by Larry Tye
He would come unstrung, however, just as others were beginning to pull themselves together. Journalist Haynes Johnson described him after the funeral: “I remember Bobby standing on the steps. I looked at him and he looked at me and his eyes” were haunted. “It was deep, deep, deep black despair.” John Seigenthaler, who had taken a leave from journalism to work at the Justice Department, went back to Hickory Hill after the burial: “[Bobby] opened the door and said something like this, ‘Come on in, somebody shot my brother and we’re watching his funeral on television.’ Which was sort of the sardonic humor I was talking about earlier. I said, sort of with a half laugh, ‘Bob, that’s not funny.’ And he looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘Don’t you think I know that?’ ” Ethel says that in the days after the assassination her husband was like the marathon runner who somehow finds the energy to make it 26.2 miles “and then it takes you a little while to slow down and maybe just walk, and then maybe to lie down, and [then you] crash.”
That his grief was different is no surprise. Everyone else, even his siblings, returned to familiar routines that distracted them from their loss. But Jack had been a part of every piece of Bobby’s life and reminders were everywhere, from the red phone on his desk to the new occupant of the Oval Office. Forgetting, even temporarily, wasn’t an option, as he was pulled into a deeper, darker stage of mourning. That difference became apparent over the Thanksgiving holiday. Celebrating in Hyannis Port was a Kennedy tradition, and with Thanksgiving Day in 1963 falling a week after the assassination, everyone felt it was especially important to be in the embrace of family. Everyone but Bobby. “It was something he could not quite do,” explained Rose. “He had reached a state, I suppose, of almost insupportable emotional shock.” Instead he headed to Florida with Ethel, their older children, and friends including White House press secretary Pierre Salinger. “He was the most shattered man I had ever seen in my life,” Salinger said. “He was virtually non-functioning. He would walk for hours by himself….From time to time, he’d organize a touch football game….They were really vicious games. I mean it seemed to me the way he was getting his feelings out was in, you know, in knocking people down. Somebody, in fact, I think either Ed Guthman or somebody broke a leg during one of those games.”
Back in Washington it was Bobby who crumpled, retreating into himself. Unable to sleep, he would drive off in his convertible on frigid nights under a pitch-black sky. The U.S. marshals now patrolling his property could hardly keep track of him. Other mornings he was up at four riding his horse or wandering the grounds, his huge Newfoundland at his heels. He stayed away from the Justice Department for most of the rest of 1963, returning occasionally for partial days in which he couldn’t maintain his focus. He was unable to make himself read official documents that he typically would have devoured. Staffers noticed his trousers were missing a belt and his socks were mismatched. In meetings, his expression would go blank as he stared out the window. His colleagues’ sense that they were an elite crew on an extraordinary mission—Bobby’s band of brothers—faded after Dallas. “I don’t think there is much left for me in this town,” he told friends. He talked about going away—to England for a year to write, or to a university to teach—but couldn’t make himself do it. He also couldn’t refer directly to Jack’s murder, instead using the euphemism “the events of November 22, 1963.”
Ed Guthman begged journalists to “just come over. Ask him anything….Draw him out of the damned shell he’s in.” One who did was journalist Simeon Booker. “Entering the dark paneled room, I found Robert Kennedy at his desk, his head in his hands,” Booker recalled. “When he looked up, I could see that he’d been crying. His eyes were red and moist. ‘Come on, now,’ I told him lightly, ‘You’re Irish. You’re supposed to be tough. I’m Negro and you think you can push me around.’ My ribbing made him laugh. ‘Booker,’ he said, smiling, ‘you always know how to knock somebody off balance.’ ” Charles Spalding, another writer who stayed close, borrowed images from Bobby’s treasured sport of sailing to capture his devastation: He “was just the picture of a boat, if you will, under such full sail and breezes just perfectly pitched and the sails set right and everything going and suddenly—it sinks.”
