Bobby Kennedy

by Larry Tye

  When he shall die

  Take him and cut him out in little stars

  And he will make the face of heaven so fine

  That all the world will be in love with night,

  And pay no worship to the garish sun.

  Had he ended on this emotional high point it would have been enough. It also would have had the world speculating—as many did anyway—whether, if JFK was the dead hero who lit up the heavens, Lyndon Johnson must be the garish sun. But Bobby was at his generous best that night, intending not to demean but to honor, and not just his brother but his brother’s chosen number two. So, in lines that the history books have forgotten, he went on to implore the delegates and the nation that “the same efforts and the same energy and the same dedication that was given to President John F. Kennedy must be given to President Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey.” Afterward, he begged off talking to the press and sat for fifteen minutes on a fire escape outside the convention hall, quietly weeping.

  —

  JOURNALISTS TRUMPETED THAT Democratic National Convention appearance as the moment when Bobby began to arise from his post-assassination despair and despondency, and they were right. “He had, in a way, become his own man in the sunshine of Atlantic City,” wrote Stan Opotowsky in the New York Post. “Bobby Kennedy seemed to be trying to talk himself out of the trance of grief that has held him since November,” agreed McGrory, who was herself shaken enough by the murder to declare that, with JFK gone, “we will never laugh again.” His raucous embrace by the delegates surely registered, and helped him dry his wounded tears. Yet misery that crushing couldn’t vanish that fast. Anyone who followed Bobby during those blackest months of his life observed many such moments that together pointed a way out.

  The first turning point had come the previous March, when he reluctantly agreed to speak at a Friendly Sons of St. Patrick dinner at the Hotel Casey in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He hadn’t delivered a talk before a large domestic audience since Jack’s death and he wasn’t sure he was ready. But the ten thousand women, men, and children who lined his route were, and proved it by standing in place for an hour despite the wet snowfall. Bobby had planned to address his brother’s legacy, closing with a poem written when Ireland was in comparable mourning over the death of its patriot Owen Roe O’Neill in 1649. The ballad ended,

  We’re sheep without a shepherd

  When the snow shuts up the sky –

  Oh! Why did you leave us, Owen?

  Why did you die?

  Ed Guthman scratched the poem from Bobby’s notes and the attorney general asked why. Guthman: “Because you’ll never get through it.” Bobby: “I’ve been practicing in front of a mirror. I can’t get through it yet—but I will!” And he did, Guthman recalled, “just barely.” So touched was the attorney general by his audience’s reaction, with many husky sons of Erin openly weeping, that on his plane ride home “he made an irrevocable decision about his future,” Guthman said. “Somehow, he would remain in public service.”

  Bobby didn’t know precisely what he would do, but he was slowly remembering what it was that moved him, as the journalist Ben Bradlee observed that summer when he traveled halfway across the country with him. “We spent two hours at the dedication of a Catholic Home for the Aged in Kansas City,” Bradlee recalled. “Almost half of that time Bobby spent upstairs (away from TV cameras and other reporters) in a ward for the terminally ill, sitting alone at the bedside of a woman whose eyes were tight shut, whose death rattle was the only sign that life still existed in her frail body. I watched with tears in my eyes as the ‘ruthless’ Bobby Kennedy stroked this unknown woman’s hand, and spoke to her in a near whisper.”

