by Larry Tye
But that was only the public half of the explanation for why his aides believed in Bobby in a way they never had or would in anyone else. He was the rare senator who had no social armor and the uncommon politician who was generous to people who didn’t matter. His staffers learned those secrets when he reached out to them specifically and confidentially, revealing the tenderness he worked so hard to disguise. “A friend of mine’s brother died and he wrote a several-page handwritten letter…about what the loss of a brother was. She was incredibly moved,” recalls Esther Newberg, a New York literary agent who, like Bobby, was not known for sentimentality. With Jeff Greenfield, it was the senator’s response when the young aide warned that he planned to resist if he were drafted. Whereas other senators might have fretted about how that would reflect on them, Bobby joked, “I used to be attorney general and I have some important friends in the federal correctional system. And anyway, some writers have done their best work in prison.” Later, just after Martin Luther King was killed, Bobby arrived at his campaign hotel in the middle of the night and found Greenfield passed out on the bed. “He tucked me in, which was why I said to him, ‘You aren’t so ruthless after all.’ He said, ‘Don’t tell anybody.’ ” Wes Barthelmes, his first Senate press secretary, remembered when a Negro National Guardsman from Washington, D.C., was ambushed and killed in Georgia. The soldier’s wife died shortly after of natural causes. Bobby contacted a relative of theirs in Syracuse who agreed to take the couple’s children, “and [the senator] made arrangements to provide for them financially,” said Barthelmes. Bobby also insisted that nobody know what he’d done, telling his aide, “I don’t want it to get out. I’m not winking when I say it. I don’t want it to get out.”
He’d done even more for Ena Bernard, although she never told the story. The Costa Rican nursemaid went to work for the Kennedys when Kathleen was an infant and stayed for forty-four years, helping raise ten more children and keep the household going. Eventually Ena brought over her daughter Josefina, who had had a rough time in Costa Rica, living first with a family friend who was abusive, then at a strict boarding school. Josefina’s life was transformed here in big ways, because Bobby and Ethel gave her a home, and in two small ones that mean even more to her looking back. Once, when the teenager returned from a party at 2:00 A.M., she found Bobby waiting in the den. “These,” Josefina says, “are the words I remember: ‘Your father is not here, and I am your father away from home.’ That has stayed with me to this day, and I am seventy-four years old. In that family I felt loved. I never had love.” She also recalls how Bobby would empty the coins from his pocket onto a table. Twice, she filched a quarter. “I was the only one that was around and he asked me, ‘Josefina, did you take a quarter from me?’ ‘No, no, no, sir, I didn’t,’ I lied, lied, lied, lied like a rug….If I did anything wrong back in Costa Rica, man, I had the daylights beaten out of me with belts, with soap and urine. I never admitted it. I knew Mr. Kennedy knew I took it. But he never punished me for it, and that was the cure. That was the cure.”
If he surprised his staff with his benevolence, he surprised colleagues with his mood swings. “One day he would crack jokes for an hour, the next day he would chop you off,” recalls Democrat Walter Mondale, a seatmate in the Senate’s back row. “At first I got mad, but I just figured that’s the way he was….I’m not sure that he realized how some people were hurt by that.” Republican Javits was torn, too—drawn in by Bobby’s “passion for life,” yet put off by a sense of entitlement “which one associated more with royalty.” Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby’s longest-lasting press secretary, found a way to manage the choler that he knew had a short half-life.*11 He did nothing to discourage the determined senator from dictating an angry letter, whether it was to the editor of The New York Times or the ski resort that hadn’t been friendly enough to a Kennedy kid. But “about a week later I’d say to him, ‘Remember the letter you wrote to Abe Rosenthal or the ski resort?’ He’d say, ‘yah.’ I’d say, ‘I didn’t send it.’ He’d say, ‘fine.’ ”
The one senator he didn’t have to explain himself to was Ted, who was his only real friend in Congress and, after Jack died, a trusted confidant. There was competition among their staffs, with Bobby’s whiz kids hiding neither their ambition nor their disdain, same as their boss, and Ted’s more nuts-and-bolts aides resenting that. Ted himself was accustomed to it. He’d grown up with Bobby’s sharp elbows and the clan consciousness of a pecking order based on age and accomplishment. He’d also grown up adoring his brother, and he said, “Our new proximity brought with it the spirit of the old times; the laughter and teasing and optimism of our boyhoods; the easy intimacy of our autumn garage weekends at the Cape house.” While the Senate was a step up for Ted, it was a comedown for the former attorney general. Each helped the other adjust. Ted knew he had to do his homework, learning every detail of each bill and of parliamentary procedure, in order to be accepted as something other than Bobby and Jack’s little brother. Bobby saw Senate folkways as something to be circumvented and had an unusual capacity to teach even as he was learning. Reaching out to colleagues came easily to Ted but remained painful for Bobby. Whereas the older brother asked why, the younger cared only about how. Neither could have been the other if he tried, and neither did.
