by Larry Tye
The opposition research that Bobby stage-managed in 1960 set the standard for every election that followed. Frank Sinatra, a pal of Jack’s, hired a private investigator who found out that Nixon periodically visited a psychiatrist, which still carried a stigma and could have stirred up a hornet’s nest if Bobby had made it public. He didn’t. He also kept hush-hush information leaked to the campaign by two credible sources—the governor of Alabama and a journalist turned Kennedy aide—that anti-Castro exiles backed by the CIA were getting ready to invade Cuba. In both cases, knowing was enough, and feeling he could fire back if Nixon made an issue of Jack’s medical records or of Castro and Cuba. It was Bobby the way he was on the football field and in the Hoffa hearing room: better armed for battle than anyone else, and ready to fight dirty if his adversary struck the first low blow. Kennedy staffers, meanwhile, compiled a big black binder they dubbed the Nixonpedia that cataloged every detail of the Republican’s public life, with special attention to flip-flops, smears, controversial votes, and other potential embarrassments.
Bobby did uncork at least one dirty trick: leaking documents showing that the billionaire businessman Howard Hughes had secretly lent Nixon’s brother $205,000. Hughes, who received millions in government largesse, presumably sought to curry favor with the candidate. National columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson ran the story not once but in six separate columns, and in case anyone missed those, Pearson took to the airwaves to charge that “Mr. Nixon has been talking about experience. It now develops that his experience, which began with an $18,000 personal expense fund, has progressed to a $205,000 loan….This is the kind of experience the American people can do without.” Coming on the eve of the election, it hurt. Bill Haddad, an investigative reporter working for Bobby, says his contacts in the Hughes organization supplied the information and that Bobby, while he didn’t say “go do this, go do that,” was anxious to see what Haddad and his colleagues came up with. Author Mark Feldstein, who did extensive interviews with Anderson shortly before his death in 2005, said he uncovered evidence that the Kennedy campaign went several steps further—paying $16,000 to an informant ($128,000 in today’s dollars), accepting documents that were pilfered or burgled, then slipping the incriminating paperwork to the press. In his post-Watergate memoir, Nixon, who had been pinned with the nickname Tricky Dick as far back as 1950, called Bobby and his brethren “the most ruthless group of political operators ever mobilized for a presidential campaign….I vowed that I would never again enter an election at a disadvantage by being vulnerable to them—or anyone—on the level of political tactics.”
The real master of political hardball was Joe Kennedy, who stayed out of sight for most of the campaign, as he had in 1952. “Jack and Bob will run the show,” reporters joked, “while Ted’s in charge of hiding Joe.” But the press didn’t appreciate that Joe trusted Bobby completely by now, since he had schooled him, then arranged apprenticeships for him with the hardheaded Joe McCarthy and the even fiercer John McClellan. And Joe was never out of reach of a phone that he could use to advise or buck up Bobby or Jack, or to call in a favor from an old-pal mayor, congressman, or governor. “If Jack had known about some of the telephone calls his father made on his behalf to Tammany-type bosses during the 1960 campaign, Jack’s hair would have turned white,” said Kenny O’Donnell. But Joe had the wisdom to avoid becoming a distraction, as he told Bobby’s campaign assistant John Seigenthaler: “I don’t want my enemies to be my sons’ enemies or my wars to be my sons’ wars.” As for the cash Joe contributed, “no one will ever know what was spent on the Kennedy campaigns,” said campaign chronicler Teddy White. “John F. Kennedy probably did not then know himself. Later I learned that even Robert Kennedy did not know. Perhaps only Joseph Kennedy knew.”
