Bobby Kennedy

by Larry Tye

  Those machinations nearly buried his campaign before he could find his footing. The image of reluctant hero could have enhanced his allure, but instead his tag became one he abhorred: “Bobby-come-lately.” Worse, he never even tried to get the true story out to critical journalists like Kempton and McGrory, convinced they wouldn’t believe it and would see him as wishy-washy. But both had been his friends and might at least have seen that while his campaign kickoff was emotionally tortured and politically naïve, the last thing it was was ruthless.

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  THE OFFICIAL CAMPAIGN announcement on March 16 was half Jack Kennedy, half Bobby. It was staged in the same ornate Senate Caucus Room with granite columns and gold leaf where JFK had debuted his candidacy eight years earlier, at the same age of forty-two.*7 Their opening sentences were identical. Both candidates appealed to the promise of a nation whose byways they said they had traversed, listening to its citizens, learning its problems, and responding to its noblest yearnings. For Jack, that meant “leadership” that answered “the hopes of the globe around us for freedom and a more secure life”; for Bobby, it was exercising “our right to moral leadership of this planet.” The similarities weren’t surprising, since half of Bobby’s speechwriters had worked for Jack. Nor were they accidental: The younger brother was running not just to complete the interrupted agenda of the older, but to restore the missing magic. If JFK’s death meant Paradise Lost, RFK’s election promised Paradise Regained.

  But this wasn’t 1960 and Bobby wasn’t Jack. America was a more turbulent and uncertain place in 1968, with young people more rebellious and their parents more terrified. The Magnificent Seven and Chubby Checker had given way to The Graduate and the Grateful Dead. And the circumstances of the brothers’ campaigns couldn’t have had less in common, as was clear to anyone paying attention to the words rather than the atmospherics of his speech to a room packed with journalists, staff, and nine of Bobby and Ethel’s ten little Kennedys. “My decision reflects no personal animosity or disrespect toward President Johnson,” Bobby said, although the bid to unseat him surely reflected both. His candidacy, he said, “would not be in opposition to [Gene McCarthy], but in harmony,” which no one believed and only served to remind everyone that he was climbing onto the Minnesotan’s coattails. While he defined his vision more concretely and compellingly than Jack had—from ending a disastrous war and addressing the crisis in the cities to removing a sadly out-of-touch president—he failed to point out that the war, the festering ghettos, and Lyndon Johnson were all part of Jack Kennedy’s legacy.

  For most candidates, the rollout of a presidential campaign is a high point of their lives. Not for Bobby. Nearly all the questions from reporters focused on the politics vis-à-vis McCarthy or LBJ instead of on his platform. Things didn’t get any better on day two of the campaign, when he was on what should have been friendly ground at St. Patrick’s Day parades in New York and Boston. For every shrieking teenage girl shouting “We’re with you, Bobby,” there were boos and chants of “coward” and “opportunist.” The candidate maintained his composure and even his humor, dodging political questions and shouting to the throngs, “Happy St. Patrick’s Day. I hope some of you bothered to have a drink.” Then he did more evading on Meet the Press, saying again that “I want to cooperate in every way that I can with Senator McCarthy…both of us together will do better than one of us as individuals.” He desperately wanted to change the subject, but neither angry McCarthy boosters nor the press would let him.