Jack was no longer in Bobby’s world but still governed his life. The attorney general quietly built a shrine to his slain brother in a corner of his office, with JFK’s photos, books, and other talismans. He donned Jack’s tweed overcoat and his leather bomber jacket with the presidential seal, and he continued to wear a black mourning tie far longer than tradition dictated. He had to drive past Arlington Cemetery at least twice a day and would stop often, climbing over the wall, kneeling in front of the gravestone, and praying. (Bobby called it “visiting the President”—as if Jack still were alive.) Faith failed to comfort him the way it did Ethel, who was sure her brother-in-law was in heaven alongside his big brother and little sister, keeping watch. Jack’s ambitions had been Bobby’s, and now the hero-brother was gone and any earthly goals seemed ephemeral. The president’s assassination was, as journalist and friend Jack Newfield observed, “like an amputation that never healed.”
The Kennedy family trait of holding feelings behind a wall of silence had often frustrated friends who wanted to help. Jack himself was famous for putting misfortune in his past, be it the death of a sibling or even a child. Teddy, too. Bobby, however, could neither open up nor let go. “I think often of Bobby’s grief over the loss of Jack,” Ted said looking back. “It veered close to being a tragedy within the tragedy. Ethel and my mother feared for his own survival; his psychic survival at least….He would spend hours without speaking a word….Hope seemed to have died within him, and there followed months of unrelenting melancholia. He went through the motions of everyday life, but he carried the burden of his grief with him always. I was so worried about Bobby that I tried to suppress my own grief.”
Bobby’s symptoms were those of a wounded warrior, uncertain whether he could make it back to battle or even through the day. He lost weight and felt depleted. He couldn’t sleep or focus for long. His eyes were swollen, his hands trembled more than normal with fingernails bitten to the quick, while his movements and speech seemed tentative. He had always been brooding and even sad, but now the despair wouldn’t let up. To Seigenthaler, it looked as though his friend was suffering from what today would be diagnosed as clinical depression and back then was whispered to be a nervous breakdown. Seigenthaler resisted confronting him, knowing Bobby would never admit weakness or accept assistance. Finally he asked, “Have you gotten some help?” Bobby: “You mean from a psychiatrist?” Seigenthaler: “Yes.” Bobby “didn’t get angry, but he was very brusque in saying no,” Seigenthaler added. “That ended the conversation.”
Only children could lift him out of his self-absorption, as happened during a Christmas Eve party at an orphanage in Washington. It was the first time Bobby had been out in public since the assassination, and he went because it was a tradition. “The moment he walked in the room, all these children—screaming and playing—there was just suddenly silence,” remembered the journalist Peter Maas. “A little boy—I don’t suppose he was more than six or seven years old—suddenly darted forward, and stopped in front of him, and said, ‘Your brother’s dead! Your brother’s dead!’ Gosh, you know, you could hear a pin drop. The adults, all of us, we just kind of turned away….The little boy knew he had done something wrong, but he didn’t know what; so he started to cry. Bobby stepped forward and picked him up, in kind of one motion, and held him very close for a moment, and he said, ‘That’s all right. I have another brother.’ ”
The other perpetual mourner was Jackie. Like Bobby, she had shown superhuman strength throughout the public memorials, only to crash once she was out of view. The night of the funeral, Bobby asked Jackie, “Shall we go visit our friend?” The two dropped to their knees in front of Jack’s gravestone, offering silent benedictions, then walked hand in hand through the wet grass. Bobby tried to soften the blow
of losing their father for John Jr. and Caroline, spending as much time as he could with his nephew and niece and bringing them to Hickory Hill to play with their cousins. Over Easter, Bobby and Jackie joined friends at a hilltop villa lent to them in Antigua, without Ethel or any of the kids. They had been close before but not intimate confidants like this. While Ethel had always had issues with Jackie, until now they hadn’t included jealousy.*2 Whether JFK’s brother and widow were having an affair nobody can say for sure, but there was speculation enough to fill a book with the indelicate title Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story. (It was published in 2009, when neither of the supposed lovers was alive to refute that contention or to sue for libel.) What is clear from interviews with sources close to each is that both were devastated by their loss and each was determined to help the other through. Bobby “always came, unasked, at times like that,” Jackie would say later. “Because of him, no one ever gave up.” And fifty years after the fact, Ethel concedes it might well have been Jackie who lifted Bobby from his haze.
