by Larry Tye
The loss was jolting but at the same time liberating. Defeat provided another moment of learning for Bobby. Just as Jack’s coming up short at the Democratic convention in 1956 made him refocus on the race that really mattered—for the top spot in 1960—so Bobby’s defeat a dozen years later reminded him why he was running and what it took to win. Playing it safe hadn’t worked and hadn’t been fun. He made clear a day after the Oregon vote that he would debate McCarthy on national TV, a reversal of his earlier insistence that he would agree only if Humphrey did. He announced he’d quit the race unless he won the following week’s primary in California, which set up the kind of all-or-nothing odds that Bobby liked. He reminded supporters that his campaign was not the juggernaut everyone had assumed and reiterated that he could win only with their help. He also let journalists know, without having to say it, that this Kennedy might be a bit more fragile and less ruthless than they’d imagined, leading even critic Mary McGrory to concede that he had met defeat “with grace.”
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AT STAKE IN California was less whether Bobby could best Gene McCarthy than whether the nation was ready for this Kennedy as its president. The Golden State had recently surpassed New York as the most populous state, and it had always been the most representative demographically and politically. It was going through the same agitation in 1968 as the rest of the nation, over a war that still roiled, riot-torn cities, and tensions between the old and new in everything from electioneering to hairstyles. The question was which presidential aspirant could restore both peace and harmony. Was it law-and-order types like California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, and its former senator, Richard Nixon? Or could it be Bobby Kennedy, whose fans imagined him reconciling warring factions here and in Vietnam even as his haters saw him as a juvenile delinquent in a suit? It had come down to a battle not just between right and left, but between despair and hope.
Half of his California advisers implored him to tone things down. Hold fewer rallies in the cities with less crowd frenzy, they said, and focus more on the white working-class Democrats who were escaping to the exurbs. Bobby might have given that same advice in 1960, and he had taken it the month before in Indiana, but not now. He might go down in California, but he’d go down swinging, not playing it safe the way he had in Oregon. “The issues,” he told one journalist, “are more important than me now.” In the last weeks he imported longtime confidants including his brother-in-law Steve Smith and his Justice Department friend John Seigenthaler, displacing although not replacing Jesse Unruh and the Californians who had been in charge. He also fell back on his instincts, doing more, not less, barnstorming in strongholds of Mexican Americans, urban blacks, wage-earning whites, and other elements of the coalition into whose hands he was thrusting his fate. His fist was once again pounding his open palm, as fans in Los Angeles yelled, “Sock it to ’em, Bobby!” He sounded his new theme at a reception at the Beverly Hilton Hotel: “If I died in Oregon, I hope Los Angeles is Resurrection City.” In Oakland, at a secret midnight session with Black Panthers and other minority activists, he listened to them vent in a way he hadn’t been able to with James Baldwin and friends in 1963. “These meetings aren’t very attractive,” Bobby said. “They need to tell people off. They need to tell me off.” When that bawling-out got especially nasty, a black Kennedy aide tried to intervene, but the candidate wouldn’t let him: “This is between them and me.”
All of that served as a prelude to what was supposed to be the big event: an hour-long nationally broadcast TV face-off with McCarthy just three days before the primary. Such appearances had always been Bobby’s Achilles’ heel. He lacked Jack’s quiet grace and McCarthy’s poetic intellectualism. He did best in a freewheeling give-and-take, worst in this format, which was more like a joint press conference. But just by showing up he quelled the criticism over ducking debates. He made his case to the thirty-two million Americans who tuned in, most of whom scored the encounter a draw and a yawn, given how often the candidates agreed. There was, however, one exchange that registered. McCarthy, who’d never shown any passion for urban issues, made a compelling pitch for breaking down ghettos so blacks could live where the jobs were and America wouldn’t end up with a “practical apartheid.” Bobby’s Bedford-Stuyvesant approach was just the opposite, acknowledging the dangers of segregation but recognizing that, for now, it was vital to bring good jobs and better housing to where blacks actually resided. Yet the way he put it this time was different. “[You] say that you are going to take ten thousand black people and move them into Orange County,” Bobby argued, putting words into his opponent’s mouth. “Kick those people out, put them in the suburbs where they can’t afford the housing, where their children can’t keep up with schools, and where they don’t have the skills for the jobs. It’s just going to be catastrophic.” It was coded phrasing designed less to defend displaced blacks than to scare McCarthy’s suburban voters with the specter of an invasion from the ghetto. It also was a rare display—in this phase of his campaign and life—of the bare-knuckled Bobby of old.