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WITH THE CAMPAIGN nearing its finish, confidence grew in every part of the Kennedy entourage except at the top. Bobby was living on nerves, plain to see in the dark rings under his glacier-blue eyes and the old-man stoop to his shoulders. He knew he was pushing too hard but felt that doing “one bit less of anything” might mean defeat. He could control the organization’s internal dynamics, but not real-world events like the arrest of Martin Luther King, Jr. That required quick wits and high-wire improvisation, at which he and Jack excelled. The campaign had jeopardized its standing with Negroes first by the choice of Lyndon Johnson, who was as unnerving to blacks as he was soothing to Southern whites. Almost as tone-deaf was Bobby’s sparring with the race hero Jackie Robinson, who backed Humphrey, then Nixon, and—when Bobby questioned his motives—denounced the campaign manager as a man “who will not hesitate to use lies, innuendos and personal attacks on those who disagree with him to get his candidate into the White House.” That is why the Kennedy brothers’ back-to-back phone calls following King’s jailing mattered so much.
Those calls came at a moment when the campaign and the civil rights movement were both reaching a rolling boil. The activist minister from Montgomery had long been a favorite target of the Dixie establishment, which saw its chance when he was arrested on October 19 with a group of students sitting in at the whites-only lunch counter at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta. Everyone went to jail, and everyone but King was released. His problem, a judge in neighboring DeKalb County explained, was that his arrest violated the terms of an earlier suspended sentence for driving without a Georgia license three months after moving to the state (he had one from Alabama). His real offense was that he and his wife had been driving with the white novelist Lillian Smith, which was enough for a patrolman in Ku Klux Klan–friendly DeKalb to stop them for questioning and, when he realized who King was, to slap him with a summons. Now the judge revoked the probation and sentenced the reverend to four months of hard labor on a road gang, commencing immediately. That news was bad enough for Mrs. King, who was six months pregnant, but not as frightening as the call she got the next day from Martin. He had been transferred in the middle of the night, in handcuffs and leg chains, to a rural prison that his supporters feared was a setting ready-made for a lynching.
The full story of what happened next has filtered out bit by bit over the decades, with the final details revealed here for the first time. As soon as they heard about King’s fate, Bobby and Jack started making calculations about how they could help him and themselves. They knew the civil rights leader wouldn’t have ended up on a chain gang for a traffic misdemeanor if the judge weren’t trying to make a point. They also were counting on the segregationists who ran Georgia to deliver the state to them in the next month’s election. Standing up for King could cost them in the Peach State; doing nothing would cost them with black voters nationwide and Northern liberals. The solution was classic Bobby: Have it both ways.
The Kennedys quietly started making long-distance calls. The first was to Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver, who was known for his “no, not one” stance against letting black children into all-white schools—and then for not standing in the way when a federal judge ordered two black students admitted to the all-white University of Georgia. Vandiver was just the watch-what-I-do, not-what-I-say kind of Southerner to whom the Kennedys could relate. Jack “asked the assistance of the governor’s office in seeking the release of Martin Luther King,” Vandiver recalled. The governor knew just which strings to pull. He first called his brother-in-law Bob Russell, who called Georgia Democratic Party secretary George Stewart, who called his pal the DeKalb sentencing judge, J. Oscar Mitchell. During this back-and-forth, Vandiver added, “I had three or four conversations with Bobby Kennedy in Washington.”
Harris Wofford, Kennedy’s civil rights liaison, knew nothing about that intrigue, but he did know the campaign needed to do something. He contacted Sargent Shriver, urging him to persuade the candidate to make a sympathy call to Mrs. King. Shriver waited until he was alone with Kennedy in his hotel room at O’Hare Airport, made his pitch, and was taken aback when his brother-in-law said, “Why not? Get her on the phone.” When Shriver did, the senator s
aid in his most sympathetic telephone tone, “I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King.” It lasted less than two minutes, but the call “was like a shot of lightning in the middle of the night,” Shriver said, giving Mrs. King hope about her husband’s prospects and about Kennedy as a potential president. Yet when Bobby heard what his aides had done behind his back, he turned on them: “Do you know that three Southern governors told us that if Jack supported Jimmy Hoffa, Nikita Khrushchev, or Martin Luther King, they would throw their states to Nixon? Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us?”
