by Larry Tye
Witker didn’t have earlier campaigns to compare this one to, but the Pulitzer Prize winner David Halberstam and the legendary muckraker Jack Newfield did. Neither man was close to a pushover, but both were sufficiently beguiled that they wrote books about Bobby that read like valentines. “He would tell you you were full of shit,” said Newfield. “I have never found another national politician with his authenticity, his candor, his willingness to express emotions, and his unwillingness to behave in a conventional political manner.” Halberstam called him “the most interesting figure in American politics, not only because he was a Kennedy, not only because so much of his education had taken place in the public eye—it could be traced by putting together film clips of this decade—but primarily because he was a transitional figure in a transitional year.”
It wasn’t just them, and it wasn’t always expressed as a panegyric. Bobby had taken to paraphrasing the now famous lines by the playwright George Bernard Shaw—“Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?”—to signal reporters when he was ending a speech and they should run for the press bus.*16 Journalists reciprocated by composing an eight-stanza ode to Bobby during their train trip in Indiana that retraced the famed “Wabash Cannonball.” They called their parody “The Ruthless Cannonball,” and they recited it to the candidate as the trip neared its end:
Oh, listen to the speeches
that baffle, beef, and bore
As he waffles through the woodlands
and slides along the shore.
He’s the politician
who’s touched by one and all.
He’s the demon driver
of The Ruthless Cannonball…
So here’s to Ruthless Robert
May his name forever stand
To be feared and genuflected at
by pols across the land.
Ho Chi Minh is cheering,
and though it may appall,
He’s whizzing to the White House
on The Ruthless Cannonball.
When they finished there was a tense moment of silence, with nobody sure that Bobby would see the humor. He did, addressing the authors with a poker face: “As George Bernard Shaw once said—the same to you, buddy.”*17
Not all journalists were joking when they lampooned him. The Daily News in Welch, West Virginia, editorialized that “Bobby Kennedy is: uninvited, unwanted, undesirable, unethical, un-American, unfit, unprepared, unshorn, unpopular, unloved and overrated.” William Loeb, the unyieldingly conservative publisher of the New Hampshire’s Manchester Union Leader, wrote that Bobby was running for “Dictator of the United States” and that “once installed in the White House, no one and no group of people would be safe from him!” On the other end of the political spectrum, neither Murray Kempton nor Mary McGrory, old RFK and JFK allies, had forgiven him for his oafish entrance into the campaign. Kempton penned a piece in The New Republic explaining “Why I’m for McCarthy.” McGrory wrote that “Kennedy is not in the large sense a unifying candidate because of the deep divisions within himself.”
As for his journalist fans, few came from or could relate to an arena of privilege like Bobby’s. But they were show-me types, and they could see that this son of Florida’s Gold Coast and Massachusetts’s Cape Cod was genuinely devoted to an underclass few politicians noticed. Most political reporters had despaired of finding a liberal with backbone or a conservative who cared. Bobby was that tough liberal—or humane conservative. “There was something in him that reminded me of something that I had in myself, maybe long ago,” says James Stevenson of The New Yorker. Norman Mailer was likewise “excited by precisely [Kennedy’s] admixture of idealism plus willingness to traffic with demons, ogres, and overlords of corruption.” Bobby had seen as much of America’s dark side as any hard-bitten hack, yet he remained a patriot and an optimist. He started out thinking he could censor the press and ended up listening to and learning from its practitioners. He still reamed out reporters for stories he felt were overly critical, but now he apologized afterward. He made journalists identify with this man who had everything, made them believe, as the columnist Jules Witcover wrote, “that to deny him, at forty-two, the leadership of the most powerful nation in the world would be unjust.” The longtime CBS newsman Dan Rather was mistrustful at first but became a believer. Bobby, he says, seemed “tough enough to get elected, and smart and sensible enough to implement what he’d promised to do.”
