by Larry Tye
Bobby did, in fact, continue to work with political power brokers the way the Kennedys always had. But the newspaper failed to see that he’d always been a reformer, although never a “squishy” one, and that he would continue to push for changes that he felt would help the state as well as himself. That was what he’d done in 1965, when he tried to get more reform-minded legislators into leadership positions in Albany; he failed when Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller teamed up with entrenched Democrats. Both Rockefeller and Kennedy were sons of corporate titans, both had their eyes on the White House, and, while they waited, both wanted to call the shots in New York. In Bobby’s first speech in the Senate, he pushed to make thirteen New York counties eligible for an aid program benefiting poverty-stricken Appalachia, a move the governor said would damage those counties’ reputation at a time when he was trying to attract new businesses. The limits of Bobby’s clout in state politics were apparent in the summer of 1966 when he couldn’t find a strong challenger to Rockefeller and gave lukewarm support to the Democratic nominee, Frank O’Connor. He also couldn’t persuade Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., not to run on the Liberal ticket, where he pulled enough votes to ensure Rockefeller’s victory.
Even more nettlesome to Bobby was the mayor of New York, another glamorous and ambitious rival. Bobby thought Lindsay was an intellectual lightweight and a threat to challenge him for the Senate seat in 1970 or the White House in some future year. Lindsay, who was smart enough and shared Bobby’s visions for Bedford-Stuyvesant and other urban projects, thought Bobby was a publicity hound. Some of their antagonism went back to their days together in Washington, when Congressman Lindsay had challenged the Kennedy administration on everything from its record on civil rights (not enough) to the attorney general’s role in foreign affairs (too much). Now each was too stubborn to cut the other any slack. “One thing that Lindsay was trying to do was trying to look like he was a Kennedy,” said John Burns, chair of the New York State Democratic Party and a Bobby crony. “The newspapers kept saying, ‘There’s another John Kennedy type.’…I don’t think that Senator Kennedy appreciated that very much.”
Bobby also continued to defy political handicappers on where he’d land on any issue. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action gave him a perfect score on his voting record his second year in office, one of just four senators to rate that high. Less noticed was that he also notched a 33 percent rating from the conservative Americans for Constitutional Action. That wasn’t just a matter of his protecting his flank, but of seeking solutions that defied an easy liberal-conservative delineation, the way he always had. Bobby believed in a social safety net—but he envisioned it as a trampoline, helping recipients bounce back to jobs that made them self-reliant rather than fostering dependency. He broke with his church by endorsing birth control and voting to fund family planning in countries that wanted it. The Defense Department wanted to prevent the American Communist Party boss Robert Thompson from being buried in Arlington National Cemetery despite his Distinguished Service Cross from World War II. Bobby thought that was ludicrous. “I don’t think anyone now buried in Arlington would object to having Thompson buried there,” he explained, “so I don’t see why all these living people are objecting.”
In later years, the conservative Jack Kemp and the liberal Barack Obama would both embrace Bobby’s ideas on fighting poverty. The columnist Murray Kempton called him “the first significant post–New Deal American politician,” adding that “[Franklin] Roosevelt was historic because he betrayed his class, the old rich; Robert Kennedy could be historic for betraying his class, the new rich.” Asked by another journalist whether he was a liberal or conservative, Bobby balked: “I don’t go for analyzing myself.”
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JOURNALISTS DIDN’T SHARE his reluctance. Only the president got anywhere near the coverage that Bobby did in the mid-1960s, with profiles, commentaries, and even armchair psychoanalysis showing up everywhere from the daily newspapers and newsweeklies to Look, Life, and Good Housekeeping. The issue scrutinized most, by diplomatic and political reporters as well as feature writers, here and overseas, was the senator’s stance on Vietnam. The questions were straightforward even if his answers were everything but. How and why, the scribes and their readers wanted to know, had the brother of the president who got us into Vietnam morphed into the war’s most emphatic critic? Was his turnaround a matter of conscience or expediency? When would he stop pretending to back LBJ?