In practice, that meant dividing the issues both cared about, with Bobby getting first crack at the hottest ones, like Vietnam, and Teddy focusing on civil rights and immigration. Bobby instinctually took more responsibility for Jack’s children, just as he took over the center seat in the family plane, known as the President’s Chair. The two often walked back to their offices together after a vote in the Senate, consulting and laughing, and they had special phone numbers that let them get through to each other almost as fast as the old White House hotline.*12 Fellow senators adored Ted and feared Bobby. At parties the younger (by six years), taller (by five inches), better-looking (by most benchmarks) Kennedy would regale the crowd, while his brother was in a corner conspiring one-on-one. Their personalities seemed defined by their size, as one friend noticed: “Ted was always big trying to be little, Bobby was always little trying to be big.” The spotlight that shone on Bobby gave Ted cover to learn and mature. In the end the Massachusetts senator would have a staff bigger than and as brainy as Bobby’s had been, and he became an equally effective advocate for the afflicted. Whatever rivalry existed now was expressed mainly through humor, which was the Kennedy way. In talks on the West Coast, Bobby deadpanned that he’d gotten a telegram from Washington reading, LYNDON IS IN MANILA. HUBERT IS OUT CAMPAIGNING. CONGRESS HAS GONE HOME. HAVE SEIZED POWER. TEDDY. Ted countered, “Everyone here knows that if I ever did seize power the last person I’d notify is my brother.”
There wasn’t much kidding with LBJ during these Senate years, although Bobby had a favorite joke about him: “You know how to tell when Lyndon Johnson is lying? Well, when he wiggles his ears, he’s not lying. When he twitches his nose, he’s not lying. But when he moves his lips, he’s lying.” The president and senator both made occasional gestures of goodwill. In January 1966, Bobby sent Lyndon a copy of Bruce Catton’s Never Call Retreat, a book that explored Abraham Lincoln’s agonizing loneliness in waging the Civil War. In an accompanying note, Kennedy handwrote, “I thought it might give you some comfort to look again at another President, Abraham Lincoln, and some of the identical problems and situations that he faced that you are now meeting.” Johnson responded in an equally warm tone: “You know better than most the gloom that crowds in on a President, for you lived close to your brother. Thus, your letter meant a great deal to me and I tell you how grateful I am for your thoughtfulness.”
Lulls like that were the exception in a relationship that had grown even stormier. LBJ kept track of Bobby’s every move, here and abroad, political and personal, through news clippings and memos from White House aides, diplomats, state party apparatchiks, and others anxious to feed the fears. The files’ titles bespoke their tone: KENNEDY—THE CONSERVATIVE, OTHER
S ON KENNEDY—COLUMNISTS, and KENNEDY—THE UN-CROWNED PRINCE. Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird’s chief of staff and LBJ’s political ears and eyes, suggested early in 1966 that the president “start working to soften up the Kennedy columnist set…subvert them from ‘buying’ everything Bobby does. We ought to be able to move in with them when Bobby makes an error as he did on Viet Nam.” Another way to undermine the senator on his favored ground would be for the president to take “a dramatic poverty installation tour.” LBJ read the memo, which had to delight him since it mirrored his own thinking but also made him nervous lest it become public. “Tear this up,” he scribbled at the bottom, “and flush it down the toilet.”
