by Larry Tye
Over the next week Bobby made clear how, for the rest of his campaign and his life, he would be the racial healer that Lyndon Johnson wanted to be but couldn’t, despite authoring a record number of civil rights laws. More than any of King’s would-be successors, Kennedy inherited the slain leader’s mantles of prophecy and advocacy. “Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear,” Bobby told his mostly white and wealthy listeners in Cleveland. “Only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.” Two days later he was back in Washington, where troops in armored carriers patrolled the riot-ravaged streets that he insisted on walking. “A crowd gathered behind us, following Bobby Kennedy. The troops saw us coming at a distance, and they put on their gas masks and got the guns at ready,” recalled Walter Fauntroy, a minister and city councilor. “When they saw it was Bobby Kennedy, they took off their masks and let us through. They looked awfully relieved.”
He was the unexpected center of attention again at King’s funeral in Atlanta on April 9, to the dismay of McCarthy, Humphrey, Nixon, and Rockefeller, who were largely ignored, and LBJ, who didn’t come. Andy Young, one of King’s closest aides, who would later serve as Atlanta’s mayor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was a Kennedy skeptic until that day when Bobby met with him and other black leaders. “He said, ‘You have to pick up the torch or the cross of the fallen hero and carry it on. There’s no slowing down, there’s no stopping,’ ” Young remembers fifty years later. “From that point on, I felt that this was a guy that I could give my life for, like I would have for Martin. I never felt that way about Gene McCarthy or McGovern or anybody else.” To the Reverend Frederick D. Kirkpatrick, another civil rights icon, Bobby was the “blue-eyed soul brother.”
Black leaders may have been impressed with Bobby’s reaction to the King killing, but Eugene Pulliam wasn’t. The son of Methodist missionaries and grandfather of future vice president Dan Quayle owned both papers in Indianapolis and others in Muncie and Vincennes. And he hated Democrats, especially Kennedys, and above all Bobby. It wasn’t just their ideological divide but that unlike Jack, Bobby made zero effort to woo the hardscrabble newspaperman. He simply wouldn’t and couldn’t. Pulliam took his revenge through a stream of mocking editorials and cartoons, with headlines branding Bobby as UNFIT, UNSHORN, UNWANTED. Orders went out to the newsroom dictating “whenever Senator [Eugene] McCarthy comes to Indiana that we should give him as full coverage as possible—but this does not apply to a man named Kennedy.”
Pulliam’s naysaying was a window into why Indiana was an unfortunate choice for Bobby’s first primary test. Its politics traditionally were right-wing enough that it once boasted the largest Ku Klux Klan chapter in America, and Indiana was where Robert Welch, Jr., had founded the John Birch Society. Jack lost the state to Nixon by more than two hundred thousand votes in 1960, and George Wallace captured close to 30 percent of the Democratic primary tally in 1964. In his primary, Bobby faced not just McCarthy, who had spent months organizing there, but also Roger Branigin, the governor, who four years before had won by the largest margin in Indiana history. Control of the tight-knit state party ensured Branigin the support of all but one of ninety-two county Democratic chairs, along with a war chest filled by what amounted to compulsory contributions from more than twenty thousand patronage workers. The governor had launched his campaign as a stand-in for LBJ, and he ended it as a placeholder for Humphrey or for his own pipe dream of talking himself onto the national ticket. The question in 1960 had been whether a Kennedy could buy Indiana. In 1968, it was whether Indiana would buy this Kennedy.
Bobby seemed oblivious to the challenge at first. In early April he was delivering the same catalog-of-pain speeches he had everywhere else and was buoyed by his huge crowds. But the scenes on the nightly news showed a long-haired, high-voiced candidate being mobbed by fans who were too young and too black for an electorate that was over 90 percent white. Indiana worried more about crime than poverty, and they wanted a father figure, not a fifth Beatle. So Kennedy changed course. By the time he returned to Indiana on April 22 for a pre-primary blitz, his barbers had a green light to crop closer. His schedulers added factories, farm towns, and whistle-stop trains and subtracted universities. He started referring to himself as “former chief law enforcement officer of the United States” instead of “former attorney general,” and staffers stopped calling him Bobby, opting for the more grown-up Robert or Bob. His stump speeches focused on crime, hog prices, and his love of Kokomo, Vincennes, and other burgs whose names he could barely pronounce or remember. Even his clothes were toned down. Custom-fit suits from Lewis & Thomas Saltz Clothiers were replaced by one that, in the words of a New York Times reporter, “looked as if it had come off the rack of a small-town haberdasher.”