  The fun part began the next day in Kansas. Bobby had reminded Walinsky that when writing his speech, he needed to bear in mind that they weren’t in the East anymore, where bearded and braless anti-Vietnam activists would buy his no-holds-barred attacks on the president and the war. “These people,” Bobby warned, “are very conservative.” That made it all the sweeter when he gazed out at the 1,450 students jamming the seats and the rafters at the Kansas State field house. His maiden campaign address opened with humor, some of it ad-libbed. Maybe it was a mistake to say he was “reassessing” his stand on Vietnam, Bobby said, because “yesterday there was a man from the Internal Revenue Service out reassessing my home.” Then he laid out for his heartland audience his primary reason for running. The Vietnam War “has divided Americans as they have not been divided since your state was called Bloody Kansas,” Bobby said. “It must be ended, and it can be ended in a peace for brave men who have fought each other with a terrible fury, each believing that he alone was in the right. We have prayed to different gods, and the prayers of neither have been answered fully. Now, while there is still time for some of them to be partly answered, now is the time to stop.” He was like a lion finally freed from his cage, and his listeners roared their approval. The enclosed arena amplified the noise, making it sound, in the words of one journalist, “as though it was inside Niagara Falls; it was like a soundtrack gone haywire.” Stanley Tretick, a photographer for Look who’d been covering this Kennedy since he was a Rackets Committee investigator, momentarily forgot he was supposed to be nonaligned. “This is Kansas, fucking Kansas!” Tretick yelled to the senator’s staff. “He’s going all the fucking way!”

  If his central campaign theme was No More Vietnams, a close second was unleashing a second War on Poverty. He explained how he’d do that to a record-setting crowd of twenty thousand at the University of Kansas, where the entire enrollment was just sixteen thousand and classes had been canceled for his appearance. He talked about starving Mississippians, desperate Indians, unemployed Appalachian coal miners, and others who belied the dream of America. This evolving Bobby saw the schism that mattered most now not as black against white but as rich versus poor. “We must,” he told his overflow gallery, “begin to end the disgrace of this other America.” They listened and they cheered, interrupting him thirty-eight times. “It doesn’t matter what he says,” said one man who was watching. “He could recite ‘Mary’s Little Lamb’ and they’d still go wild.”

  Bobby and his advisers knew audiences would be easiest to assemble and friendliest on college campuses, even ones whose girls wore skirts that covered their knees and boys sported buzz cuts and neckties. Geographic choices seemed haphazard—from Kansas to Tennessee, Alabama to California—but the campaign had a point to make. “Any who seek high office this year must go before all Americans: not just those who agree with them, but also those who disagree,” Bobby told nine thousand listeners at the University of Alabama, where he’d defied the governor and public opinion only five years before. “I come to Alabama to ask you to help in the task of national reconciliation.” He was determined to show he was a national candidate for reasons of politics as well as principle. He couldn’t afford to give up even on regions like the Deep South, where his name was mud, if he was to have a chance of winning the nomination. Bobby had concocted a methodical strategy for Jack in 1960—wooing delegates one by one in primaries and in person, out-hustling and outflanking his opponents—but he didn’t have time for that in 1968. He had entered the race late, and the president had the upper hand in that kind of insiders’ game. His only hope was to make an explosive enough impact, in the remaining primaries and public appearances in other states, that the convulsions would be felt by the men who, in that pre-reform era, still manipulated the delegations. Governors, senators, big-city mayors, and union power brokers had to be convinced that Bobby was not just the Democrat most likely to win in November, but the one most likely to let them preserve their power. That was less a matter of delegate counting than of psychology.

  Crowds were the most emphatic way to make that point, and the ones he drew were even bigger and more supercharged than in his uproarious campaign for Senate. In 1964, it took just one aide to steady him as he stood and waved from his convertible; now three were needed, with one holding his belt. Hands perpetually reached out not just to grab him but to collect a tie clasp or cufflink, a shoelace or even one of his London-made shoes.*8 Bloody knuckles and bruised knees had been the main physical to
ll in the earlier race. This time he was pulled so hard that he tumbled into the car door, splitting his lip and breaking a front tooth that required capping. He ended up on a regimen of vitamins and antibiotics to fight fatigue and infection. If he kept screaming, his doctors warned, his laryngitis would become permanent. Gone was the firm handshake he regarded as a sign of manliness, replaced by a limp mackerel at the end of a wrist too often tested. For most politicians, the challenge was to attract crowds; for Bobby, it was to survive them.

