by Larry Tye
It also depended on the timing. During his Senate years he tilted more soft than ruthless and was more at home with pacifism than with fighting hot or cold wars. There was less moralism and more morality. The willfulness and cunning remained, but they were harnessed to causes such as ending apartheid and remaking ghettos. He’d laid claim to a rare piece of political ground as a pragmatic idealist, which was the same terrain JFK had hoped to plow. While some remained skeptical, others were dazzled by the possibilities of a standard-bearer with that blend of tenaciousness and gentleness. “One of the reasons, I suspect, that some people are puzzled by Senator Kennedy is that he is a tough-minded man with a tender heart,” said Senator George McGovern, who stood with Bobby against both hunger in America and American involvement in Vietnam. “He is, to borrow Dr. King’s fitting description of the good life, ‘a creative synthesis of opposites.’ ”
* * *
*1 Kwashiorkor, caused by too little protein in the diet, is the most common nutritional disorder in developing nations.
*2 That friend was David E. Bell, a Harvard professor of economics who served as administrator of the Agency for International Development from 1963 to 1966. Like many administration officials, Bell was caught between his friendship with the Kennedys and his allegiance to his new boss, President Johnson.
*3 “That was an attempt on [Bobby’s] part to build relationships,” says Hayden. Hayden’s purpose was even more straightforward: “Whether Kennedy would get us out of Vietnam…I thought it was a good conversation” (Author interview with Hayden).
*4 The titles of Bobby’s books always had a special resonance. This one was borrowed from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who in his poem Ulysses wrote, “ ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” Just Friends and Brave Enemies echoed the words Thomas Jefferson wrote to Andrew Jackson in 1806: “We must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.”
*5 In their bid to maintain the racial status quo, the South African government banned publications and organizations along with individuals, placing them under severe restrictions intended to shut them up. Robertson was in eminent company, with Steve Biko, Winnie Mandela, and the entire African National Congress. Robertson’s banning, like the others, was for five years, although he left the country three months after Bobby’s visit and didn’t return for twenty-two years.
*6 Marshall, Robertson, and most of the other officers and members of the student union were white, as were most South African college students then.
*7 Luthuli died a year after Bobby’s visit. The government said he had been struck by a train, a story widely disbelieved since he walked in that same area every day and knew the schedule of the trains.
*8 Thirty-seven years later, Marshall would strike her own blow against bias by authoring the first state ruling in the nation affirming the constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
*9 “Bob doesn’t represent me,” Jackie told the men from Look. “He sort of protects me.” Also trying to protect her—although she never appreciated that—was Manchester’s editor at Harper’s, Evan W. Thomas II, who also edited JFK’s Profiles in Courage and RFK’s The Enemy Within (Corry, Manchester Affair, 121).
*10 Bobby had always said that loyalty was the most important ingredient in politics. In 1966, his Christmas gifts for the twenty-five office clerks were small gold bracelet charms shaped like aspirin. On the front was engraved “One a Day—RFK,” and on the back, LOYAL was spelled out horizontally and vertically (“Robert Kennedy Staff Gets Gold Loyalty Pills,” New York Times).
*11 Mankiewicz also knew that at seven in the morning, weekends along with weekdays, he could expect a call from Bobby. “He had, of course, already read the papers and expected that I, too, had done so before I answered the telephone,” the press secretary recalled half a century later. “With rarely a cursory greeting, he would be speaking as though in mid-thought or mid-sentence. ‘Bombing pause in Vietnam. Looks like Johnson’s about to end it. Should I call now for continuance?’ Or, ‘Possibility of new unrest like Watts last summer’ ” (Mankiewicz, So As I Was Saying, 152).
*12 The brothers had nearby Senate suites and they’d hold their own private caucus several times a week. “Bob always went to Ted’s office; it was never the other way around,” recalled Mankiewicz. “ ‘He’s been here longer than me, and even if he hadn’t, he knows his way around much better,’ RFK once told me. But I knew it was much more: a consistent, unplanned effort to show special respect” (Mankiewicz, So As I Was Saying, 157).
