by Larry Tye
Even without Jackie, the national and foreign media couldn’t get enough of the race. The 1964 presidential campaign that year lacked both suspense and appealing candidates. Goldwater never stood a chance, and Johnson was neither eloquent nor likable despite his popularity. American culture was in transition, hovering somewhere between its 1950s-like fascination with the new Mustang muscle cars and the heavenly Mary Poppins on the one hand, and on the other LBJ’s call to create a Great Society that would root out poverty and racism. The struggle for the Senate seat from New York offered an early hint of that generational battle and pivot in the country’s tastes and worries. Here was Bobby Kennedy, a boyish-looking thirty-eight-year-old, making his maiden run against a less politically astute sixty-four-year-old incumbent whose ruddy complexion and bulging girth made him seem even older. One critic called the former attorney general a “glamour puss.” Everywhere he went he would draw stares, then a dawning recognition, and finally a shriek: “It’s Bobby!” Keating, by contrast, was seldom noticed and never hailed by his constituents or the army of reporters based in Manhattan. The national stakes, however, were what really made the press and public pay attention. Bobby bore the mantle of a prince in exile, and a win here would be interpreted as a first step toward reclaiming the White House. A loss by Keating, in a year when the GOP had taken a sharp turn rightward, could be a death knell for his breed of Republican moderate.
The Washington Post and other faraway news outlets were editorializing on the race as early as August, and many others weighed in as it neared its end in November. From the isolated perches of their newsrooms, editorial writers saw Bobby more as a ruthless carpetbagger and an echo of his brother than as a flesh-and-blood politician. New Yorkers and the nation might have been swept up in Camelot nostalgia but not these stalwart editors, who would prove their independence by sounding their warnings. “We believe that a man who is not entitled to vote in the state has no business being elected to the U.S. Senate from that state,” wrote The Saturday Evening Post. “If Robert Kennedy had really wanted to further the plans and ideals of his late brother,” scolded the liberal Nation magazine, “he could have served them gallantly by running against Harry Byrd, who is out for a sixth term in Virginia and who stands as a roadblock to most of the things John F. Kennedy cherished. Robert has been living in Virginia; he could have stayed there and been above reproach.” And the grayest of ladies, The New York Times, endorsed Keating, explaining that “nothing that has happened in the campaign thus far has altered our previous estimate of Robert F. Kennedy as an able, purposeful young man who has rendered distinguished service as Attorney General, but who is now attempting to use New York and the Senatorial office in a relentless quest for greater political power.”
Most of the street reporters covering the campaign rendered a decidedly different verdict. The more they saw him, the more they trusted him, and they liked that he broke the familiar molds of politicians. He was less polished and more spontaneous. The hard-as-nails shell they had heard about protected a deep, reassuring tenderness. He listened, learned, and changed in ways journalists believed were nearly impossible for officeholders. It had been that way with beat reporters at the Justice Department, and it would be that way during his run for the White House. The scribes took care not to reflect that embrace too overtly in their stories, for fear of violating their pledge of neutrality, but they subtly conveyed it anyway, in books, interviews, and between the lines of newspaper columns. In the process they reinforced the evolving adage that Bobby was easy to hate at a distance and difficult not to love up close.
“Who is he, this rich man’s son who happened to be the brother of a President and now wants everything in sight because of it? Who is he to be coming in to New York just because Lyndon Johnson didn’t make him Vice President?” asked Jimmy Breslin, the dean of up-close journalism. The New York–based columnist answered his own question: “Where is there a Democrat in the whole state worth running for an office as big as Senator? Where is there one? There isn’t….Why shouldn’t we have a man like Bobby Kennedy around here?” Norman Mailer, even crustier than Breslin and less likely to jump on any bandwagon, made known his feelings in the weekly Village Voice that he cofounded: “I think something came into him with the death of his brother. I think Bobby Kennedy has come a pilgrim’s distance from that punk who used to play Junior D. A. for Joe McCarthy and grabbed headlines by riding Jimmy Hoffa’s back. Something compassionate, something witty, has come into the face. Something of sinew….I’d rather go this way and be wrong, than vote the other way trying to stop a possibility with a non-entity.”