  None of the other candidates in 1968 generated the polarized responses that Bobby did. For every voter who wanted a lock of hair, another wanted his scalp. And for each bumper sticker or poster urging RETURN TOUCH FOOTBALL TO THE WHITE HOUSE, there were ones scolding BOBBY AIN’T JACK, NONE OF THE WAY WITH RFK, and STERILIZE BOBBY KENNEDY. No presidential aspirant since Franklin Roosevelt had drawn that level of adulation—and loathing. George Wallace, other segregationists North and South, and the Teamsters had always hated him, as did most members of the Chamber of Commerce and the American Legion. But now he was arousing antipathy from Gene McCarthy’s left-wing boosters who remembered his ties to Joe McCarthy and machine politics, along with right-wingers who felt he had sold out his cold warrior roots. “While I have a choice between Kennedy and McCarthy, it’s the latter. Easily,” the liberal commentator Nat Hentoff wrote in The Village Voice. “Kennedy, like his brother, will manufacture the illusion of change, co-opting as he goes.” The conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler, a friend of Joe’s, welcomed the chance that “some white patriot of the southern tier will splatter [Bobby’s] spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.” So did Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s protégé and companion, who in 1968 said at an FBI briefing, “I hope someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.” At a loss to explain the animus, Bobby kidded that “I’m the only candidate who has ever united business and labor, liberals and Southerners, party bosses and intellectuals. They’re all against me.”

  It was no joke to reporters covering him. He set off particular alarms at the end of March, with a speech at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles that Richard Goodwin had originally prepared for Gene McCarthy.*9 “For almost the first time,” Bobby said, “the national leadership is calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit—not, perhaps, deliberately, but through its action and the example it sets—an example where integrity, truth, honor, and all the rest seem like words to fill out speeches rather than guiding beliefs.” It was what Bobby believed and had bottled up for the four and a half years since Jack’s death, watching a successor he deemed unworthy. Whether or not his audience understood the gauntlet he was throwing down to the president, on everything from Vietnam to racial tensions, the national press did, and they felt it was rabble-rousing gone too far. “When a war becomes a flaming political issue, the line between debate and demagoguery becomes a thin one,” Robert Donovan wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “A candidate can easily be carried across it in the ardor of the fight.”*10

  Bobby and his team never settled on how far they could go in criticizing the president because on March 31, a week after the Greek Theatre speech, the president dropped a bombshell near the end of his televised speech to the nation on Vietnam. “I shall not seek, and I will not accept,” he said that Sunday evening, “the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” In a single sentence he had changed history and upended the entire logic of the Kennedy campaign. Bobby was now a dragon slayer without a dragon. LBJ’s withdrawal also took the war off the table as an issue when he gave as his reason the desire to devote himself to forging a peace. Johnson’s likely replacement as the candidate of the Democratic establishment, Vice President Humphrey, was someone Bobby liked. LBJ had been musing about quitting for years, but neither Bobby nor anyone else had taken him seriously. “You’re kidding” is all Bobby could say as he got the news after landing in New York. Then: “I wonder if he would have done it if I hadn’t come in.” Ethel was more transparent, breaking out a bottle of Scotch and announcing, “He never deserved to be president anyway.”

  The Old and New Bobbys collided at times like this. The angry insurgent yielded here to the backroom operator, as he telegraphed the president with praise for a move that “subordinates self to country and is truly magnanimous,” then stayed up until three in the morning telephoning influential politicians who’d been in Johnson’s camp. Two days later, Bobby and LBJ had a private conversation at the White House, the last between them and one of the more cordial. As always, both men were playacting. LBJ, upon getting Bobby’s telegram days before, had told an adviser, “I won’t bother answering that grandstanding little runt.” Afterward he encouraged Humphrey to jump into the fray. Bobby, meanwhile, knew Johnson would do anything he could to undermine his effort, which is why he or his aide brought to the White House meeting a scrambling device that thwarted LBJ’s bid to tape it and had the president fuming over being outfoxed.*11