Bobby’s evolution on Vietnam took place in three stages. His hawkish phase started with his first trip there in 1951 with Jack and lasted until a year and a half after his brother’s death. He believed the United States could win and had to try, not just to save the Vietnamese from the scourge of Communism, but to show the Soviets we would make the same stand against their expansionism in Indochina that we had in Berlin and Cuba. He wrote that in his book Just Friends and Brave Enemies. He drilled it into his colleagues on the Kennedy administration task forces on counterinsurgency. He also said it as clearly as he knew how in speeches such as the one he gave at the North Carolina Cold War Seminar in the spring of 1963. The struggle, he told his Asheville audience, would be “long and hard,” but “I believe the tide has turned. I believe it is within our ability to keep world Communism on the defensive, and we intend to do just that.” The war wasn’t an issue during his 1964 Senate campaign, but the few times he was asked about it, he expressed confidence that the South Vietnamese would rally and win. A month after he took office he reiterated, in a speech in Ithaca, that “the United States has made a commitment to help Vietnam….If our word means anything, we must remain as long as it is evident that the people favor it.”
His resolve grew out of bedrock beliefs. He’d been an unwavering anticommunist even before he went to work for Joe McCarthy or traveled across the Soviet Union with Justice Douglas. The provocateur in him remained convinced that the counterinsurgency’s black pajamas and green berets were the way to battle back against leftist insurrectionists. He was determined to keep faith with his dead brother, who had steadily increased the number of military advisers in Vietnam from 685 when he came into office to 16,732 at the time of his assassination. But even during this hawkish period, Bobby wasn’t blind, as many of his New Frontier colleagues were. He recognized the importance of winning not just battles but the minds and hearts of the people we were fighting to save, saying, “Ultimately, Communism must be defeated by progressive political programs which wipe out the poverty, misery, and discontent on which it thrives.” He had seen firsthand the embarrassing failure of the French despite their overwhelming military superiority. Better than anyone else, he knew how an overconfident CIA had led JFK to a humiliating drubbing at the Bay of Pigs, and how out of touch the State Department was with the third world. He was born a skeptic and had learned to ask hard questions as a congressional investigator and the nation’s top prosecutor. So even as he was underlining in North Carolina that the war was winnable, he insisted that America would triumph only if it was “ready to meet war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of combat.” And in Ithaca, he added the caveat that he was “not in favor of staying a minute more than is necessary.”
His certainty that the United States could prevail and should try started to give way in the spring of 1965, as Bobby entered the in-between phase of his Vietnam progression. In April he urged LBJ to temporarily suspend his bombing of North Vietnam, but the president pushed ahead with troop increases and heavier bombardments. The next month, Bobby supported Johnson’s request for another $700 million in military spending on Vietnam, but he took to the Senate floor to argue for “honorable negotiation”—a middle course, he said, between the unacceptable options of abandoning or escalating the war. By July he signaled another leap in a speech to the International Police Academy in Washington, writing that “if all a government can promise its people in response to insurgent activity is ten years of napalm and heavy artillery, it would not be a govern
ment for long.” The written text of that talk made its way to the press, but when Bobby saw the reaction, and realized that making a break then would be especially embarrassing to an old administration friend who was on the same podium,*2 he took a softer approach in his delivered remarks. Then, without hesitating, he misled the media about the changes. “I’m going to lie,” Bobby confessed beforehand to Sherwin Markman, the young LBJ aide assigned to get the senator to tone down his criticism. “I’m going to say it’s not the speech that my staff handed out—it’s the speech I give—that counts, and nobody influenced me, that sort of thing.”