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FOR MOST CANDIDATES, election day is a time for sleeping in, biting nails, and looking for something to occupy them at the end of a campaign filled with preoccupations. That was one more way Bobby stood out. He was up at dawn for breakfast with the West Side Democratic Club, many of whose members still hadn’t warmed to him, then off to thank his young headquarters staff on Forty-Second Street. A trip to the zoo with Ethel and their eight children showed that this family weaned on politics hadn’t lost its sense of humor. “Please do not feed the candidate,” Ethel chided when Bobby bought a bag of peanuts for the kids. When Kerry, who’d just turned five, planted a kiss on her father’s cheek, he laughed: “I told you—only when there are cameramen around!” No matter his lightness, there were two things this candidate knew better than anyone else: Kennedys didn’t lose elections that mattered. And for all his amazing track record in managing elections, he had yet to prove he could win one for himself.
Thankfully for Bobby, more New Yorkers agreed with columnists Breslin and Mailer than with their editorial-writing colleagues. He beat his Republican rival by 719,693 votes,*6 which was 335,000 more than Jack’s margin of victory in the state in 1960. He captured just 60 percent of the Jewish vote, a full nine points less than Keating’s opponent in a closer Senate race six years earlier, but he made up for that by winning easily in black and Puerto Rican areas and stanching the defection of Italian Americans. He did less well than expected in New York City but better than Democrats generally did in Republican counties upstate. Overall, his majority was the biggest a New York Democrat had managed, for senator or governor, since 1934. “This vote,” he said that night, “is a mandate to continue the efforts begun by my brother four years ago.” It was that, but it was also a demarcation between his past as Jack’s kid brother and his future as his own man.
The White House didn’t have to claim credit for Bobby’s win, since the numbers seemed to speak for themselves, and pundits echoed that message. Johnson beat Goldwater by 2.7 million votes in New York State, a historic edge and, more to the point, nearly four times bigger than Kennedy’s. “If it was a race just between the two of them, and no Goldwater, Keating would’ve won easily,” says Eugene Rossides, campaign manager for the spurned incumbent. The New York Times editorial board agreed, arguing that it was the “anti-Goldwater sentiment resulting in a Johnson landslide that carried [Kennedy] to victory.” The paper couldn’t resist getting in a last dig: “This was a victory not only over the incumbent, Senator Kenneth B. Keating, but also over the old tradition that a member of Congress should come from the state or district he represents.”
Bobby’s boosters read the results differently. “Kennedy did not need the Johnson landslide to win,” said Gwirtzman. “The difference between the Johnson and the Kennedy vote…was comprised exclusively of Republican voters who bolted the Goldwater ticket to vote for Johnson, and then returned to their party to vote for Keating. Kennedy did not get these voters, did not expect to get them; and thus there was no coattail effect in the Senate election in New York in 1964.”
Bobby himself had it both ways, as was still his wont. When LBJ took time out of his historic election triumph to call and congratulate the senator-elect, RFK was gracious. Johnson: “Let’s stay as close together as [JFK]’d want us to….Ain’t nobody going to divide us….I’m proud of you.” Kennedy: “Thanks for y
our help….[It] made a hell of a difference.” But in a look-back with a reporter dissecting all the factors that had aided his campaign, Bobby mentioned just about everything—the empty-chair debate, his TV commercials, Keating’s abortive bid to paint him as a Nazi sympathizer—but not the visits by the president or vice president. In his nationally televised victory speech on election night he thanked just about everyone, from Ethel to former New York governor Averell Harriman to Steve Smith. But he made no mention of the man he’d thanked privately minutes before for making a hell of a difference, and who had. “As Bobby looked up from his notes, I found myself silently urging him to speak: C’mon, Bobby, let’s hear it. [But] the name I wanted so much to hear never came,” recalled Jack Valenti, a Johnson aide who had traveled to New York with the president and now was watching the election results with him on TV at a hotel in Austin. “President Johnson made no outward sign that the omission had registered….But I certainly felt the absence of Bobby’s appreciation for the hard stumping the president had done on his behalf. To be honest, I felt ill.”
