by Larry Tye
Daniel Ellsberg had top secret evidence of those mistakes, some in the past and others America was about to make in a bid to rescue a war effort on the verge of collapse. The military analyst at the Rand Corporation think tank had never shown president’s-eyes-only documents like these to anyone without clearance, but now he felt that that was the only way to keep the Pentagon from getting the 206,000 extra soldiers it wanted to ship to Vietnam. The only question was whom to leak them to, which turned out to be the easy part. Bobby was “the one person who had the passion and commitment to do something,” says Ellsberg, who would later be persecuted, prosecuted, and eventually have the charges against him dismissed for releasing a much more comprehensive secret history of Vietnam titled The Pentagon Papers. “I thought of Bobby Kennedy as being in a category of his own.” Ellsberg wasn’t the only one who had reached that conclusion. McNamara was talking to Bobby, once a week at least, and, says Peter Edelman, the defense secretary was giving the senator “figures, classified material, or at least, you know, unreleased material.” Few noticed the irony that this man who once was the keeper of the nation’s deepest secrets was now helping to expose them.
The senator from New York’s involvement with the Republic of South Africa was different. Unlike Vietnam, it didn’t matter to the White House or to most Americans. And in South Africa, it wasn’t Bobby but millions of oppressed blacks and thousands of their white allies who were desperate to speak out but had gagged themselves for fear of the consequences. Traveling there in 1966, Bobby gave them a voice in a way that nobody else had. The trip also freed him from the politics that clouded everything he did in America and brought him back to first principles.
The multiracial union representing college students had invited him to give the keynote address at its annual Day of Reaffirmation of Academic and Human Freedom, but no one expected the South African government to let him in. It was an especially tense moment for the country, with apartheid segregating the races everywhere except in a few church and student groups. The activist Nelson Mandela had been jailed for life; television was prohibited, along with books by Ernest Hemingway and Mary Shelley; and the political opposition had been crushed or driven underground. A year before, when the students had invited Martin Luther King, Jr., to speak, the government refused him a visa. Saying no to a man who could someday be the American president was more problematic. So, after a month of hemming and hawing, South Africa said Bobby could come, but it also slapped a banning order on Ian Robertson, the student union president who had planned to host the senator.*5 Even the White House took notice of the trip, with LBJ delivering his first and last address on Africa the week before Bobby left.
Bobby made clear his attitude about his hosts on the flight over, when he was asked to register as black, white, or other: “I didn’t fill out the card.” The government had refused to let in the thirty American newsmen who’d planned to accompany the senator, thinking it could control the coverage and choreography of a visit it viewed as a publicity stunt. Just how little the efficiently authoritarian regime understood its own people became clear at Johannesburg’s Jan Smuts Airport when the plane carrying Bobby, Ethel, and two aides touched down just before midnight on June 4. Four thousand students hoisted him onto their shoulders and marched him into the terminal. “The airport was swarming with white, black, brown, Indian, every hue of skin,” remembered Margaret Marshall, vice president of the student union who stepped in as host after Robertson was banned.*6 “I don’t think I had ever seen anything like that in my life. And so, that very first night we began to get an inkling of what this visit was going to entail.”
The first speech, at the all-white but liberal University of Cape Town, remains one of Bobby’s most memorable, beginning with one of his favorite devices of leading listeners in one direction and then taking them somewhere else entirely. “I came here,” he said, “because of my deep interest [in] and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier…a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.” His audience understood instinctively their speaker’s point: that he had not come as a pious missionary but as someone struggling with his own country’s racial shame.
But it was his odic lines halfway through the talk that proved defining for the sixteen hundred students in the lecture hall, the eighteen thousand huddled in the cold and wind listening via loudspeakers, and the millions who read transcripts or heard recordings of what would be called the Ripple of Hope Speech. “Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation,” Bobby said. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance….Only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly. It is this new idealism which is also, I believe, the common heritage of a generation which has learned that while efficiency can lead to the camps at Auschwitz, or the streets of Budapest, only the ideals of humanity and love can climb the hills of the Acropolis.”
Those lines—“the most stirring and memorable address ever to come from a foreigner in South Africa,” according to the London Daily Telegraph—had been carefully scripted by Bobby’s wordsmiths Adam Walinsky and Richard Goodwin, but only after the anti-apartheid activist Allard Lowenstein “blew the whole thing up with impassioned denunciations of the speech and everything in it,” recalled Walinsky. Lowenstein, Walinsky added, complained that the early version of the talk “wasn’t ‘attentive to the struggles of the people’ there and how maligned and dreadful the government was. [Lowenstein’s critique] was a really good corrective. It certainly acted as a jolt for us.” It also was how Bobby did things, drawing on outside voices to shake up even his most valued aides and saving for himself any last edits. That speech, like his other four in South Africa, anticipated his critics and disarmed them with humor and rhetoric toned to the right pitch, neither too fiery nor too minced. Wording was revised on the run by Walinsky, or by the senator as he sensed an audience’s mood.