The Nashville Tennessean’s John Seigenthaler and Bill Kovach were disciples. Both considered journalism their religion and spent their careers putting politicians in the spotlight, and often in the slammer—but for Bobby, they took a rare hiatus to work on his campaign. “It was the soul of this man,” says Kovach. “I have never before, nor since, seen a politician with that core of feeling for other people, especially people who needed his help.” Robert Scheer of Ramparts helped with speechwriting. Jack Mallon of the New York Daily News acted as informal liaison with the labor movement. Roger Mudd became a regular guest at Hickory Hill. All sacrificed their journalistic chastity, but Bobby was worth it. Harrison Salisbury had had few good words for this third Kennedy son when he was reporting for The New York Times, but by 1968, when he was an editor overseeing the paper’s political coverage, he had become a convert. “The new Bobby was a proud man but a humble one. He was no longer a capo. He was a member of the human race, a man of doubts and uncertainties. This was not the Bobby Old Joe had created in his image,” said Salisbury. “Gone was the smart aleck. Gone was the political trickster. Gone was the shallow sureness. Robert F. Kennedy had come of age….I could hardly wait until November. I had not the slightest doubt that Robert F. Kennedy would win.”
The journalist whose U-turn resonated most with fellow writers, and with Bobby, was Richard Harwood of The Washington Post. Harwood had enlisted in the Marines at seventeen and had scars on his back attesting to his role in the bloody World War II battle to capture Iwo Jima. He brought the same icy resolve to his political coverage, with politicians dubbing him “Black Death Harwood” for fear of what he’d do to them if he smelled malfeasance. With Bobby, he smelled a demagogue on the campaign stump and a bully on the football field, and he shared his doubts with Post readers. “I had known Bobby Kennedy slightly prior to the 1968 campaign and found him not to my liking,” Harwood said. “That is one of the reasons Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor, assigned me to cover his campaign. He thought I would not be seduced, so to speak.” Looking back, Harwood acknowledged that Bradlee “was wrong. By the end of Bobby’s campaign, I was so fond of him that I asked to be relieved of the assignment.”
What turned Harwood around? “We were seduced,” he explained, “because [Bobby’s] circle was so big that it took us in. It was impossible to draw lines and stay outside….By the time of the Indiana primary—very early in the game—we talked about the Kennedy airplane as ‘The Mother Ship.’ The airport motel at Indianapolis became ‘The Mother Inn.’ Those are family concepts which get back to the concept of the Circle. He brought us in by the qualities of his life….A couple of lines from the Tales of Canterbury [come] to mind. They were about the poor Parson who had a great gift: ‘To drawen folk to hevene by fairnessse, By good ensample; this was his bisynesse.’ That was Bob Kennedy. He did not draw us all to heaven because a lot of us were not capable of that. But he left the good example and made all of us want to try. He drew the circle to take us in and that is why, prodigal or no, we always ached to go home to The Mother Ship.”
Elizabeth Drew, then a Washington correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, puts it more concisely: “He was a flame the moths couldn’t resist.”
—
THE PRIMARY AFTER Indiana was Nebraska, where Kennedy went head-to-head with McCarthy, with no favorite son or other active candidate muddying the contest. Nebraska was an even less promising venue for Bobby than Indiana, with fewer blacks, more farmers, and closer proximity to McCarthy’s home in Minn
esota. Of all fifty states, Nebraska was where John Kennedy lost to Richard Nixon by the widest margin in 1960. But the same magical connection that JFK developed in 1960 with the coal miners of West Virginia, Bobby forged eight years later with the farmers of Nebraska. One day he was giving a talk and the wind blew away his text. Bobby: “There goes my farm program.” His listeners loved it. In Wahoo, on the last day of campaigning, Bobby pointed to a theater marquee reading THE HAPPIEST MILLIONAIRE and told his audience, “I hope that’s what you will make me tomorrow.” More smiles, from the crowd and the candidate. “There was a kind of communication between him and, you know, almost Grant Wood kind of characters in a sense—leather skinned, very hard working people, very traditional values…the last people in the world you would imagine Robert Kennedy to have any relationship with,” said Jeff Greenfield, an RFK speechwriter who was there. Farmers had “the sense that he was somehow not a part of all those gray, faceless, three-button-suited, crew-cut people that were responsible for a lot of what had driven them crazy.”