Johnson’s preoccupation with Bobby had become a distraction to his presidency, all the more curious because he was now ensconced in the White House after a landslide victory while Bobby was a mere senator who’d sailed in partly on the president’s slipstream. But LBJ’s popularity was sagging because of riots in the cities and a growing backlash against his open-ended escalation in Vietnam. Bobby was a convenient scapegoat, since he embodied everything LBJ hated, and his poll numbers were rising in inverse proportion to LBJ’s slide. The president now required three things from every potential appointee: “First, of course, skill and capability. And second, absolute loyalty.” The third, he admitted, was an assurance “that you are not going to work for Bobby Kennedy down the line.” Harry McPherson, Jr., one of LBJ’s most loyal counselors, was worried enough by this fixation that he wrote a four-page memo entitled “Thoughts on Bobby Kennedy and Loyalty.” The first three pages sympathized with the president’s concerns, noting that liberals and journalists will see Bobby as “St. George slaying the conservative dragon” and that he would appeal to intellectuals, who “are as easy a lay as can be found.” On page 4 he zeroed in on his real concern: the president’s over-the-edge suspicions about the senator, which was causing him to question the loyalty of even the most talented and loyal JFK holdovers. “You have the office, the policies, the personal magnetism, the power to lead and inspire, and above all the power to put good ideas into effect,” McPherson wrote. “An obsession with Bobby and with the relationship of your best people to him may, I believe, distort policy and offend the very men you need to attract.” Instead of achieving its goal of getting LBJ to back off, the missive “imperiled McPherson’s own place in the president’s inner circle,” according to Jeff Shesol, who wrote a 591-page book on the LBJ-RFK relationship that he titled Mutual Contempt.*13
Bobby kept his own tabs on who among JFK’s advisers was getting too close to “this man” in the White House. The senator’s feelings about the president never softened, but they didn’t harden into a fetish the way LBJ’s about him had. LBJ was “mean, bitter, vicious, [an] animal in many ways,” Bobby told a Kennedy Library interviewer in 1964, “which makes it very difficult, unless you want to kiss his behind all the time.” After his swearing-in as senator he asked Richard Goodwin, who’d stayed on temporarily in the White House, “Why does he keep worrying about me? I don’t like him, but there’s nothing I can do to him. Hell, he’s the president, and I’m only a junior senator.” Goodwin: “That’s the reality. But we’re not talking about reality. In Johnson’s mind you’re the threat. If he had to choose between you and Ho Chi Minh [to succeed him as president], he’d pick Ho in a minute.”
Bobby escaped from the D.C. intrigue by flying to New York as often as he could—to check in on Bed-Stuy, see Jackie, and just get away. He almost never used his office there, preferring to meet staff or friends at his new apartment with its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the East River. Always short on time, he’d caucus with his visitors while bathing, shaving, or walking around the three-bedroom suite wrapped in a towel. He bought the unit just north of the United Nations when he gave up the Long Island mansion he’d rented during the election to counter charges of carpetbagging. Its living room shelves were stocked with volumes by Dickens, Kipling, and the Kennedys, with former friend Frank Sinatra playing on the stereo. Steve Smith would bring in a closed-circuit tape machine that let Bobby test-run his speeches, and staffers filled him in on the difference between express trains and locals, a mystery to this senator who generally was chauffeured or walked. He complained about the perpetual noise and polluted air but loved that New Yorkers were so harried that at least some of them didn’t recognize him.
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BOBBY, A LEGITIMATE cultural icon, rarely went unnoticed. He was half James Cagney, half James Dean, only this tough-guy rebel had more causes than anybody else. While liberals remained as suspicious of him as he was of them, the War on Poverty pioneer Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered this reassurance: “Kennedy has worked for his liberalism. It’s not something he learned at the Bronx High School of Science. The things he learned first were conservative things. The things he learned second were liberal things. He is an idealist without illusions….You might want to call this higher liberalism.” But Bobby hadn’t shed all of his conservatism. He still hated Russia, even if he had come to see Saigon as the wrong place to make a stand. He questioned New Deal shibboleths of federal paternalism and remained as devoted as his father and grandfather had been to blue-collar truisms like honoring hard work and self-improvement.