*13 A clear sign that LBJ didn’t heed McPherson’s warning was his treatment of Roger Wilkins, whom he named to run the Community Relations Service in January 1966. Wilkins, the nephew of NAACP head Roy Wilkins, had been lukewarm about Bobby, but since he was living in New York it was natural that Kennedy would introduce him at his Senate confirmation hearing. That was too much for LBJ, who snubbed Wilkins at his swearing-in. “[Johnson] spoke to my mother, my step-father, my wife, my kids, my mother-in-law, to my uncle, to my aunt,” Wilkins recalled. “But he did not speak to me!” There was no doubt in the appointee’s mind why the president was furious: “pure hatred of Robert Kennedy” (Shesol, Mutual Contempt, 321–23).
Chapter 10
LAST CAMPAIGN
FOR A POLITICIAN considered the master strategist of his era, Bobby Kennedy’s plunge into the 1968 race for the White House was so melodramatic and ham-handed that it was painful to watch. But there was nothing ruthless about it, although that’s the rap he took.
Running for president had been at the back of Bobby’s mind since the earliest days of JFK’s administration. Jack joked about it in ways that seemed designed to plant the idea in the minds of the public and of his brother.*1 Joe didn’t find it funny. He never doubted that the son most like him should succeed the one most different. Bobby was the last to buy in. While he was perhaps readier for the White House than anyone who hadn’t lived there, he remained mesmerized by the prospect of writing, teaching, and freeing himself from the public arena and the Kennedy limelight. But down deep he knew that that wouldn’t do for the designated heir.
JFK’s assassination shattered dreams of a Kennedy dynasty, but only temporarily. As Bobby pulled out of his despair, he reengaged with the nation’s problems in a way that made clear that despite having served half as long, he was twice the senator and reformer that Jack had been. Whereas Senator John F. Kennedy had plotted a course to the White House by gathering chits and avoiding conflicts, Senator Robert F. Kennedy had made himself a lightning rod for controversy. Whether the issue was Vietnam or tobacco ads, auto safety or a minimum tax on the rich, the junior senator from New York consistently positioned himself to the left of the Johnson administration and most of his fellow lawmakers. LBJ and others had rightly wondered whether Jack had sufficient gravitas as a senator to qualify for the White House, but few doubted Bobby’s resoluteness. Instead, critics within the opposition party and his own reproached him for brazenly orchestrating a shadow government capable of experimenting with ghetto busting in Bedford-Stuyvesant and putting out peace feelers in Paris.
His achievements added up to a sturdy platform from which to take on LBJ, whose poll numbers had been sliding almost since the day of his historic landslide victory. Nearly every new speech Bobby made suggested not just an alternative policy but an alternative president. The winds were turning against the war and in his direction, and he felt them blowing as he barnstormed the country in the 1966 midterm elections on behalf of a mind-boggling seventy-six candidates for the Senate, House, and state houses. His convoy was of presidential proportions, with limos, a police escort, buses bearing newsmen, and a crowd with signs reading KENNEDY IN ’68 and KEEP HARASSING LBJ. The love even crossed the border. During a three-week trip through Latin America at the end of 1965, a Chilean newspaper had referred to him as “the future president,” Indians in Peru chanted, “Viva Kennedy,” and Bobby joked that he was running for “President of the World.” Bu
t it was the office of president of the United States that focused the mind of the antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein, who helped launch a Dump Johnson campaign in the summer of 1967 and that fall approached Bobby to pick up the baton. It was a presumptive candidate’s dream scenario—being drafted to run by a grassroots movement he agreed with, making them, rather than him, look like schemers and disrupters.
A lone dissenter stymied that challenge-the-president scenario: Bobby himself. He never seriously questioned the goal, just the year. He had the scars to attest to the whatever-it-takes tactics this sitting president would use to maintain his grip on the Democratic Party and the White House, no matter what the pollsters said about the softness of his support. A brash bid to topple Johnson would dredge up charges that everything Bobby had done as a senator was Machiavellian, motivated by politics rather than ideals. With Kennedy as the champion of the anti-LBJ crusade, the president might actually dig in deeper in Vietnam. Running in 1968 would divide the Democrats and could help Republicans retake the White House and make gains in the Senate. It could also ruin Bobby’s chances in 1972, when LBJ would be constitutionally excluded from running again and there’d be a clearer path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So overwhelming were his doubts that he told Lowenstein that while he endorsed his objective, “someone else will have to be the first one to run. It can’t be me because of my relationship with Johnson.” He told the press that he planned to run for reelection to the Senate and to support President Johnson for a second term.