  Shortly afterward, Bobby was off on another trip that reminded him of his engagement with the world. The Polish People’s Republic wasn’t quite prepared for this Kennedy brother who stormed onto its scene in the summer of 1964. Like the rest of the Soviet Bloc, Poland was on tenterhooks then, with the relatively liberal Khrushchev about to be deposed and reformers certain that whatever apparatchik came next wouldn’t be good. Bobby, by contrast, personified the brash, fresh leader most Poles dreamed of as he climbed onto the roof of whatever car he was riding in, including the limousine of a flustered U.S. Ambassador John Moors Cabot, often lifting Ethel and their eldest children up with him. He serenaded crowds that never left his side with an improvised “When Polish Eyes Are Smiling.” He met with the Catholic primate, the government’s principal adversary, and reached out to disaffected youths after Cabot had specifically warned they were a “nightmare to Polish Communist leadership.” His trip was “nonofficial” and there was no need to pretend he cared about protocol now that his brother wasn’t president and he was on the outs with the new leader of the Western world. Asked in Cracow if he wanted to be president of Poland, Bobby quipped, “No…I think I’ll run for mayor of Cracow.” In the short run “the Kennedy visit certainly did harm to Polish–United States relations,” wrote Arthur J. Olsen, the New York Times correspondent in Eastern Europe and later a diplomat himself. “In the long run the Kennedy invasion of Poland may well be remembered as an act of unorthodox statesmanship. Using deliberate shock tactics, he assaulted the complacencies of diplomats and Communist functionaries….It was a bold and conscious response to his brother’s appeal: ‘Let us begin.’ ” It also bolstered Bobby in finding his own new beginning.

  Religion helped, too, but on his terms, not the Church’s. He kept a missal beside him in the car and thumbed through to prayers he found consoling. Instead of attending mass mainly on Sundays and days of obligation, as had been his adult routine, he was in the pew nearly every day. His faith helped him internalize the assassination in a way that, over time, freed his spirit. Shortly after Jack’s death, a friend and former president of the University of Notre Dame, Father John Cavanaugh, came to Hickory Hill for dinner. Ethel asked him, “If there is someone who has lived a great, good, wonderful life and died suddenly, and has no opportunity for confession, don’t we know that God is good enough for that person not to have to deal with purgatory?” She wanted assurance that Jack was in heaven, but the prelate equivocated. That wasn’t good enough for Bobby, recalls Seigenthaler, and he said “not in anger but not in a friendly way, ‘I don’t think that’s how God gets his kicks.’…Bobby was saying, ‘Ethel and I agree that Jack’s sitting up there on the right hand of the throne. He’s not suffering in purgatory.’ ”

  Bobby continued as attorney general, but he found it difficult to reconnect with most of his old passions. The war on organized crime had lost its appeal and its commander. So, too, the campaign to dislodge Castro was fizzling out. The one issue that mattered enough to pull him out of his mist even temporarily was civil rights. Months after the assassination, LBJ deputized Bobby to steer a beefed-up version of JFK’s bill through a viciously divided Congress, knowing not only that his presence would remind reluctant legislators how much his brother had wanted the law, but also that if it died on Capitol Hill, Bobby would have to share the blame. (That seemed fitting, since JFK had involved LBJ for the same reasons.) The new president kept his word, giving Bobby free rein in setting the tactics for passage and working out with congressional leaders the final legislative language. At that summer’s signing ceremony the president gave a handful of pens to the attorney general, although neither could disguise the awkwardness of what should have been a triumphal moment.

  That law, the most far-reaching ever on civil rights, demonstrated what LBJ and RFK could do when they worked together, but it also highlighted the tragic conflict that kept them from doing more. “Had they ever been congenial to paving over past wounds, and real or imagined slights, and if from this congeniality there had been built an alliance between the two,” lamented LBJ’s confidant Jack Valenti, “it is likely that these two men, linch-pinned together, could have constructed a political combination unbeatable by any known political force.”

  Much of Bobby’s energy in those months went to his family. He
spent time with his grieving mother and infirm father, although not as much as he had in the past or would in the future. He was an uncle and surrogate father to Jack’s two young children as well as father to his own eight, the youngest of whom was born just four and a half months before JFK died. He was a friend and perhaps more to Jackie. He was also polishing his brother’s legacy, the way he always had. To Jack, the New Frontier existed mainly as a campaign slogan; to Bobby it became a rallying cry for the young, here and abroad, whom he urged to reach for “new frontiers of education, science and technology.” Where the inheritance was even thinner, Bobby made whatever leaps were required. Finding a notepad on which JFK, at his last cabinet meeting, had scratched the word “poverty” several times and circled it, Bobby said it was a sign of the president’s determination to make the poor the priority they hadn’t been in his first three years. He saved the note, framed it, and displayed it in his Justice Department office.