The day after his Ripple of Hope talk, Bobby addressed Stellenbosch University, the Harvard of Afrikaanerdom, making clear that he was there “less to lecture than to learn.” But that was only half true. He admonished his listeners that “as the skilled and professional people of South Africa and the world, you will be largely removed from contact with the hungry and the deprived, those without ease in the present or hope in the future. It will require a constant effort of will to keep contact, to remind ourselves everyday that we who diet have a never ceasing obligation to those who starve.” There and elsewhere, students fired back with challenges. Had Bobby’s failure to crack down on Communism contributed to his brother’s death? The audience gasped and the senator grew quiet. What about the Bible’s admonition that Negroes were created to serve? Bobby: “But suppose God is black. What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?” His audience’s response was unexpected applause.
Between speeches, Bobby did what he had done in all of his foreign travels, going wherever it took to uncover what people were thinking and how they lived. In Cape Town he visited the student leader who’d invited him in the first place, bringing a copy of Profiles in Courage inscribed by Jackie. “He asked what it was like being a banned person and I told him that. He asked about South Africa and I told him,” recalls Robertson. “As soon
as he walked in he asked, ‘Is this place bugged?’ I said, ‘I assume so.’ He said, ‘Do you know how to handle a bugging mechanism? You can either play music very loud or jump up and down like this.’ It was a wooden floor and that made a big banging noise. That kind of set me at ease right away.”
Just after dawn on his last day in the country, the senator called on another banned leader, Albert Luthuli, on the farm north of Durban where he was living in exile. The Zulu tribal chieftain was president of the anti-apartheid African National Congress, the first African to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and as popular as Mandela would be later. Bobby’s seventy-minute visit sent powerful signals—to the government that he was defying its bid to make Luthuli invisible, and to black South Africans that the leader they hadn’t heard from in five years was okay and still mattered to the world. Bobby brought gifts along on the helicopter that took him to Luthuli—a letter from Martin Luther King, Jr., and a record player on which he and the chief listened to President Kennedy’s 1963 civil rights speech. “When [Luthuli] talked of the future of his country, of his people, of the relationship between the races, [he became] intense and hurt and hard, all at once,” Bobby wrote about the man he would add to his list of heroes. Luthuli asked his American guest, “What are they doing to my country, to my countrymen? Can’t they see that men of all races can work together—and that the alternative is a terrible disaster for all of us?”*7
Bobby and Ethel’s last big excursion was to the sprawling township of Soweto, where half a million blacks were crowded into matchbox houses behind wire fences. Never before had a prominent politician from abroad included them on his itinerary. Few whites had ever mingled so easily, addressing residents from the rooftop of his car. The Bantus here knew that shaking hands with a white man could spell trouble, but they also knew about Bobby’s visit that morning with the venerated Luthuli and few refused when the senator extended his hand. As he approached, the crowd surged forward as one, shouting, “Master, Master.” It was their way of warmly greeting an important personage, but to Bobby it was embarrassing. “Please,” he implored, “don’t use that word.”
Press reviews of his trip agreed that it was momentous, but whether that was for better or worse depended on where the newspapers stood along the racial divide. “Is it too difficult for [Americans] to grasp that if their non-White population had consisted of more than half a dozen different nations which together were four times more numerous than the White Americans, the enthusiasm for integration there would have been as limited and politically powerless as here?” Die Burger asked in Afrikaans. The English-language Rand Daily Mail countered that “Kennedy’s visit is the best thing that has happened to South Africa for years. It is as if a window has been flung open and a gust of fresh air has swept into a room in which the atmosphere had become stale and foetid.” The only common ground was captured by the one American reporter who had defied the government’s ban on foreign press. “Neither Kennedy nor any other politician like him will ever be welcome again in their apartheid state,” George Laing wrote for the New York Daily News. “Once is more than enough.”
That single visit, lasting barely six days, was the most important ever made to South Africa by an American and a watershed in the lives of many whom Kennedy encountered. “If you’re in an environment where somebody is telling you over and over and over again that you are the tool of Communists, that you’re out of line, that it’s not the way the world operates, and somebody who is as respected as he is comes and says, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, there’s a whole world out there that thinks the way you do. In fact the whole of history thinks the way that you do.’…That has a really powerful impact,” explains Margaret Marshall, who emigrated to America, married Bobby’s friend Anthony Lewis of The New York Times, and became chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.*8 As for black South Africans, they have a custom of naming their eldest son after a famous person they admire. Kennedy Malibusha, Robert Kennedy Makalima, and Kennedy Gowgela Kilokibi Nakala are among the hundreds who honor Bobby’s memory.