They were right. Strip away the Kennedy name and privileges, and Bobby really was more like the Americans whose votes he sought than were the professorial Gene McCarthy, the introverted Richard Nixon, and the exasperatingly exuberant Hubert Humphrey. Bobby was smart but as anti-intellectual as any redneck. He relished sports, lacked patience, and loved God. His contradictions were in full view. Pulled by compassion to help the dispossessed, he was tempered by pragmatism and able to see the limits of government. He was less of a conventional politician than McCarthy, even if the college whiz kids couldn’t see it, and he offered a palette of bold colors inaccessible to the pallid Humphrey and Nixon. When he was bored, his facial expression showed it, the same as when he was angry. What tied everything together for Bobby, as for most adults in this most youthful of nations, was his being crazy about kids. They sensed his magic and loved him back. At his best, the way he was in Nebraska, Bobby Kennedy was open and uncomplicated. And, for the first time in this long campaign, he was having fun.
The proof of the chemistry he’d created came at the polls. On May 14, an impressive 51.7 percent of Democratic Cornhuskers pulled their levers for Bobby, compared with McCarthy’s 31.2 percent, Humphrey’s 7.4 percent, and 5.6 percent for LBJ. That made the New Englander two for two in the Midwest, against his Midwestern rivals.
Those early primaries reinforced how irreconcilable the differences were between the Democrats’ two antiwar candidates. Bobby appealed to the blacks and blue-collar whites who lived on either side of the railroad tracks; McCarthy supporters were suburbanites who drove their cars to catch a train. Bobby was Harold Hill, the Music Man, strutting at the head of a raucous crowd. McCarthy was Marshal Will Kane, striding down a lonely street at high noon. Everything the Kennedy campaign did was oversized, from its boiler room operation to the payouts to poll workers at the going rate of twenty-five dollars; McCarthy did less wooing of delegates and paid his volunteers in peanut butter sandwiches. Each played fast and loose with facts—Kennedy about McCarthy’s voting record, McCarthy about Kennedy’s part in the Bay of Pigs and Dominican interventions—but Bobby relished hardball politics, whereas McCarthy was easily bruised. No wonder each ended up hating the other and, if he couldn’t be the nominee, preferred that the prize go to Vice President Humphrey, an avatar of Old Politics and (out of loyalty if not conviction) of the very Vietnam policies that made McCarthy and Kennedy challenge their sitting president.*18
One way Bobby renewed himself and his sense of purpose was by going home—to Hickory Hill on Sundays and to Hyannis Port as often as he could. Jackie sometimes made an appearance at the Kennedy compound, although she and Bobby had grown less close and she was being wooed by the Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis, whom her brother-in-law detested. Jackie was a big booster of Bobby’s campaign, however, and at one family gathering she let her enthusiasm brim over: “Won’t it be wonderful when we get back in the White House?” Ethel was normally gracious about sharing her husband, but not this time: “What do you mean ‘we’?”*19
Bobby visited his parents before heading west for the next primaries in Oregon and California, and he briefed them on the campaign. Afterward, as Joe’s nurse recalled, “he hugged Mrs. Kennedy and said, ‘How will you feel being the mother of two presidents? That makes you quite a girl, doesn’t it?’…He bent over to kiss his father good-bye and added, ‘I’m going to win this one for you.’ [Bobby] stood up straighter than I had ever seen him. Usually his shoulders were hunched over with his head tucked between them, but as he stood before his father, he pulled himself to his full height. Mr. Kennedy held out his hand and they said good-bye with a tight, lingering grip.”