  There were, however, two matters even Bobby avoided. One was the notion that the Kennedy administration had achieved the glory of King Arthur’s Camelot. Jackie wanted to believe it, and Bobby was too gallant to contradict. “At night before we’d go to sleep…we had an old Victrola. Jack liked to play some records…the song he loved most came at the very end of this record, the last side of Camelot, sad Camelot:…‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot,’ ” the widow told Teddy White, who wrote it into legend in Life magazine. So, White added, “the epitaph on the Kennedy administration became Camelot—a magic moment in American history, when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers and poets met at the White House, and the barbarians beyond the walls held back.” While the Kennedy administration did offer hope, White later admitted that comparing it to Arthur’s enchanted reign was “a misreading of history. The magic Camelot of John F. Kennedy never existed.”

  The dream, however real it was, ended with an assassin’s gunshot. The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy—known as the Warren Commission, after its chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren—was determined to explain the who, how, and why of the killing, and Bobby was equally determined not to help. Aside from LBJ and Defense Secretary McNamara, he was the highest-ranking official who was let off the hook, presumably in deference to his grief, although Jackie did testify. Bobby said publicly that he didn’t believe there had been a conspiracy, that he hadn’t read and wouldn’t read the Warren Commission report but had been briefed on it, and that he agreed with the commission that “Oswald was solely responsible for what happened.” That apparently satisfied Warren and the other seven commissioners, at least two of whom, according to LBJ, had been named at Bobby’s behest.

  Half a century later there is still a torrid debate over what Bobby thought and felt. “He publicly supported the Warren Commission report but privately he was dismissive of it,” said Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who was nine when his uncle Jack died. The attorney general, his son added, was “fairly convinced” that others were involved, maybe the Mafia. Ted Kennedy saw it differently. After a four-hour briefing by Warren, Ted “reported to Bobby that I accepted the commission’s report and thought he should too. Bobby agreed readily. He did not want to continue to investigate Jack’s death.” Others say, with conviction but without proof, that Bobby privately briefed Warren, launched his own quiet investigation, and would have done more if he ever became president. His silence made such speculation inevitable. There is no question he was hurting, but so were Jackie and Ted. To do their job, the commissioners needed to know everything Bobby could tell them about the enemies he and Jack had made—from Cuba to the Cosa Nostra—and where to look for conspirators. With the president dead, nobody but the attorney general had all that knowledge, and he wouldn’t share it.

  Just as the Warren Commission was making its last edits before presenting its 889-page opus to President Johnson, on September 3, 1964, Bobby handed the president his resignation as attorney general.*7 Three years and nine months had passed since his brother named him to the post, which was longer than he had planned to stay and tested the limits of his and LBJ’s mutual tolerance. He got a five-minute standing ovation that morning from thirty-five hundred students at Washington’s Cardozo High School, who had heard the news and greeted him with signs plastered across their stadium reading WE SHALL MISS YOU BOBBY and, even better, WE’LL MEET AGAIN. He then spent an hour with the president and shared a farewell lunch with fellow cabinet members. At day’s end he met in the Justice Department courtyard with a thousand staffers. Their task, he told them, was “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.” His choice of words and themes suggested the transformation in this man, who had come to the department baring his own savage determination and barely recognizing the name of Aeschylus, the Greek playwright he was quoting now.