The day after the debate, Bobby visited Orange County, which he had mentioned the night before and was Nixon’s birthplace. His touch this time was light as he asked his audience at a strawberry festival, “Will you all remember to vote for me on Tuesday? Promise? [‘Yes, Yes.’] Think of all my children. Think that if I lose, think of all the little tears that will come down all their cheeks.” Then he took the six of those children who were with him to Disneyland. Their favorite memory is of the souvenir shop, where they passed up Mickey Mouse ears for a gag gift of cut glass tumblers with holes ensuring that unsuspecting drinkers would get dribbled on. “He loved all that kind of stuff,” recalls daughter Kerry. “He loved getting people pushed in the pool.” He also realized, even as he faced the most critical election of his life, that the kids were what mattered most.
The day before the primary he traveled twelve hundred miles—from Los Angeles to San Francisco, Long Beach, Watts, San Diego, and back to Los Angeles. At each stop he railed against the war, against poverty, and against voter apathy, which he believed was his biggest impediment to the nomination. The crowds by now had grown so big that the rallies were held in multiple seatings so everyone could be accommodated, and Bobby barely made it through. It wasn’t just bloody hands and wilted vocal cords now. His stomach was roiling and he was dizzy to the point of collapse. “I just ran out of gas,” he said in a rare admission after the final rally at the El Cortez Hotel in San Diego. Four bottles of ginger ale helped. So did a rare moment alone sitting offstage, his face buried in his hands as he tried to catch his breath. Seldom, in the long annals of American political history, had a candidate waged as intense and condensed a nomination campaign as Bobby had in the eighty days since his launch.
There was one more incident that Monday that everyone with him remembered. It happened in the teeming streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, in late morning. A large firecracker exploded, near and loud, then a string of them—Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Ethel lurched, then crouched in the convertible, frozen. Not Bobby. He continued waving and shaking hands, determined to keep at bay memories of Dallas but quietly asking a reporter to climb in beside Ethel and hold her hand. Random threats had come in throughout the campaign—that the Mob would kill him, or a madman anxious to appear in the history books alongside Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth. Presidential candidates didn’t get Secret Service protection then,*21 and Bobby’s only full-time security man was Bill Barry, a former FBI agent. In mid-May, Ethel sounded the alarm with a friend: “He’s getting more and more death threats, and I’m worried.” Just a day before the Chinatown rally, the Reverend Edwin King of Mississippi received and passed on a warning that if he won the California primary, Bobby would be assassinated by the same unspecified people who had killed JFK. Every week during the campaign, the FBI gave press secretary Frank Mankiewicz pictures of potential assassins, and at every rally he scanned faces in the crowd. Kennedy aides say they tried to w
ork with local police, but there were problems in places like Los Angeles, whose mayor, Sam Yorty, hated Bobby. Tom Reddin, the LA police chief back then, says it was the Kennedy people who were the problem in his city and others—staging illegal motorcades, busting through traffic signals, blocking streets, “and just being general ‘pains in the ass.’ ” That, Reddin adds in an unpublished memoir, is why his officers couldn’t do their job during campaign rallies and why they weren’t on hand to provide proper security at the Ambassador Hotel on election night.
The truth is that Bill Barry and the Kennedy team did their best to protect him, but Bobby got in the way. He had always been a phobophobe, averse to showing fear. Having a brother gunned down would make most people more cautious, but it made Bobby more fatalistic. “Living every day is like Russian roulette,” he said. “There’s no way of protecting a country-stumping candidate. No way at all. You’ve just got to give yourself to the people and to trust them, and from then on it’s just that good old bitch, luck. Anyway, you have to have luck on your side to be elected President of the United States. Either it is with you or it isn’t. I am pretty sure there’ll be an attempt on my life sooner or later. Not so much for political reasons. I don’t believe that. Plain nuttiness, that’s all. There’s plenty of that around.” If he were elected, he added, he surely wouldn’t ride in the kind of bubble-topped, bulletproof limousine that LBJ used: “We can’t have that kind of country, where the President is afraid to go among the people.”