There was one memory about Jack that Bobby couldn’t share even with Jackie and that tormented him on his sleepless nights: He suspected that Jack’s assassination was motivated by actions he had taken as attorney general, in public or, worse still, out of sight and with questionable authority. He had no doubt that the gunman was Lee Harvey Oswald—or “Harvey Lee Oswald,” as the press first called him and as Bobby would always remember him—but he didn’t know who might have put Oswald up to it. Was it payback from Fidel Castro? Was it Oswald acting alone but thinking he was doing the bidding of the Cuban leader he idolized? Was it anti-Castro Cubans—with help, perhaps, from their CIA handlers who were master liquidators—who hated the Kennedys for abandoning them at the Bay of Pigs? Could it have been the work of “Screw” Andrews or some other hoodlum Bobby had locked up, or more likely a mob higher-up like Mooney Giancana? What about Jimmy Hoffa, who had promised to get even and knew just the hired guns to do it? What if the Teamsters boss had decided that the sweetest revenge was making Bobby’s life a living hell by murdering the person he loved the most and making Bobby feel responsible? Hoffa called the notion “nonsense,” which it likely was, but Justice investigator Walter Sheridan told the attorney general that Hoffa was at a restaurant when he heard about the assassination and “he got up on the table and cheered.”
There is no way to know how much those suspicions bedeviled Bobby, but questions he put to Sheridan, John McCone, Haynes Johnson, and others leave little doubt they were on his mind. So did his saying, to people he trusted such as Guthman, “It should have been me.” Yet the FBI and other agencies involved weren’t interested in pursuing such conspiracy theories, nor was the new president. The only way left for Bobby to resolve the underlying who and why of his brother’s assassination was to unmask the very stories he was determined to hide forever. And as difficult as it was to comprehend the senseless act of a crazed assassin, a purposeful one that bore his fingerprints would have been intolerable.
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BOBBY NEVER HAD to speculate about where he stood with LBJ, who would play even more of a defining role in his life than earlier enemies like Jimmy Hoffa. The animus was evident from the instant they met in the Senate cafeteria a decade before, and it was reinforced during their brushes the day after JFK’s assassination. Every time the two had interacted during the Kennedy administration, their relationship suffered. New Frontiersmen mockingly referred to the vice president as Uncle Cornpone. He was invited to Hickory Hill parties at the last minute if at all, and he was consigned to what Ethel called the losers’ table. During one fete he didn’t attend, the attorney general’s friends gave Bobby a Lyndon Johnson voodoo doll and a set of pins. Bobby also had a long list of substantive gripes against the vice president—from his advising JFK to delay filing civil rights legislation, to his failing to mediate between dueling Democrats in Texas, which is why Jack made his fateful trip to Dallas. LBJ blamed Bobby for displacing him as JFK’s second in charge and never missed a chance to belittle the attorney general. “John Kennedy and I had achieved real friendship,” Johnson wrote in his memoir. “I doubt his younger brother and I would have arrived at genuine friendship if we had worked together for a lifetime. Too much separated us—too much history, too many differences in temperament.”
That gulf was on graphic display after a White House dinner dance in 1961, when a group of officials gathered in the First Family’s upstairs kitchen to scramble some eggs. LBJ crowded in on RFK, saying, “Bobby, you do not like me. Your brother likes me. Your sister-in-law likes me. Your daddy likes me. But you don’t like me. Now, why? Why don’t you like me?” Charles Spalding, who was standing nearby, remembers that “Bobby agreed to the accuracy of all that” and “was enjoying” watching LBJ grovel. Finally the vice president tried a new tack: “I know why you don’t like me. You think I attacked your father [at the 1960 Democratic Convention]….I never did attack your father and I wouldn’t and I always liked you and admired you. But you’re angry with me and you’ve always been upset with me.” Doubting his own memory, the next morning Bobby asked Seigenthaler to check old newspaper clippings that confirmed that LBJ had in fact smeared Joe Kennedy as thinking “Hitler was right.” Bobby’s conclusion, as he told an interviewer later, was that LBJ “lies continuously about everything. In every conversation I have with him, he lies. As I’ve said, he lies even when he doesn’t have to lie.”
