me he would not be alive if it were not for cortisone.”

  If LBJ thought his adversaries naïve and unready, Bobby’s same-day response to the medical charges made him think again. Johnson’s attack, he told reporters, was a sign that “there are those within the Democratic party who would prefer that if they cannot win the nomination themselves they want the Democrat who does win to lose in November.” Jack, he insisted, “does not now nor has he ever had an ailment described classically as Addison’s Disease.” Bobby proceeded to release a statement from JFK’s doctors proclaiming his health “excellent” and a page from his political biography attesting to the family’s openness in acknowledging his “adrenal insufficiency.” The hair-splitting denials typified the Kennedy way of doing what it takes to win. Jack did in fact have Addison’s. His adrenal glands were not just producing insufficient hormones, they were withering away. He had been getting cortisone injections for a decade, with Joe going so far as to stash emergency supplies of the drug in safety deposit boxes wherever his son traveled. No one learned any of that at the time, however. The counterattack worked, notwithstanding its contravention of Bobby’s investigatory zeal for truth telling. LBJ was compelled to disavow his aide’s allegations and to eat crow.

  Bobby was everywhere now. He put out brush fires ignited by LBJ and other adversaries and rallied his staff of former Rackets Committee aides and longtime Kennedy minions. He campaigned personally at roadside rallies and Rotary Clubs, his least favorite part of the job. Even when he wasn’t there, aides half-joked that “little brother is watching.” He helped Jack plot strategy when they talked by phone every night and had a free hand with tactics. The image of a well-oiled campaign juggernaut was a myth invented after the fact by journalists. Politics requires thinking on one’s feet, and nobody was better at ad-libbing than Bobby, whether it was counterstriking on Jack’s health or gambling on the religious tolerance of West Virginia voters. Often he would give overlapping or even identical assignments to two different staffers, infuriating them but guaranteeing that the job got done. Now, more than ever, the team consisted of nice guy Jack and that SOB Bobby.

  As the convention neared, he drilled into staffers that they could not make any misstep that would give their opponents an opening. Few knew that Bobby himself had uncha­rac­teris­tica­lly made just that sort of mistake two weeks before the delegates arrived. It happened at a pool party at Hickory Hill in honor of Clark Mollenhoff, the reporter he had worked with at the Rackets Committee who had broken his neck in a car crash the previous fall. After eight months, his cast finally was off, but he was wearing a neck brace and told Bobby he couldn’t swim yet. The beefy Mollenhoff was walking along a gangplank that ran over the pool, on his way to the bar, when “out of nowhere came this form in swimming trunks with the spray all over him, like a young god coming out of the water,” remembered Fletcher Knebel, a reporter with the Cowles newspaper chain. Bobby “gives Clark a push. Clark takes one big step trying to get to the side of the pool, misses, catches his foot in the trough, rolls right over on his neck. Boom!…First thing that went through my mind was—Clark was a good friend of mine—one, he’s dead and two, Kennedy has lost the nomination.” Mollenhoff picked himself out of the pool and told Knebel, “No, no, no, I feel fine.” Knebel planned to write a story on what he had seen—evidence that Bobby was “not only ruthless, he’s idiotic”—but Mollenhoff persuaded him not to. Nor did any other reporter who was there. “It just shows you how people were about the Kennedys,” Knebel told a Kennedy Library interviewer years later. “If Nixon’s brother had jumped out of the pool like that it would have been headlined everywhere.”

  Bobby demanded from his staff clear-eyed assessments of where every convention delegate stood, and he did whatever it took to line them up for Jack. The Kennedys had agreed to let Governor Michael DiSalle run uncontested as a favorite son in his state of Ohio if he publicly announced that he really was for JFK. Bobby knew the endorsement would matter most if it came early; DiSalle balked about jumping on an empty bandwagon. Bobby headed to Ohio to meet with the governor, and afterward DiSalle called JFK and Kenny O’Donnell to complain. “He told me that Bobby was the ‘most obnoxious kid he’d ever met,’ that Bobby practically had called him a liar and said ‘We can’t trust you. You will do what you’re told,’ ” O’Donnell recalled. “In essence, Bobby’d done exactly what he’d been told to [by Jack], of course.” That Kennedy brashness worked, with the Buckeye governor pledging his delegation to JFK; other officeholders got the message. Bobby told Alabama governor John Patterson to cast for JFK just four of his fourteen delegates on the first roll call. If a second ballot were needed, Alabama, the first state alphabetically and first to vote, should cast all fourteen for JFK to make it look as if he was gaining momentum. Not only would that be disingenuous, Patterson told Bobby, it would be awkward to explain to delegates who had stuck their necks out for a Catholic Yankee that he didn’t need their first-ballot vote. “And [Bobby] said, ‘Well, do it. I want you to do it,’ ” Patterson recalls. The governor did as he was instructed, and “some of them held that against me all their lives.”

  Remembering Jack’s narrow loss for the second spot in 1956, Bobby took nothing for granted at the convention. Pledges made in the smoke-filled back rooms of that era lasted only until a more tempting offer arrived. So Bobby choreographed whatever he could, which was more than any campaign manager ever had. His staff prepared dossiers on each delegate. Volunteers tracked their movements and used a network of phones and walkie-talkies to report hourly on any and all disturbing developments. The arm twisting and preplanning paid off. Jack won, on the first ballot, before delegates could defect to LBJ or anyone else. His tally of eight hundred six votes was twice Johnson’s and within ten of Bobby’s prediction. With the nomination secure, Bobby let himself show a few minutes of emotion, dancing around the room with Pierre Salinger in what the press assistant called a French-Irish jig. He hadn’t had any real sleep in days and hadn’t let himself or his troops relax even an inch, knowing that if the polling went beyond that first ballot, Jack was sun
k. It was, Bobby would say later, the best day of his life, but the celebration was short-lived and so was the joy. The following day would be one of his worst.

  Jack still had to find a running mate before the convention wrapped up and the general election campaign could begin. Seldom has the choice of a vice presidential nominee caused so much consternation or sparked such prolonged historical debate. Bobby preferred Senator Henry Jackson of Washington State, whom he knew and liked from their days chasing the Teamsters. Jack liked Humphrey until Hubert balked at endorsing him. The name of another Minnesotan, Governor Orville Freeman, was raised, but not too high. Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri was everybody’s second choice for the number two spot, and he was so convinced Kennedy would pick him—he had drawing power in the South and Midwest and support from labor, liberals, and, it seemed, both Kennedy brothers—that he held a family conclave the night of JFK’s nomination. “Dad called us up to his room and said, ‘I have a big decision to make: Do I accept the vice presidency?’ ” his son James remembers. “We went to bed that night absolutely convinced that was going to happen.”