  If LBJ’s withdrawal knocked the Kennedy team off its axis, Martin Luther King’s assassination just four days later gave it an unexpected clarity of purpose. It happened on the evening of April 4, as Bobby was kicking off his campaign in Indiana for the first of the big presidential primary tests. He got word of the shooting as he was boarding a plane from Muncie to Indianapolis; by the time he landed, King was dead. An outdoor rally had been planned for the heart of Indianapolis’s ghetto at Seventeenth and Broadway, but the mayor and chief of police told Bobby not to go, fearing for his safety and their city’s.*12 Bobby wouldn’t hear of it—“I’m going to go there,” he said, “and that’s it”—continuing on to the black neighborhood and asking his police escort to peel off just before he arrived. When an aide handed him scribbled notes he stuffed them into his pocket, preferring to extemporize but unsure what the nearly all-black crowd of a thousand knew about King’s condition and what it would be open to hearing from a white politician.

  “I’m only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening, because I have some—some very sad news for all of you…Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight,” he said from the flatbed truck that served as his platform, his black overcoat pulled tight against the raw cold as his audience gasped as one: “No! No!” He continued, louder but his voice still tremulous, “For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with—be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man….What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black. So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King—yeah, it’s true—but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.”

  His remarks, lasting barely five minutes, were pitch perfect. No one else had Bobby’s credibility in talking about the pain of a loved one gunned down, or about racial reconciliation. It was the first time he had opened up that way about Jack and his listeners sensed it, wanting to comfort him even as he tried to soothe them. “To do it that night was an incredibly powerful and connective and emotionally honest gesture,” said John Lewis, a Freedom Rider who knew the strains in Bobby’s relationship with Martin and had taken heat for joining the Kennedy campaign. “I said to some of my friends, ‘Dr. King may be gone but we still have Robert Kennedy.’ ” Not only did Bobby prove wrong the mayor and police chief, but the crowd—some carrying knives and homemade bombs—dispersed as he’d asked. Indianapolis would be hailed as an island of calm during that Holy Week Uprising that saw riots break out in more than a hundred U.S. cities. The way Kenned
y held his audience spellbound would have been unimaginable for Johnson, Humphrey, or McCarthy. If the King murder and its aftermath put urban unrest back on the front burner of the 1968 campaign, it also reinforced that Bobby was the one Caucasian in America trusted by Negroes. As the signs in the ghetto said, KENNEDY WHITE BUT ALRIGHT.

  Back at his hotel, Bobby couldn’t unwind. Indianapolis mayor Richard Lugar, who had been waiting to make sure the presidential candidate made it out of the ghetto, recalls him as “shaken.” Lewis said Bobby “broke down on a bed, lay there on his stomach and cried.” This Kennedy brother also knew from experience and from asking her just what King’s widow Coretta would need, and he arranged for a plane to bring her to Memphis to pick up her husband’s body, then for three more telephones to be installed at her home that very night. He’d already canceled all campaign appearances except one the next day at the Cleveland City Club, which would be a plea for national calm. He’d met with a dozen local black leaders, with Charles Hendricks of the Radical Action Program conceding afterward that the senator was “completely sympathetic and understanding,” and Bill Bell, who ran a youth center, adding that “the cat [Kennedy] was able to relax.” Then Bobby prowled the hotel, checking in on aides who years later would recall his stream-of-consciousness remarks that offered a lens into a soul troubled by the nation’s problems and his own. “You know,” he said to one of them, “that fellow Harvey Lee Oswald, whatever his name is, set something loose in this country.” He told another, “My God. It might have been me.” The observation that stuck longest with those who heard it was, “You know, the death of Martin Luther King isn’t the worst thing that ever happened in the world.” Speechwriter Jeff Greenfield said, “I could not for the life of me understand that callousness until, of course, I realized he had been thinking of the death of his brother.”