Bobby was right that Johnson perpetually shaded the facts, but so did Bobby. LBJ came closer to the truth when he said the two men were simply too different to get along. Although each had been weaned on the old politics of party loyalties and backroom deals, that had remained LBJ’s comfort zone while Bobby, seventeen years his junior and an early adherent of the New Politics movement, enthusiastically embraced new media such as television, new ways of reaching voters such as scientific polling, and building an entirely new base of support among America’s rambunctious youth. Bobby had to learn by observation about the plight of the poor and minorities, whereas both were in the bones of LBJ, who’d grown up dirt-poor in the Texas Hill Country. The bombastic Texan pawed and hugged his listeners as he exercised his electric capacity to persuade, moving into just that personal space that the restrained New Englander felt should not be violated. The attorney general, meanwhile, disproved the new president’s self-justifying theory that intellectuals couldn’t get anything done. Bobby was a thinker as well as a doer, glib along with direct. Perhaps what separated the two came down to Southwest Texas State Teachers’ College versus what LBJ called “the Harvards,” his dismissive term for the Kennedys and their East Coast chums. In the end, each made the other recoil.
But Bobby shared more than he admitted with Lyndon, as was the case with all of his enemies. Both knew well how to count votes, and how to double-deal when they had to. Each would disarm and dismay conservative allies by moving to the left on issues like civil rights and poverty. Both were strong-willed and thin-skinned. Neither forgot a slight or forgave an adversary. Each seemed to have been put on earth to annoy the other. LBJ blamed Bobby for blocking his getting closer to JFK, failing to see that JFK had been amused by his vice president but had never embraced him. For RFK, Johnson became the scapegoat for his grief and anger over losing his brother, and he failed to see that no successor could ever have filled that sacred space. One last thing united America’s two most closely chronicled political personalities and as a consequence divided them: Both saw themselves as the legitimate heir to the JFK legacy. The other, by definition, became the wicked usurper.
For the 1,036 days of JFK’s presidency, Bobby had the upper hand if not the senior title, with LBJ chafing, in the words of his young aide Bill Moyers, like “a great horse in a very small corral.” Gunshots in Dallas flipped those roles. LBJ was now the one with the power and the capacity to make underlings quake, leaving RFK with only the authority the president chose to confer. It wouldn’t take long for that turnaround to manifest itself, beginning with a series
of run-ins the day after the assassination.
LBJ’s advisers pushed him to move into the Oval Office that morning, even as JFK’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln was trying to move out the dead president’s belongings. When Bobby stopped by to see how things were going, Lincoln wailed, “Do you know he asked me to be out by 9:30?” To Bobby, whose world had been upended less than twenty-four hours before, that was as inconceivable as LBJ’s earlier inquiry about his swearing-in. “Oh, no!” he said to Lincoln, then he found the president in the hallway. Johnson tried to reassure Bobby that he needed him in his cabinet even more than Jack had. Bobby said there was something more immediate to address: the time it would take to remove JFK’s furniture. “Can you wait” until noon? he asked. LBJ: “Well, of course.” Johnson in fact delayed three full days, but the encounter made him see himself through Bobby’s eyes—as an unfeeling oaf. To the president, that was strike one against the attorney general.
Strike two came that afternoon, when Johnson held the first gathering of the cabinet. Bobby hadn’t planned to go. “By this time I was rather fed up with [Johnson],” he explained. But “I went by and Mac Bundy said it was very important that I come in. So I went.” It was an impossible situation, with JFK’s furniture still strewn across the corridor and his corpse half a building away. Sitting in his chair was an imposter who had had no presence at all in earlier cabinet meetings.*3 Bobby entered the room looking nearly as forlorn as he felt. Several presidential aides stood, one reaching for his hand, another patting his back. LBJ was in the middle of remarks that he continued, still seated, as soon as Bobby sat. “None of us in this room can really express the sadness we all feel,” Johnson said. “Yet we have work to do. And must do it….I want you all to stay on. I need you.” He knew how rough it must be for the attorney general, but he was convinced that Bobby had come late intentionally and with the aim of upstaging him. “During all of that period,” LBJ would say later, “I think [Bobby] seriously considered whether he would let me be President, whether he should really take the position [that] the Vice President didn’t automatically move in.”