Mission accomplished. His audiences now were mirroring the Hoosier State’s mid-American electorate, as veteran chronicler Teddy White observed: “The matrons on their porches with their aprons, pin-curlers in hair; the old ladies of Indiana, with their white pinafores over blue dresses, teeter-tottering in tennis shoes to catch a glimpse of him and mothering him from afar. (‘He looks so tired, the poor boy, why do they make him work so hard?’) Blue-collar workingmen thickened the crowds, a rare sight in daytime political campaigning, and one saw them shyly wipe their hands on overalls or shirts before offering hands to the candidate to shake. One grasped for analogy: Along the highway, as the car swept along, he was, obviously, The Kennedy, of the Family and Blood Royal, the Prince Coming to Town. In a working-class district he was Robin Hood. At night, in such places as Gary and South Bend on the final weekend, he was the Prince, Robin Hood and the Pied Piper all combined.”
Some journalists worried that after tailoring his messages to his galleries, he now sounded more like Barry Goldwater than Bobby Kennedy, a charge that resonated with younger staffers. There was no denying that he was a politician, not a prelate, but he was far from the prototypical panderer. Anyone who knew him realized he’d been a law-and-order man since his days chasing down racketeers and mafiosi, just as he’d made Republican-style free enterprise a centerpiece of his Bedford-Stuyvesant experiment. Rural whites “don’t want to listen to what the blacks want and need. You have to get them listening by talking about what they’re interested in, before you can start trying to persuade them about other matters,” Bobby said in siding with his older, more pragmatic advisers. Yet he knew how issues like crime could be used as a wedge between blacks and whites, poor and rich. So he made sure that every speech on crime included a call for justice, and that what he said to chambers of commerce differed in the sequence but not the elements from what he said in the slums.*13
Simple evenhandedness was not nearly enough, however. He had come too far to revert to his Bad or Old incarnations, and he’d never learned to mask his emotions. That meant making his audiences squirm. He told college kids everywhere he went that they could change the world, so why the hell weren’t they? He warned eight hundred medical students at Indiana University that they’d have to foot the bill for caring for the poor. As boos rang out, a doctor in training asked whether the senator would end medical students’ cherished draft deferments. “The way things are going here today, probably yes,” he said, smiling but serious. It happened again at a luncheon of Civitans, a men’s service club. As his audience chewed on Salisbury steaks, he took the requisite questions on gun control and daylight saving time. Then he turned to his biggest issue—“American children, starving in America”—and asked, “Do you know, there are more rats than people in New York City?” Hearing guffaws, this senator who was kept up nights by images of the hungry children he’d met in the Mississippi Delta grew grim: “Don’t…laugh.” Thomas Congdon, Jr., an editor at The Saturday Evening Post who had started as a Kennedy cynic, attended the lunch and was struck by what he witnessed: “He was telling them precisely the opposite of what they wanted to hear.” It was demagoguery in reverse.