Bobby was again asking himself Hamlet’s famous question, as he had when he weighed whether to be attorney general in 1961 and to run for senator in 1964. Just as characteristically, he sought to dig out of his paralysis by consulting everyone he knew, and some he didn’t. The two Teds, Kennedy and Sorensen, were dead set against his jumping in, convinced the timing was wrong. Not so Adam Walinsky, Peter Edelman, and other young turks on his staff, who had signed up for precisely this kind of battle of ideologies. The factions met and deliberated, with and without Bobby, and in the process managed to reinforce his indecision and inaction. In December 1967, Jack Newfield wrote in The Village Voice that “if Kennedy does not run in 1968, the best side of his character will die”; three weeks later Joseph Alsop countered in The Washington Post that if he does run, “He will destroy himself. He will destroy his Party.” The lobbying continued at home, where Ethel and the kids were rehearsing for the role of First Family while Rose was having what she called “profound misgivings.” Jack wasn’t there to cast a vote, so Ted spoke for him: “He might have cautioned against it…but he probably would have made the run himself in similar circumstances.”
The central struggle, of course, wasn’t between Bobby and his advisers or his relatives, but between his dueling natures. The demarcation for this highest-of-stakes decision was no longer the cartoonish Good Bobby versus Bad, but Old Bobby versus New. Was he the cautious political pro who had stayed in the background of the civil rights struggle and vacillated on Vietnam? That had been the hardheaded Bobby whom Joe reared, serving his country but doing it judiciously and betting mainly on sure things. Or was he the hot-blooded insurgent he’d become once he recognized the failures of Jim Crow and counterinsurgency? Torn yet again between what he thought and what he felt, he would telephone acquaintances late at night, without introduction, asking, “Should I run for President?” Before they could answer he’d rant on: “They keep telling me I should run, my friends, my sisters; Ethel thinks I should run. But that’s not so bad, it’s what I hear from myself at five o’clock in the morning—the country can’t stand four more years of this.” In the end the question that haunted him most was one raised by the students who greeted him at Brooklyn College that winter with a placard asking, BOBBY KENNEDY: HAWK, DOVE OR CHICKEN?
Events early in 1968 pulled him closer to his inevitable run for the White House. At the end of January, at the beginning of the Vietnamese new year, known as Tet, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong unleashed simultaneous attacks against a hundred South Vietnamese cities and hamlets that shocked the public there and in America. The next month George Romney, the governor of Michigan and an antiwar Republican, withdrew from the race, essentially clearing the field for Kennedy nemesis and Vietnam hawk Richard Nixon. LBJ ignored the findings and recommendations of his own Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders, which had warned that America was splitting into “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” and had called for new jobs, new housing, and a new drive to end segregation. Then Bobby learned that the U.S. commander in Vietnam was asking for a huge infusion of soldiers even as the president was firing that commander’s boss, the increasingly skeptical defense secretary Robert McNamara. Bobby had tried reasoning with the president in private. He tried pressuring him in public. He knew there was one route remaining if he hoped to change things.
But the political world continued to spin while he was making up his mind. Lowenstein and his anti-LBJ plotters were turned down by Bobby’s favorite senator, George McGovern, and ended up with one Kennedy didn’t much like, Eugene McCarthy. The Minnesota lawmaker had always believed that Jack and Bobby were less Catholic than he was, less intelligent, and less worthy of high office. Bobby thought McCarthy vain, lazy, and “not moral” because he “votes one way in the Finance Committee to help his special interests, and then he votes the other way on the floor when the press is watching.”*2 Yet McCarthy filled the vacuum that Bobby’s hesitation had created, and the young and alienated who would have rallied to Kennedy turned instead to the only opposition campaign. Bobby had walked straight into a trap he set for himself: Diving in now would raise suspicions that a lust for power compelled him to take on not just his brother’s legitimate successor but that president’s brave challenger.