The truth was that Bobby was outraged not at Wofford and Shriver’s instinct, but at their making an impetuous and token gesture when he himself had been meticulously hatching a plan that could actually free King. Not long after he chewed out his assistants, Bobby made his own call to Judge Mitchell, a move he would insist was impromptu when in fact it had been prearranged by Governor Vandiver and Party Secretary Stewart. Nor did he lecture King’s sentencing judge about any moral or legal lapses, as he later claimed. To underscore the political importance of King’s release, Bobby told the judge that without it “we would lose the state of Massachusetts.” He also said Mitchell would be a welcome visitor in a future Kennedy White House, an offer the judge would cash in.*6 Stewart already had convinced the judge he could legally release King pending an appeal, which meant that he and Bobby could reach an accommodation. Mitchell understood just what was being asked of him. Not only did he release on bail the fiery black minister, he hinted to reporters that Bobby had pushed for that to happen—and, by implication, that Vice President Nixon had not.
Even that wasn’t by chance. Before he’d dialed the judge, the ever-cautious campaign manager eliminated any possibility that his support for King would backfire and hurt his brother by instructing his aide Seigenthaler, who was from Nashville, to ask every Democratic state chairman in the South his reaction to Jack’s earlier call to Mrs. King. When they voiced less opposition than expected, Bobby knew he could chance his conference with Mitchell and the likelihood the judge would sing to the press. The only thing he didn’t let bother him was the propriety of a lawyer like him calling a judge on a matter pending before his court, which the Bar Association regards as an ethical breach.
The Kennedys’ gamble paid off bigger than even Bobby could have foreseen. Stories on the King calls appeared in the mainstream press, but the one describing Jack’s that could have frayed white Southern nerves was buried as deeply as the brothers hoped, on page twenty-two of The New York Times. While Bobby’s call made page one, the only controversy it sparked was when four honorary colonels resigned from Vandiver’s staff.*7 In the black world, by contrast, the grapevine telegraph lit up. The Kennedy calls, and the Kings’ reaction, were splashed across the front page of newspapers like the Washington Afro-American and shouted out on radio stations targeting black listeners. As he was leaving prison, Martin Jr. said he was “deeply indebted to Senator Kennedy, who served as a great force in making my release possible.” Martin Sr. was more graphic if less broad-minded: “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion. But now he can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is….I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.” To ensure that black voters across the country heard those and other words of tribute, the campaign printed up three million leaflets—called “blue bombs,” a reference to the color of paper they were printed on and their impact on black voters—that were handed out two days before the election at churches, barrooms, and other “coloreds-only” settings. To be sure nobody could trace the effort back to the Kennedys, the fanciful Freedom Crusade Committee was listed as the sponsor.
The story behind those Kennedy phone calls remained unknown for more than twenty years, until a journalism professor from South Carolina tracked down Vandiver, then in his sixties and anxious to make amends for his segregationist past.*8 To have told the truth back in 1960, the ex-governor explained, would have been “political suicide, with the temper of the times as it was.” So he lied, doing his damnedest behind the scenes to boost Jack Kennedy’s candidacy while telling reporters that “it is a sad commentary on the year 1960 and its political campaign when the Democratic nominee for the Presidency makes a phone call to the home of the foremost racial agitator in the country.” When he came clean he did it full blast, claiming he had engineered King’s release and Kennedy’s triumph.
New threads in the reconstruction suggest that the history-making intervention had even more architects than realized. Wofford says that Byron “Whizzer” White, counselor to both Kennedys who later served on the Supreme Court, confessed to him—without elaboration—that “I am the one that told [Bobby] to call the judge.” The latest to fill out the narrative and put himself at the center of the affair is Carl Sanders, who succeeded Vandiver as governor. He says he called the judge “and told him that Martin Luther Jr. really had no business being in [jail] to begin with….Word came back from the court, from the judge, that he wouldn’t consider releasing [King] unless Kennedy called and told him that they’d like him to be released. And Bobby Kennedy did that….It was a situation that could have exploded into some horrible things, but it turned out all right.” Whatever marionettes actually appeared in the show, it was the young campaign manager pulling the strings.