As the candi
date was searching for a voice that was sensitive and at the same time genuine, his ad hoc collection of aides was coalescing into a powerhouse of an organization. At its center was Gerard Doherty, the Massachusetts operative who’d parachuted in with an entourage of Vassar girls, Ivy League lawyers from K Street and Wall Street, and other honorary Kennedys.*14 Onto that unsteady base Team Kennedy grafted thousands of Hoosiers who had resisted joining Branigin’s army of professionals and McCarthy’s college corps. Back in Washington the campaign set up a “boiler room” like the one in 1960, where female partisans quietly tracked, state by state, everything from the latest count of convention delegates to the allocation of bumper stickers. Money helped. In early April the campaign couldn’t afford a mimeograph machine; by early May it was commissioning opinion polls, TV ads, chartered planes with specially stocked galleys, sound trucks, cases of wine, and top-of-the-line hotels and rental cars charged to Papa Joe’s credit cards. Cash—tens of thousands of dollars—showed up in suitcases and shopping bags, delivered from the Park Agency office in Manhattan by Kennedy relatives or friends. Richard Corbett, Steve Smith’s assistant, was supposed to be keeping track, but when nobody stayed on budget, Corbett appealed to Bobby. “What is the presidency worth?” asked the candidate, whose personal wealth by then was estimated at $10 million. “We will spend whatever is necessary.” Rose took the same attitude when one reporter too many quizzed her about buying elections: “It’s our money and we’re free to spend it any way we please. It’s part of this campaign business. If you have money, you spend it to win.”
Bobby spent the earliest hours of election day doing what he often did, grabbing dinner with staff and journalists at the nearest greasy spoon, in this case Sam’s Attic in Indianapolis. Boyish no more, he looked like the wreck he was after a grueling first primary battle—lines on his forehead deepened to crevasses, puffy eyes bloodshot and haunted rather than blue and hostile, and skin blotched like an older man’s. He’d rub his hands over his face in a fruitless bid to banish the exhaustion. Yet campaigning was also restorative. “I loved the faces here in Indiana,” he told his supper mates, “on the farmers, on the steelworkers, on the black kids.” After a couple of hours’ sleep he relieved the stress of waiting by quarterbacking a football game on the front lawn of his Holiday Inn, playing tough enough that an aide twisted his ankle and a journalist was sidelined with a bloody nose.
By nightfall Gene McCarthy’s nose would be bloodied, too, with Bobby scoring a bigger victory than anyone in his camp had hoped at the start. He took 42.3 percent of the vote—compared with Branigin’s 30.7 and McCarthy’s 27—and won nine of eleven congressional districts along with fifty-six of the state’s sixty-three delegates. Kennedy beat Branigin in his home county, city, and precinct; doubled McCarthy’s take among Catholics, laborers, and younger voters; and won every substantial municipality except the college towns of Bloomington and Evansville. In black districts, he scored a crushing 85 percent of the votes, on the same night that he thrashed Humphrey nearly two to one in the primary in predominantly black Washington, D.C. He also carried the seven largest counties in Indiana where Wallace, the racial-backlash candidate from Alabama, had done best in 1964. Bobby did less well in white precincts of Gary and in upper-income suburbs and small towns, where his opponents benefited from Republican crossovers. TV analysts focused on the negative, and it was true that his rivals had won three of every five votes cast. But it also was true that Bobby had trumped McCarthy’s showing in New Hampshire—42.3 percent versus 42.2—which the television networks and everyone else had scored as an epic triumph. Most newspaper reporters were more upbeat. Kennedy’s chief goal, David Broder wrote in The Washington Post, “is to expand the electorate—by bringing out many ordinary non-voters—on the sound theory that those additional voters will give a big margin—to the man who has captivated their interest. In Indiana—despite the obstacles of a late start and strong opposition—that formula worked to perfection.”
Watching the televised results that night from his headquarters at the Sheraton-Lincoln Hotel, Kennedy heard McCarthy say that who came in first, second, or third wasn’t what counted. Really? “That’s not what my father told me,” Bobby said, laughing as he talked back to the TV set. “I always thought it was better to win. I learned that when I was about two.” But he also offered a sober reading of the voters’ verdict: “I really have a chance now, just a chance, to organize a new coalition of Negroes, and working-class white people, against the union and party Establishments.”