He generally managed to stay on his tightrope in prepared remarks but not in press conferences, where candor often trumped caution, as it did at the University of Southern California that November. “What,” a journalist asked, “about giving blood to the North Vietnamese?” Bobby: “I think that’s a good idea.” Reporter: “Is that going too far?” Bobby: “If we’ve given all the blood that is needed to the South Vietnamese, I’m in favor of giving [to] anybody who needs blood.” The press couldn’t believe its good luck, nor could Barry Goldwater, who branded the remarks as “closer to treason than to academic freedom.” Rather than backing off, in February 1966 Bobby called in his top advisers and Jack’s to discuss just what America might be willing to give up to get a negotiated peace. His new middle-way option—outlined in a seven-page statement that he read to the media just before leaving for a family ski trip to Vermont—was to offer the Communist insurgents in South Vietnam a carrot along with the continuing stick of our troops and guns. Just as withdrawing from Vietnam was “impossible for this country” to contemplate, he argued, the only way to lure the Vietcong to the peace table was “to admit them to a share of power and responsibility.”
The White House saw that as a step too far, and as the opening for which it had been waiting. The administration’s friends in the press pounced first, with the Chicago Tribune titling its editorial HO CHI KENNEDY and calling Bobby “the senior senator from communist North Viet Nam—Ho Chi Minh’s Trojan horse in the United States.” Vice President Humphrey reached for every metaphor he could find to lambaste the man for whom he had recently campaigned. Bobby’s proposal, Humphrey said, would be like putting “a fox in a chicken coop; soon there wouldn’t be any chickens left.” It amounted to putting “an arsonist in a fire department.” In case those didn’t sink in, the vice president couldn’t resist this warning: that the Kennedy prescription for the ills of South Vietnam “includes a dose of arsenic.” Bobby was bruised enough by the backlash that, although his mind didn’t waver, he kept his mouth shut on Vietnam through the rest of 1966.
This neither-hawk-nor-dove period frustrated not just the press that was trying to decipher his messages, and a White House that never doubted his ill will, but the senator himself. While Bobby was better than a meteorologist at reading the political currents and forecasting storms ahead, all that data was immobilizing. He recognized the twin trap that history had set for him as he waded into the quagmire of warfare: being the guy who committed our troops to a deadly and unwinnable mission, like the French he had met in Vietnam in 1951, or being blamed for losing Southeast Asia, the way Harry Truman had been condemned for losing China in 1949. Any overt break with the White House would be read as a launching pad for a presidential bid, not to mention a rejection of his brother and the Kennedy brain trusters still working in the White House. “I’m afraid,” he told an antiwar journalist, “that by speaking out I just make Lyndon do the opposite, out of spite. He hates me so much that if I asked for snow, he would make rain, just because it was me.”
But how could he not stand up against a war he felt was increasingly futile, with an ally who was corrupt as well as inept? The moral issues were eating at him even more than the political ones. He asked himself what Joe and Jack would have done. His father had always been an isolationist, if not a dove, but his brother had been more inscrutable. The late president’s loyalists said he had planned to pull out of Vietnam, but not until after the 1964 election, when it would be less controversial. LBJ believed otherwise, and insisted he was staying true to JFK by standing up to North Vietnam and the Soviet Union.
Bobby wasn’t the only one on the fence. It was a wrenching time for the nation, with U.S. troop strength rising by 150,000 over the course of 1966, to 350,000. America’s casualty count for the year climbed to 9,378 dead and 62,024 wounded, which set a terrible new record and was higher than the South Vietnamese losses for the first time. Students were burning draft cards and staging rallies even as more of Bobby’s fellow senators were speaking out against the bombing and wider war, including Mike Mansfield, LBJ’s successor as Senate majority leader. Yet the vast majority of Congress, the country, and even college students still backed their president on Vietnam, at least for the time being. Bobby wanted to do the right thing and be a leader, but he didn’t want to be marginalized or sacrifice his political future. “If I became convinced that by making another speech that I could do some good,” he said in mid-December, “I would make it tomorrow.”
Vacillation like this was how Bobby changed. It had taken him longer than most to recognize the perils of McCarthyism, and he never fully severed his ties with McCarthy himself. He had learned slowly at the start of the civil rights struggle, having had to suffer through riots in Montgomery and at Ole Miss before grasping what Martin Luther King, Jr., and James Baldwin had been telling him. He followed a similar pattern during the Cuban missile crisis, although that metamorphosis from militant to moderate was accomplished in just thirteen days. His evolution on Vietnam took only slightly less time than America’s, which is what helped make it convincing. Bobby was neither a quirky individualist like Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon nor a longtime liberal like Senator George McGovern, both of whom LBJ could easily dismiss as out of touch. He was an old cold warrior whose anticommunist credentials matched up against anyone’s. And he was a Kennedy.