Primary day in California was cooler than normal for the fourth of June, with smog masking the Los Angeles sun and Bobby allowing himself an indulgent sleep in. The filmmaker John Frankenheimer had lent the Kennedys his Malibu beach house, and after lunch, everyone headed for the water. David, who was just days from his thirteenth birthday, was overtaken by the undertow and Bobby dived in for the rescue. He emerged with a red bruise on his forehead but no deadening of the playful mood.
The early reads on voting were upbeat as more family, friends, and aides gathered throughout the afternoon. That evening, Frankenheimer chauffeured the candidate into the city, taking a meandering route that made Bobby nervous and arriving at his headquarters at the Ambassador Hotel just after seven o’clock.
With the polls staying open until eight, results came in slowly and differently on each network. In those days, news organizations could announce partial results before polling stations closed and the final numbers were tallied. CBS had him ahead; NBC was less sure. South Dakota also held its primary that day, and Bobby was delighted with an early showing from one district in particular. “You want to hear about the Indians?” he asked the family and friends in his fifth-floor Royal Suite. “We’ve got an Indian precinct in from South Dakota: 878 for Kennedy, 2 for Johnson, 9 for McCarthy. How about that?” The full tally from the Mount Rushmore State, Humphrey’s birthplace, was almost as encouraging: 49.5 percent for Bobby, 30 percent for the vice president, and 20.4 percent for McCarthy. In California, he didn’t do quite as well as some TV analysts predicted or he’d hoped. But buoyed by unprecedented turnouts and majorities in black and Mexican American districts, in the end Kennedy scored a clear-cut victory with 46.3 percent of the vote, compared to McCarthy’s 41.8 and 12 percent for unpledged delegates. The trend was encouraging enough for him to go on TV and quietly claim victory, and for journalists and friends gathered in the suite across the hall to start the party. Everyone who’d mattered during the previous eleven weeks was there, including columnist pals Breslin and Hamill, admiring authors Teddy White and George Plimpton, and activist fans Cesar Chavez, Charles Evers, and John Lewis.
For the first time since he’d jumped in, Bobby believed he could do it. The dream—“Make room for the next leader of the free world,” he’d tease as he sprinted from hotel showers wrapped in a towel—seemed less distant following the day’s double win. That very night he held a series of one-on-ones with Smith, Sorensen, Walinsky, and other trusted lieutenants, and began charting plans for the campaign ahead. There’d be a single-minded push in his adopted state of New York. A full-page ad in The New York Times would feature photos of AFL-CIO boss George Meany and segregationist governor Lester Maddox of Georgia—both staunchly anti-Bobby and both wielding huge clout in the Democrat Party—asking rhetorically whether insiders like them should be allowed to pick the next president. The candidate would head overseas next, showing his gravitas by meeting with the pope and foreign leaders. Nobody, least of all Bobby, minimized the obstacles remaining. But after California and South Dakota he knew that McCarthy didn’t matter and that the only one who could deny him the nomination was Hubert Humphrey, or, as the comedian and mock presidential candidate Pat Paulsen dubbed him earlier that evening, Herbert Humphrey. “I’m going to chase Herbert’s ass all over the country,” Bobby vowed. “Everywhere he goes I’ll go too.”
Before he went anywhere, Bobby took a quiet moment. Sitting on the floor of his hotel room, arms around his knees, he lit a victory cigar and contemplated. At the start he hadn’t been sure whether he was running as Joe’s son, Jack’s brother, or LBJ’s avowed enemy. He retained a piece of each of those personas, but he had found a voice and two uncomplicated motivations of his own: to end the war and end poverty. Both were doable, he told himself, as aides pressed him to head down to the ballroom. Legions of restless believers were there singing “This Land Is Your Land,” the Woody Guthrie ballad that Bobby had promised to make America’s anthem. A few minutes before midnight he looked over at Ethel, who was bouncing up and down on the bed. “Ready?” he asked. Then, knowing how McCarthy and others had teased him about campaigning with his dog always at his side, he added impishly, “Do you think we should take Freckles down?”