Oregon was McCarthy country. The Minnesota senator had a six-month head start there, and he had used the time to raise money and build support from organized labor as well as college students, and from Democratic leaders along with independents and Republicans. The mayor of Portland, the state’s biggest city, had never forgiven Bobby for investigating racketeering there a decade before. Neither had the state’s mightiest union, the Teamsters. Every media image of Bobby hit the wrong note—diving into the icy Pacific in May, which was nothing unusual for a hearty New Englander but constituted showboating to locals who didn’t wade in until August; being mobbed by blacks and Chicanos in neighboring California, which didn’t play well in a place where minorities were just 2 percent of the population; pushing for federal gun controls, which were anathema to the many Oregonians convinced it was their God-given right to pack a pistol or shotgun; and being lambasted by Drew Pearson for ordering phone taps five years before on Martin Luther King, Jr., which offended a population passionate about their civil liberties. Oregon Democrats were more turned on by McCarthy’s courage in New Hampshire than by any dream of restoring Camelot. They also were better off and more contented with their lot than most of America, with high employment, getaways in the mountains, and few of the urban troubles that were the rationale for the Kennedy candidacy. “This state is like one giant suburb,” Bobby said ten days before the primary. “Let’s face it, I appeal best to people who have problems.”
Those obstacles might have been surmountable if he had run a smarter campaign. It was a Kennedy precept never to let locals make critical decisions, yet he’d vested leadership of the Oregon campaign in Oregon congresswoman Edith Green, who banished from the state Joe Dolan, Dave Hackett, and other first-string Kennedy organizers. A Kennedy commandment he did follow was not sharing his spotlight with a lesser-known opponent, forgetting how misguided that had proved in New York, where he took flak for ducking a debate with then Senator Ken Keating. He repeatedly refused McCarthy’s offer to debate in Oregon, creating the appearance that he was running scared. The root cause of his dilemma was the same one he’d faced early in the New York race: Bobby the candidate needed but didn’t have a second in command who could shift tactics on the run and stay focused on the master strategy the way Bobby the campaign manager had for Jack.
A single moment captured all that was going wrong in the Beaver State. The Sunday morning before the primary, both candidates were campaigning in a mountainside park above Portland. A McCarthy speechwriter noticed Bobby’s press bus and ran up to his boss yelling, “Kennedy’s up there!” While the McCarthy caravan slowly turned to follow Bobby in hopes of a face-to-face confrontation, the young aide, Jeremy Larner, ran ahead to Kennedy’s convertible. “Senator McCarthy is coming. Why don’t you stick around and have a talk with him?” Bobby snapped back, “Isn’t that too baaad!” and then, without looking back, ordered his driver to floor it. The TV crews caught it all, with Larner yelling in Bobby’s wake, “Coward! Chicken!” and McCarthy pulling up and shaking hands with reporters abandoned by the retreating Kennedy.
But even Larner later acknowledged there was more to the scene than TV viewers had sensed. Standing next to Bobby, he’d detected “a look of exquisite hurt….He wasn’t surprised by the act itself. That wasn’t what hurt him. He would h
ave done the same himself, had done the same or worse many times and without hesitation….The hurt look was no cry for pity: it was the registration that something had gone terribly wrong in our fight for the territory….And what did I know, what did I really know, that made me so eager to beat him?” Two candidates who should have been joining forces to take on the establishment had somehow ended up duking it out with each other.*20
On election Tuesday, McCarthy capitalized on Bobby’s retreat and other stumbles, beating him by a decisive 44 to 38 percent. The press trumpeted it as the first time a Kennedy had ever lost a bid for office, which was only partly true. They had won fifteen straight contested primaries and general elections dating back to Jack’s first run for Congress in 1946. But JFK had lost his ill-advised try for the vice presidential nomination at the 1956 Democratic National Convention, which analysts left out in their bids to make Bobby feel miserable. It worked. More even than his brothers, Bobby shared Joe’s worship of the god of winning. He also understood that how he handled the loss would say even more about him than his victories, and he did it without rationalization. First he sent the winner a congratulatory telegram of the kind he hadn’t received when he’d won earlier contests. He also publicly conceded that his campaign had taken “a serious blow…I’ve lost. I’m not one of those who think that coming in second or third is winning.” Last, he took aside his chief student organizer in Oregon and said, “I’m sorry I let you down.”