If that was an example of the soon-to-be senator at his least forgiving, the rest of his victory lap that night revealed his genial best. He made a sentimental visit at 3:30 in the morning to the Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan, where the campaign had kicked off nine weeks before. The fishmongers gave him a halibut to hold and he joked that “it smells better here than it did two months ago.” After three hours’ sleep he was off and running again, this time to catch a flight to Glens Falls. “Well, it’s all over,” the reporter Terence Smith said as Bobby was climbing aboard the plane. Bobby: “Yes, now I can go back to being ruthless.” When he finally landed in the upstate town that had waited up half the night for him in September, and that he’d promised to revisit win or lose, the crowd was nearly as large. “You befriended me,” he said, and they had, giving him a 555-vote margin. “Bobby said you looked nice in your pajamas,” Ethel added. “But you look nice dressed too.” His next-to-last stop was Boston, where he spent two hours at the hospital bedside of his brother Ted, who’d been reelected by 900,000 votes even as he lay in an orthopedic frame with a broken back. A photographer chided Bobby for standing so close to the bed that he cast a shadow on his brother, prompting Ted to chime in: “It’ll be the same way in Washington.” Bobby: “He only says that because he got a bigger vote than I did.”
Bobby had one more person to thank, this time like all the others. Joe had come back to Manhattan to be near his boy on election day, and Bobby insisted on taking his father to dinner before the Kennedy elder returned to Cape Cod. With help from his nurse, Joe dressed in black tie and dinner suit and slicked back his silver hair. When his son arrived he bowed his head low in his wheelchair and extended his hand to the senator-elect. Bobby bent down for a hug, whispering, “We made it, Dad! We made it!”
They had made history. The Kennedys were the first family ever to send three brothers to the U.S. Senate, and the second to have brothers serving simultaneously*7—a tribute not just to Joe and Rose’s ambitions but to their sons’ talents. His two and a half months of campaigning had also transformed Bobby, who, unlike Ted, was a reluctant candidate and an unlikely politician. Having to ask the public for their votes proved the best therapy for his broken life, tugging him out of the last of his post-Dallas depression and unlocking him in ways that surprised even him. He loved battling Republicans again, not to mention old enemies such as Jimmy Hoffa and Roy Cohn. He enjoyed being the front man, and would have enjoyed it even more if he hadn’t had to double as campaign manager. “Being clawed and pushed by the crowds” was the least fun part, he said, not surprising for a man who loathed being touched and was energized by the idea, but not the bruising reality, of the mobs he drew. His favorite election experience? “Getting away from Washington. Getting to know upstate New York and the people who live here.” Coming from any other candidate that would have sounded disingenuous, but Bobby offered his reflections under an agreement that they’d be published after the election. This ultimate product of Washington really did loathe its phoniness. This naturally reticent man had actually learned to like interacting with a public that couldn’t get enough of him.
He hadn’t lost his sharp edges during those nine weeks barnstorming the Empire State, but he bantered in a way that made it clear he took his message more seriously than himself. Told that California had displaced New York as America’s most populous state, “I turned to my wife and I said, ‘What can we do?’ So I moved to New York, and in just one day I increased the population by ten and a half….My opponent has just sixty days to match that record.” He threw this bone to the tradesmen at the Fulton Market: “I have eight children, and we eat fish every Friday. From now on, we’ll eat fish twice a week. That’s what we’re going to do for the fishing industry of New York.” The ethnic politics that had confounded him now brought him joy as he marched with the Italians to honor Christopher Columbus, with the Poles on behalf of General Pulaski, and alongside the Germans for General von Steuben. He put on a yarmulke during a visit to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, and emerging from a meeting with a dozen rabbis he quipped, “Are you sure those guys were rabbis? I didn’t see a single beard in the crowd.”