His valedictory speech began with a nod to Don Drysdale, the Los Angeles Dodgers ace “who pitched his sixth straight shutout tonight, and I hope that we have as good fortune in our campaign.” (Bobby was one of the few men in America who actually didn’t know who the future Hall of Famer was.) Next came the thank-yous—to Jean and Pat, Rose, “and all those other Kennedys.” Also to Freckles—“I’m not doing this in any order of importance,” he joked—and Ethel, whose “patience during this whole effort was fantastic.” Then he got serious: “I think we can end the divisions within the United States…whether it’s between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups, or over the war in Vietnam….I intend to make that my basis for running over the period of the next few months.” The crowd loved it, shouting, “Bobby Power!” He ended back on a light note, saying that “Mayor Yorty has just sent me a message that we’ve been here too long already. So my thanks to all of you, and on to [the convention in] Chicago, and let’s win there.” Giving a thumbs-up, then flashing the V-for-victory sign, he turned to leave for a reception on a lower level followed by a press conference.
But plans had changed. Aides decided to skip the second reception and go directly to the press conference, where reporters were anxious to file their stories. The shortest route was the way he’d come in, through the waiters’ swinging doors and into the kitchen and pantry. In the pushing of the crowd Bobby got separated from his bodyguard, Bill Barry, who was helping a pregnant Ethel off the podium. Nobody worried, since the candidate was among friends, with a Mexican busboy reaching for his hand as a cluster of reporters, photographers, and aides trailed behind. Past the rusty ice machine, thirty feet from the media room, a curly-haired, swarthy young man wearing a pale blue sweatshirt was standing unnoticed on a low tray stacker, waiting for his opening. It was shortly after midnight and Andrew West, a reporter for the Mutual Radio Network, was asking Bobby his plans for catching up to Humphrey’s delegate lead. Bobby: “It just goes back to the struggle for it…”
That was as far as he got. The shooter stepped from his hiding place, reached straight ahead with his right arm, and started firing a .22-caliber revolver. A single shot was followed by a volley—pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop—that sounded eerily like the firecrackers in Chin
atown. Just how many shots were fired, at what range and angle, would become grist for another assassination conspiracy mill. Bobby lurched against the ice machine, then sagged to the ground, lying faceup on the grimy concrete floor. He was conscious, eyes wide open, as blood oozed behind his right ear. “Is everybody okay?” he asked. The busboy, Juan Romero, assured him they were, and Bobby whispered, “Everything’s going to be okay.” Romero placed rosary beads in Bobby’s hand and tried to cushion his head as Ethel pleaded with the pressing crowd to “give him room to breathe.” Then she turned to her husband and said softly, “I’m with you, my baby.” The scene was bedlam. “Get the gun…get the gun,” pleaded West, the radio man. “You monster!” a kitchen worker yelled from his perch atop the steam table. “You’ll die for this!” The only one who seemed serene was Bobby himself—“a kind of sweet accepting smile on his face,” recalled the journalist and Bobby’s friend Pete Hamill, “as if he knew it would all end this way.” Medics finally arrived and hoisted him by his shoulders and feet. “Oh, no, no,” Bobby protested. “Don’t. Don’t lift me.” Then he passed out. As the ambulance drove away, campaign volunteers sobbed and prayed as a large black man pounded a hotel pillar with his bloody right fist, shouting the questions being echoed across America: “Why, God, why? Why again? Why another Kennedy?”
The next twenty-five hours were a hellish whirlwind. When the police showed up at the hotel about fifteen minutes after the shooting—Chief Reddin says they weren’t there originally because “we were asked not to be”—they quickly assembled evidence that the gunman was a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan who hated Israel, hated Kennedy for supporting Israel, and shot the senator a year to the day after the start of the Six-Day War in which Israel routed its Arab enemies. Sirhan’s rampage wounded five others along with Bobby, whose injuries were recognized from the first to be life-threatening. Friends rounded up the children. David, who’d always been terrified that his father would be shot like Uncle Jack, learned by watching the election-night proceedings on TV that his nightmare had come true. Eight-year-old Kerry woke early the following morning to watch Bugs Bunny; “a news flash interrupted the cartoon,” she recalled. “That’s how I learned my father had been shot.” The three oldest—Kathleen, Joe, and Bobby Jr.—were retrieved from their prep schools and flown to Los Angeles in Air Force Two to be with their parents.