The visit had an equally powerful impact on Bobby. Exhausting foreign trips like that reenergized him for the battles back home, whether it was rebuilding Bed-Stuy or electing a new judge to the Surrogate’s Court. South Africa reminded him how insidious racism could be and, while he never said so, what he did there was partly to make amends for his belated response to racial injustice in America. His Senate years turned out to be as peripatetic as those he had spent as attorney general and Senate investigator. There were trips to Latin America and Europe, visiting with peasants and another pope. Joe had made his children citizens of the world and given them the means to see it. Everywhere Bobby went, and especially in South Africa, he said he was reminded of his power, and America’s, to be a beacon not just for capitalism and democracy but for the elusive ideal of justice.
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EVEN WITH ALL the travel overseas and trips to New York, Bobby’s years as a senator gave him his most relaxed time with the children and the life he relished at Hickory Hill. He had more control over his hours than he had during the JFK administration, when foreign crises pulled him to the White House or CIA at any hour and he spent late nights plotting deployments of U.S. marshals to racial hot spots. Senators, especially ones on the outs like Bobby, were seldom consulted by the president or his aides on anything.
Ethel had given birth to eight children by the time Bobby was sworn in on January 3, 1965, with Max arriving eight days later and Douglas two years after that. The only way around the bedlam was to develop routines. Bobby tried to be in bed by 10:30 and to get up when the sun did for a horseback ride and sit-ups. While shaving he’d listen to a long-playing record of a play by Shakespeare or act out his own drama with the kids. The youngest loved smearing lather all over him and themselves, mimicking him with a bladeless razor as he attacked his beard. The ritual at the other end of the workday was for his brood to swarm him the instant he drove up. He’d toss a football or play tickle-tumble, a game in which everyone rolled on the grass squealing and pretending to resist. They frolicked together as friends rather than as father and children, which was the right fit for this man-sized child. Remembering what it felt like to be in the second tier, he made certain never to leave out his youngest (Kerry and Chris, and later Max and Doug) or his frailest (David). He also found time for a walk across the grounds with Ethel most nights after dinner. “It was,” she recalls, “a nice habit to be into.”
Having so many people share the same tent made Hickory Hill seem like the Big Top, with multiple acts going on at the same time. Youngsters played charades in one room while aides typed Bobby’s latest manuscript. You could hear the Kennedy convertible approaching before you saw it as towheaded passengers belted out the fight songs of Army and Navy along with Harvard and Notre Dame. In the kitchen, their longtime cook Ruby Reynolds might be preparing Bobby’s favorite dessert, a chocolate roll layered with sponge cake, ice cream, and gooey chocolate sauce. Twelve people would be asked to lunch and twenty would turn up; thankfully the four refrigerators were well stocked. “The kids were a pain in the ass,” grumbled Art Buchwald, the humor columnist. “They were fighting all the time and throwing peanut butter at each other. The lunches were pretty bad, as far as everyone dunking each other in mayonnaise and things like that. But that also was part of it, and water fights the whole time. You just have to get in the spirit of it or you become a blithering idiot too.”
No circus was complete without animals, and Bobby’s menagerie was growing as fast as his progeny. The most notorious was Brumus, the malodorous Newfoundland who peed once on Senator Harry Byrd’s spaniel and twice on two ladies picnicking at Hickory Hill, and who got his name and mug shot on the lyric sheet of the Jefferson Airplane’s Crown of Creation album. Others who would call Hickory Hill home were the Irish spaniel Freckles, who loved campaigning with Bobby, the English sheepdog Panda, who spent every summer spread-eagled on the floor panting, a St. Bernard and an Irish sett
er aptly named Bear and Rusty, and two hunting Labradors called Battle Star and Firecracker. Sandy, a California sea lion, lived in the swimming pool. A red-tailed hawk named Morgan Le Fay, after the sorceress in the Arthurian legend, took up residence in Bobby Jr.’s room, near the posters of Lenin, Stalin, and Cardinal Spellman. Also coming and going were homing pigeons, iguanas, raccoons, possums, cockatoos, squirrels, mice, rats, ducks, rabbits, parakeets, hamsters, geese, chickens, roosters, guinea pigs, lizards, a 4-H calf, and a leopard tortoise brought from Kenya in a suitcase that was unusable afterward. Snakes were okay, too, for the children and parents if not the staff. Every child had his or her own horse, and for serious riders like Kathleen there was a paddock with jumping hurdles.
Bobby sometimes used his pets to make a point, as he did with his favorite, the antisocial but entirely devoted Brumus. “He knew everyone hated the dog, and it was like a haircut,” opined Buchwald. “He also had a perverse thing about a haircut. And he once said to someone, ‘If somebody would stop telling me to get a haircut, I’d get one.’ I think it was the same about Brumus. If somebody would stop telling him that Brumus was a mean dog, he might get rid of him.”