That ideological progression was confounding. Instead of following a straight line from conservative to liberal, he had skipped straight to revolutionary. The man who had waged a holy war against Cuban Communists answered “I know it” when a friend opined that he “should be in the hills with Castro and Che.” He wrote that “a revolution is coming—a revolution that will be peaceful if we are wise enough, compassionate if we care enough, successful if we are fortunate enough, but a revolution that is coming whether we will it or not.” His political evolution also ran counter to the normal pattern of Americans’ becoming more cynical as they age, the way Ronald Reagan did in going from card-carrying New Dealer to icon of the right. The insurgent had always been there in Bobby. But having lost his father, his brother, and much of his power, there was less to bind him to convention. He had seen close up the darkest sides of this country’s underbelly, from the Mob to the Teamsters, so his optimism was never starry-eyed. He’d experienced America’s problems and internalized what he had seen and felt. He told Native Americans in Oklahoma that he wished he were an Indian. He meant it no less when he said the same thing to sugarcane cutters in Brazil, blacks in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and children everywhere. In today’s derisive political context he’d be decried as a flip-flopper. But his transformation was heartfelt and transcended politics, as Jack Newfield saw, reflecting a “private, internal change, from rigidity to existential doubt, from coldness to an intuitive sensitivity for sorrow and pain, from one-dimensional competitiveness to fatalism, from football to poetry, from Irish-Catholic Boston’s political clubhouses to the unknown.” For those who knew him as a boy it seemed less a remake than a purposeful return to an earlier gentleness, when he had been the bashful runt of Joe and Rose’s litter.
Conveniently for Bobby, America was undergoing its own upheaval in the mid-1960s. An old politics dominated by big-city machines and labor unions was yielding to a new one whose touchstones were television, grassroots organizing, and a distrust of anything old. The Cold War and New Deal seemed archaic to the generation of the Thaw and the New Left. Race riots were igniting the cities and Vietnam was widening the split between parents and children. Even the Catholic Church was riven and trying to reform. There was no national consensus anymore—but there were few figures in American politics more able and determined to build bridges between the alienated and the mainstream than Bobby, who had lived on both sides. He sensed the changes early and they pulled him ahead even as he gave them voice and direction. He was halfway between the old and the new, adjusting on the run and with conviction.
The journalist who best captured that push-pull wasn’t a political writer or a columnist but the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who saw Bobby Kennedy’s constellation of contradictions not as ol
d versus new but as good versus bad. He called his schizophrenic senator the “Bobby twins,” explaining that “the Good Bobby is a courageous reformer. The Bad Bobby makes deals. The Good Bobby sent federal troops down south to enforce civil rights. The Bad Bobby appointed racist judges down South to enforce civil rights. The Good Bobby is a fervent civil libertarian. The Bad Bobby is a fervent wire tapper. The Good Bobby is ill at ease with liberals. The Bad Bobby is ill at ease with grownups.”
The caricaturist’s confusion was understandable given the conflicting signals Bobby was sending. Which was the real RFK—the archangel come to rescue the children of the Mississippi Delta or the sonofabitch who verbally assaulted quiet-spoken Walter Mondale? Was he a hawk or peacemaker, sheriff or outlaw, Captain America or Dennis the Menace? The truth was he was all of that at one time or another. His first instinct had always been to lash out, but then he would step back, listen, and find a middle ground missed by others. He’d been both a Shakespearean scoundrel and an Irish folk hero. He was changing in deeper and more authentic ways than politicians generally did, which laid bare his inconsistencies and regrets. Being simple and at the same time sophisticated, he was easy to misunderstand and difficult to stereotype. “Bobby wasn’t typical of anything or anybody…[he] was sui generis,” says the political journalist Elizabeth Drew. “That was and is his draw.” Bobby himself understood the paradox he presented. “It seems as if everybody [is] engaged in psychoanalyzing me and the Kennedy family,” he told a reporter. “Is he an angel or a devil? A saint or a Bengalese tiger?…When I am asked questions about myself, I am incapable of answering.” Later he confided to a friend that “no matter what I do, people think I am doing something else.” Whether he engendered fierce devotion or ferocious distrust depended on the beholder’s prism, since there was compelling evidence for the existence of both a Good Bobby and a Bad.