An especially nasty meeting with the president in February 1967 finally pushed him over the edge. Bobby was just back from Paris, where a French diplomat had told him that the North Vietnamese were ready to talk peace in return for an unconditional halt in the bombing. When word filtered to the press about a “peace feeler,” LBJ was outraged, telling his pals that it was a ruse and that Bobby was the self-serving leaker. Bobby tried to explain that it came “from someone in your State Department.” Leaks were habitual in Washington, especially involving Vietnam, and this one might not have registered if the president and the senator hadn’t been so ready to explode at each other. “It’s not my State Department, God damn it. It’s your State Department,” said LBJ, who was paranoid about JFK holdovers throughout his government and incongruously saw Bobby, but not himself, as part of the old Kennedy administration. As for the war, the president insisted it would be over by summer and told Bobby, “I’ll destroy you and every one of your dove friends in six months. You’ll be dead politically in six months.” Bobby tried yet again, as he recounted for his press secretary Frank Mankiewicz, pushing LBJ to end the bombing and begin negotiations. “There just isn’t a chance in hell that I will do that,” the president said, “not the slightest chance in the world.” Bobby shot back: “Look, I don’t have to take that from you.”
But he knew he did, unless he spoke out. On March 2, 1967, Bobby made his moves. First he apologized to the packed Senate gallery and chamber: “Three presidents have taken action in Vietnam. As one who was involved in many of those decisions, I can testify that if fault is to be found or responsibility assessed, there is enough to go round for all—including myself.” That was more candor than he had shown with regard to his mistakes with Joe McCarthy or Fidel Castro. Then he bore the kind of witness that scarcely any politician did to the horrors of the faraway war in Southeast Asia, showing concern for not just American soldiers but Vietnamese civilians. “To the Vietnamese,” the Catholic senator said, “it must often seem the fulfillment of the prophecy of Saint John the Divine: ‘And
I looked, and beheld a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death.’ ” Last, he spelled out what had to be done to end the nightmare: halt the bombing, reform South Vietnam’s political and social systems, negotiate with the enemy, then phase out U.S. and North Vietnamese troops and replace them with international monitors to police the cease-fire and supervise elections in the South. LBJ tried to trump his critic by delivering two hastily arranged speeches and staging a news conference at which he confirmed the gossip that his daughter was pregnant. The press might have been amused, but it had waited too long to be distracted. Fascinating as Luci’s parturiency was, the lead stories were Bobby’s.
Finally unleashed, Bobby would do for Vietnam what he had done for civil rights and antipoverty programs: give opponents of the war the political credibility they had lacked, because no one could grab the public’s attention the way he did. Nobody, with the exception of Rev. King, was stitching together all of it—race and poverty, the twin plagues of colonization by the Communists and by us—with the tone of outrage and hope that Bobby was voicing. Few consulted as wide a range of opinion on Vietnam as did the Democratic senator from New York, from his old friend Robert McNamara to a new one, the antiwar radical Tom Hayden, whom he’d met recently at the suggestion of the antiwar journalist Jack Newfield.*3 The ideological breadth of Bobby’s friendships was reminiscent of his father’s, which ranged from Senator McCarthy to Justice Douglas, but not even Joe Kennedy had been so far outside the mainstream of his party and country. Today’s youth “are the children not of the Cold War, but of the Thaw,” Bobby wrote in his 1967 book, To Seek a Newer World.*4 “However the war may seem to us, they see it as one in which the largest and most powerful nation on earth is killing children (they do not care if accidentally) in a remote and insignificant land. We speak of past commitments, of the burden of past mistakes; and they ask why they should now atone for mistakes made before many of them were born.”