His day wasn’t quite done. From the first he had been envious of McCarthy’s legions of college supporters, who he joked were the idealistic A students as compared to his campus dopes. He was sure they’d have been with him if he had gotten in earlier, and no matter how many delegates he won, he never got over their rejection. So when he saw two young McCarthy campaigners that night at the Indianapolis airport, he had to engage: “I wonder why so many of you bright, eager young students are here for McCarthy.” It was nearly midnight, but all three had to wait for an early morning flight, and their conversation went on for two hours at an airport restaurant on a night when he’d had no rest but couldn’t turn off his motor. “He was puzzled that anybody could think that McCarthy could be a good president,” recalls Taylor Branch, one of the student pair, who later wrote the definitive biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Bobby told them he accepted responsibility for helping get us into Vietnam “and that’s why I want to get us out.” He said he knew part of his attraction was just being a Kennedy, adding, “I can’t help what my name is, all I can do is try to do the best with it for the country.” He didn’t change the mind of either McCarthy backer, “but we were profoundly impressed, so much so that after we had hashed all this out forever and told him how much we admired him,” Branch remembers, “we decided we didn’t say it, you know, respectfully enough. So we stayed up and wrote him a long letter…then walked across and dropped it off at his airport motel.”
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THE BEST JUDGES of a candidate’s merits or character are not the opposition aides who get paid to find him lacking. His own staffers are even less credible, since they’re already adoring, and crowds are around only long enough to hear a single speech or shake a hand. The best arbiters are the national political reporters who are on hand around the clock, day after day, on buses, trains, and airplanes, parsing any discrepancies between what the aspirant says in farm states and urban ones, to black audiences and white, and when his poll numbers are up and down. No group of journalists is more battle-hardened except ones who cover real wars. These so-called boys on the bus—and most were still male in 1968—generally had been around long enough to have heard every political promise, seen every permutation of pandering and strong-arming, and lost whatever starry eyes or infatuations they might have started with.
Bobby couldn’t charm them the way JFK had with his intellect, his wit, or his sleek and sophisticated wife. It wasn’t his style, either, to intimidate reporters or buy their favor the way Joe did. Nor did he have his brother Ted’s disarming way of passing on kudos not just for fawning stories but for ones in which he was skewered, then inviting the reporter in for a Chivas and soda. What Bobby could do, in a manner that still amazes those who were on that campaign trail, was make rhinoceros-hided scribes fall in love with him to an extent not seen since Franklin Roosevelt or perhaps his distant cousin Teddy.
Helen Dudar, a prolific reporter at the New York Post, was won over when Bobby took time in Nebraska to visit the Beatrice State Home for the mentally defective. “The superintendent twittered: ‘Would you like to see the wards?’ ” Dudar wrote. “Kennedy, in the flat, imperious voice he uses for people who fawn, replied: ‘I would like to see the children.’*15 We went to the nursery floor….Lying inert in a playpen was a hydrocephalic, a child with a head the size of a basketball. Kennedy leaned in and scratched its stomach for a while. I cannot tell what its response was, because I found I could not look at that child. Then
he patted a vacant-eyed little girl who grabbed his hand and began chewing its fingers. He let her gnaw for a while. Finally he picked her up and carried the slobbering child as he walked about touching other children—a vegetabloid creature slumped unseeing in a chair, a baby with a grapefruit-sized lump on its head that made it look two-headed, all those pathetic grotesques hidden away from the world, suddenly and compulsively objects of Kennedy’s charity and compassion.”
“He can be tough, demanding, rude, icy,” added Dudar. “But to see him with children is always to wonder how exactly he came to be known as ruthless.”
Kristi Witker experienced that tenderness herself. She was getting started at her first job in journalism—working for American Heritage, which planned to publish a book on RFK—and the 1968 campaign was her first taste of politics. “Waving my driver’s license in a press-cardy sort of way,” she talked her way to the front of the hall in New Jersey where Bobby was speaking, then onto the press plane. As she rehearsed how she’d introduce herself to the candidate—“Er—uh, Senator uh—Kennedy, I’m Kristi Witker, and I’m writing a book about you”—she felt a tap on her shoulder: “ ‘Er—uh, excuse me,’ a voice said, ‘my name is—uh—Robert Kennedy.’ ” That “really broke the ice….I thought he was wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. And the press corps did, too. Everybody covering him was in love with him….He really believed what he was saying. I think you could have given him a lie-detector test and he would have passed it with flying colors. I don’t think any of the others could do that.”