He was changing in deeper ways, too. Defining his own public identity meant clarifying his own beliefs, as opposed to those that had come from Jack. Few could see those critical differences even when the two were working side by side. Both men were pragmatic, but Bobby was more willing to experiment with radical solutions and spend political capital. Both talked about promoting Negro rights and battling poverty, but Bobby felt the injustice on a gut level and lost sleep over it in ways that his imperturbable and cerebral brother never did. Bobby also embraced contradiction in ways that neither Jack nor Teddy wanted to or could. His realism butted up against his romanticism even as the existentialist in him looked for ways to coexist with the politician. He was half ice, half fire. How, observers wondered, could someone so shy be so intimidating? Was it possible to love both Albert Camus and roughhouse football? “Robert Kennedy’s motto,” said the Village Voice’s Jack Newfield, “could have been, ‘Do not understand me too quickly.’…His most basic characteristics were simple, intense, and in direct conflict with each other. He was constantly at war with himself.”
That conflict and growth were there to read in Bobby’s latest book, a thin volume called The Pursuit of Justice that, with help from a Cornell professor, had been rushed out in time for the 1964 campaign but had no impact on it.*8 Like all his writings, this book steered clear of personal disclosures and lacked even the candor of his Kennedy Library interviews on Jack’s presidency. It had a pontifical style and political purpose, but still managed to be revealing between the lines. He remained an anticommunist, but he wrote that “the Communist Party as a political organization is of no danger to the United States.” He had not changed his mind on Vietnam, but he said, “As long as the instruments of peace are available, war is madness.” He remained a child of the establishment, but an increasingly rebellious one. “Change,” he explained, “means that someone’s professional feathers will be ruffled, that a glass-topped desk might be moved to another office or abandoned, that pet programs might die. Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.”
Because it was in an unremitting state of becoming, Bobby’s ideology was challenging to pin down at any given moment. The evolution had begun when he toured the world with Justice Douglas in 1955 and continued as he traveled the country during the 1960 campaign, talking to and trying to understand the disenfranchised people of the Soviet Caucasus and the poverty-stricken residents of West Virginia. His developing worldview took shape in his years as attorney general, when he learned not just how bad things were for Negro Americans but that he could help. He would make these people and issues his cause as a United States senator and later as a candidate for president.
There was one more lens through which to follow the permutations in B
obby Kennedy: the men he called heroes. Paladins had always been important to him, starting with his father and continuing with his brothers, Joe Jr., then Jack. The two Roosevelts—Teddy and Franklin—were on his list from the first; he saw them as tough leaders who got things done. He revered soldiers, too: Maxwell Taylor, for his willingness to back JFK and defy his fellow chiefs of staff; Douglas Mac Arthur, for his courage and showmanship; and Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, for showing how to wage guerrilla warfare. But while he still defended Joe McCarthy, he no longer considered him a hero. The same went for Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman, an ally of both McCarthy and Joe Kennedy who was known as the American pope and whose archconservative views of politics and the Church were now less appealing than those of the real pope, the Vatican II reformer John XXIII. Bobby was split on the Hoovers, continuing to admire Herbert but coming to hate J. Edgar, whom he called “senile” and “rather a psycho.” There was room now on his mantel and bookshelf not just for the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, but for revolutionaries such as Mao Tse Tung and Che Guevara.
As he prepared to take his seat in the U.S. Senate, he held in less regard his early mentors there like McClellan and McCarthy. His new exemplars were from an earlier era, and none were still alive. George Norris, a Nebraska Republican, backed the New Deal, helped create the Tennessee Valley Authority, and confounded Democrats and Republicans with his fierce independence. Another Republican New Dealer, Robert La Follette, Jr., was an ally of labor and civil libertarians and a founder of the Wisconsin Progressive Party. And the Democrat Robert Wagner of New York, an anti-Nazi German whose son would become New York City’s mayor, authored bills to outlaw the lynchings that were rampant across the South and to create a National Labor Relations Board. All three senators were Bobby’s kind of insurgent. All were patient enough to do the gritty work Bobby knew was needed to make a difference in that deliberative body. Most important to Robert F. Kennedy, all set a standard nobler than the norm for politics and politicians—as crusaders against what Norris characterized as “wrong and evil” in the affairs of the government and the nation.