Fully aware of the risk, Bobby privately resolved to declare his candidacy as early as March 4, eight days before the all-important New Hampshire primary. That same Monday he quietly ordered California Assembly speaker Jesse Unruh to make sure he made the March 6 deadline for getting on the presidential primary ballot out there, adding, “Don’t get caught at it.”*3 On Tuesday, over a three-hour lunch with Ted Kennedy and other advisers, the talk was about how rather than whether to get in. Two days later he told Ted to warn McCarthy, but Ted balked and the message wasn’t delivered until the night before the New Hampshire balloting, fueling McCarthy’s hard feelings.*4 By Friday, the nascent Kennedy campaign was starting to churn. Washington aides were researching LBJ’s record while New York staffers were lining up that state’s delegation. The Washington Star’s Haynes Johnson met that day with Bobby and later scribbled a note to himself saying, “March 8, 1968—Spent 1½ hrs. with RFK. Certain he will run.”
It was more than the weight of recent events that had changed the senator’s mind. He was still a political animal, but one now bent on overturning the reigning order at least enough to feed the children he had met in the Mississippi Delta and thaw the Cold War he had once fueled. It wasn’t that he was a remade man, exactly, but he was responding more to gut instincts than to strategic calculations. “It is a much more natural thing for me to run than not run. When you start acting unnaturally, you’re in trouble,” he explained to friends. Then he dictated a pair of telegrams. The first—to the novelist and reporter Pete Hamill, who had written from Ireland imploring him to run—read, HAVE TAKEN YOUR ADVICE. AM IN TROUBLE, PLEASE COME HOME. The other—to the editorial board of The Harvard Crimson, the only newspaper to endorse him that early—asked playfully, ARE WE ALONE?
All these early steps took place out of public view. For most reporters, McCarthy backers, and anyone else paying attention, only two events mattered: On March 12, Gene McCarthy embarrassed LBJ in conservative New Hampshire by drawing 41.9 percent of the Democratic votes and a full half when Republican write-ins were counted. A mere four days later, Bobby Kennedy leaped into the race to unseat the suddenly vulnerable president. The case for cause and effect seemed incontrovertible. “We woke up after the
New Hampshire primary like it was Christmas Day,” one young McCarthy supporter said. “When we went down to the tree, we found Bobby Kennedy had stolen our Christmas presents.” McCarthy was enraged, telling an aide, “That Bobby; he’s something, isn’t he?” In one stroke, Kennedy had resurrected every doubt ever voiced about him and transformed McCarthy into a martyr. “Your brother’s announcement makes clear that St. Patrick did not drive out all the snakes from Ireland,” the columnist Murray Kempton said in a telegram to Ted. Fellow scribe Mary McGrory took her own swipe: “Kennedy thinks that American youth belongs to him, at the bequest of his brother. Seeing the romance flower between them and McCarthy he moved with the ruthlessness of a Victorian father, whose daughter has fallen in love with a dustman, to break it up.”*5
Bobby’s entrance made great copy—“It took Bobby Kennedy seventeen years to come out against McCarthy and then it was the wrong one,” Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary would quip—but his critics got things backward. Bobby’s decision to challenge the president was anything but swift and calculated. He had been thinking about running for years, was tormented for months, and made his mind up the week before a single anti-LBJ ballot was cast in wintry New Hampshire. Bobby didn’t need McCarthy’s success to know how vincible LBJ was; reports he was getting a week before predicted the election day outcome almost to the number, and his spies in the McCarthy and Johnson camps had pushed him to jump in before the primary. Waiting until afterward multiplied the risk, as was apparent to any self-respecting snake or avenging father. By the time Bobby did announce, he had missed not only the New Hampshire primary but the deadlines to enter the other critical early primaries, and he had just three months to prepare for the remaining six. He had failed to build the staff, organization, or bankroll that he had put in place for Jack two months before his announcement in 1960 and five months before that campaign’s first primary. Just two days before Bobby made his candidacy official, he was waiting to hear the results of one last butterfingered maneuver: a proposal that LBJ name a commission to reevaluate his Vietnam policy top to bottom. While he correctly predicted that the president would reject the overture, Bobby had made clear he wouldn’t run if Johnson accepted it.*6