Bobby hinted at his back-channel orchestrations in a 1964 interview for the Kennedy Library, saying that Vandiver made it clear “that if I called the judge, that he thought that the judge would let Martin Luther King off.” He didn’t reveal that in 1960, he added, “because I thought it would destroy the governor.” Even in that interview, however, Bobby was obfuscating. He said he wasn’t sure he knew about his brother’s call to Mrs. King when he made his to the judge. Seigenthaler set that part of the record straight shortly before he died, saying Bobby not only knew, but had him sound out the political fallout of Jack’s call before he made his. The two brothers had coordinated early on their approach to the King jailing, the way they did on everything that mattered in the campaign. And Vandiver wasn’t the only one who reaped a political dividend by hiding the full facts. Bobby and Jack Kennedy were lionized for seeming to spontaneously redress a wrong.
Bobby did the right thing in the end, for reasons that were more complicated and self-serving than he admitted. His racial consciousness was still embryonic, but nobody understood better than he did the potent symbolism of helping spring Martin Luther King from prison on a charge that was shaky from the start. Now, more than ever, Bobby was an entangled blend of Machiavellian contriver and man of conscience. King seemed to get that when he said, just after his release, “there are moments when the politically expedient can be morally wise.” Bobby may have understood it, too. Asked by a reporter just after the election whether he was glad he had called the judge, he replied, “Sure I’m glad, but I would hope I’m not glad for the reason you think I’m glad.”
While the brothers made those and other moves jointly, anyone following the campaign knew that Bobby always worried more and worked harder. Early on, when they passed each other at an airport in West Virginia, Bobby yelled, “Hi, Johnny, how are you?” Jack: “Man, I’m tired.” Bobby: “What the hell are you tired for? I’m doing all the work.” So it was that on election night—after Jack, the sixteen telephone operators, the pollster Louis Harris, and everyone else had headed to bed—shockheaded Bobby remained at the makeshift command post in his cottage at Hyannis Port. His long-distance phone bill for the night reached $10,000, as he checked and rechecked results from Texas, California, and Illinois. In truth, the Rubicon had been crossed much earlier that evening, although there were no French-Irish jigs to mark the moment. Jack was sound asleep when he locked down the ultimate prize in politics, and Bobby was too bone-tired to dance even if he’d had a partner. The only victory lap he allowed himself was a toll c
all to Liz Moynihan, a campaign volunteer in upstate New York. The two had agreed early in the campaign that if Jack won Republican Onondaga County, home to Syracuse, he would win the nation. When no one was watching, on the longest and tensest night of his life, Bobby checked in with Liz. “It was nine o’clock on the dot,” she remembers. “I say, ‘Hello.’ He says, ‘Didn’t we?’ I say, ‘Yes!’ Then he hung up.”
When a margin of victory is as narrow as it turned out to be in 1960—Kennedy won 49.7 percent of the popular vote to Nixon’s 49.6 percent—analysts inevitably debate why. Was it the telegenic JFK’s dazzle, versus Nixon’s five o’clock shadow, in the televised debates? Was it Kennedy’s money and hardball tactics, or Nixon’s failure to focus on swing states? Those factors mattered, but what counted more were the Kennedy phone calls. “This one unfortunate incident in the heat of a campaign served to dissipate much of the support I had among Negro voters,” Nixon wrote in his first memoir.*9 He left unsaid the suggestion that Eisenhower had botched a chance to help him when he failed to release the statement drafted by his Justice Department that deplored King’s imprisonment. Teddy White, the dean of balloting analysts back then, made clear the meaning of the resulting drop in black support: “It is difficult to see how Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, South Carolina or Delaware (with seventy-four electoral votes) could have been won [by Kennedy] had the Republican-Democratic split of the Negro wards and precincts remained as it was, unchanged from the Eisenhower charm of 1956.” And capturing those seventy-four electors would have meant that Nixon, rather than Kennedy, would have moved into the White House. The worsening recession had helped push black voters away from their historic allegiance to Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party and toward Kennedy and the Democrats, White added, but so did the “master stroke of intervention in the Martin Luther King arrest.”*10