  Reading the Greeks was Jackie’s idea but something Bobby was ready for. Their tragic and skeptical view of the world fit his needs now better than his more stoic and rigid Catholic faith. So did the French philosopher Albert Camus’s existentialism (Camus preferred to call it absurdism), which helped make room for doubt in an Irish American known for his self-certainty. Both men’s epitaphs could have read “Live fast, die hard.” Aeschylus, meanwhile, seemed to be speaking directly to Bobby when he wrote, “Take heart. Suffering, when it climbs highest, lasts but a little time.” Bobby would now sit alone in his room reading until the pages were dog-eared in Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. He and Jack had kept a daybook of quotes that moved them for use in speeches. Now Bobby did it on his own from readings that had progressed beyond his old war and adventure tales to biography and history. There was more poetry now and less football. For the rest of his life he would habitually stuff a paperback into his coat pocket or briefcase, some new to him and others that he liked enough to reread repeatedly, his lips moving as he did. Aides thought he was staring into his lap until they looked closer and saw the essays of Emerson or Thoreau, or poetry by Shakespeare or Tennyson. It was one more thing to which he came late—“Hey,” a journalist friend imagined him saying, “they’ve got books now?”—yet once he did he couldn’t get enough.

  The readings were a search for missing meaning. For the last dozen years, since that first Senate campaign, Joe Kennedy’s ambitions for Jack, and Jack’s for himself, had defined Bobby. He had become a masterful coach, but the game plan had been laid out long before, from seeking ever higher offices to giving back to the country. Bobby rallied the loyal minions, garnered votes, and suppressed his own competitive drive for the sake of the family. He hated on its behalf, too, although never as ruthlessly as his father. Life was often cruel, as when it took too young Joe Jr. and Kathleen, but everyone, Bobby especially, ritualistically stepped up a notch in response to calamity. Even Joe’s stroke was surmountable; by then Bobby had internalized his father’s aspirations, and the ways and means of getting there.

  Jack’s death was different. It seemed more arbitrary and unfair, plunging Bobby into a pit out of which he thought he’d never climb. It took away the one friend to whom he could tell everything. Nearly every day had begun and ended with a call to his brother. “It’s strange,” he confided to a journalist, “to think that you can’t just pick up the phone.” Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets ruined that and everything else. Lyndon Johnson was president now, and the Kennedys, not just Jack but Bobby, too, were part of the past. He lost his sense of purpose and his clout. The Get Hoffa and Get Castro squads lasted for a while, but the trauma had loosed Bobby’s moorings, quelled his passions, and made him question even his faith. This was the one death he couldn’t help but admit into his life. Part of his soul had succumbed in Dallas.

  Still, he wasn’t rebuilding entirely from scratch, however much it felt that way. “Bobby Kennedy, after November 1963, was like a landscape riven by an earthquake, familiar landmarks shattered,” said his friend Goodwin. “Yet
the reconfigured land is composed of the same elements of stone and soil that abided there before the earth shook.” The values and qualities that would define him were present from the beginning, but they fully bloomed only after his father’s disability and his brother’s death. Since childhood, he had been quietly incorporating aspects of those closest to him—Joe’s determination, Rose’s grace, Jack and Joe Jr.’s ambition, and the warmth of the Kennedy girls. Now this man so shaped by others was reshaping himself, the way the existentialists said he could. He could finally ask what he wanted and needed. His public persona finally began to reflect the gentleness that family and friends say they had always known.

  Most people have this kind of identity crisis in their teens. The questions are harder when they are raised at age thirty-eight by a man unused to internal dialogue. “Jack has traveled in that speculative area where doubt lives. Bobby does not travel there,” their friend Charles Spalding had said the summer before the assassination. Now Bobby had more doubts than he believed he could handle, and he looked for answers not just in books but in his heart and his actions. The introspection and retrospection would be ongoing, and what he found freed him, for the first time, to be himself.

  The Bobby Kennedy who emerged from that season of gloom was more fatalistic, having seen how fast he could lose what he most cherished. Rather than leading him to give up, sensing his mortality made him even more impatient to get things done while he had time. He understood the influence he had forfeited with the president’s death, but he knew, too, that becoming the number one Kennedy meant an opening to the kind of national leverage exercised by his father and brother. The loss of his brother also left him more nuanced. A palette that had been entirely blacks and whites now included shades of gray that reflected the ambiguities of the real world. “The pendulum,” said Larry O’Brien, “just swings wider for him than it does for most people.” Added Kenny O’Donnell: “He was not a simple man but many different simple men.”