by Larry Tye
Bobby meanwhile was transferred at 1:00 A.M. from Central Receiving Hospital, where he’d been stabilized, to the Hospital of the Good Samaritan, where six surgeons performed an operation that lasted nearly four hours. Machines kept his heart pumping but other machines showed that his brain had ceased to function. At two o’clock the following morning Mankiewicz appeared in the media room across from the hospital with the announcement everyone had been dreading: “Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 A.M. today, June 6, 1968…He was forty-two years old.” Back at the Ambassador Hotel, a red rose marked the spot on the blood-stained pantry floor where the senator was felled. On the wall above was a hand-lettered cardboard sign that might have been up for weeks but seemed especially appropriate now: THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING. It was the title of the Camelot novel and had been the glorious epithet of King Arthur. In a way, it didn’t matter that Bobby had never assumed the throne and now never would. Millions of Americans already believed in his majesty.
* * *
*1 “When old Bob gets to be president, why then I think I could best serve him as secretary of state,” Jack said, adding with a smile, “I don’t know whether I’d enjoy taking orders from lovable old Bob” (Paul Fay OH, November 11, 1970, 215, JFKL).
*2 Bobby joked to The Boston Globe’s Marty Nolan that “Gene’s mother was German. That’s why he’s so mean.” Nolan: “What’s your excuse?” Looking back, Nolan says, “RFK was mightily pissed for about 5 minutes. Later, he told the story himself to his friends” (Nolan email to author).
*3 Not getting caught would become a theme of the 1968 campaign, as it had been in earlier Kennedy races. It meant not getting caught using Senate staff for campaign duties. It also meant not getting caught setting up phony campaign committees, which staffer Barbara Coleman knew about because “I was treasurer of one.” They said everyone did it, which was true, but few did it better than the Kennedys. (Peter Edelman OH, July 29, 1969, 185–87, JFKL; and Barbara Coleman OH, January 9, 1970, 63, JFKL.)
*4 There are several reasons why Ted might have refused. He didn’t want to be the bearer of such unwelcome news at the eleventh hour, he still hoped to change his brother’s mind, and he worried that McCarthy would lash back at Bobby. Bobby then got his old friend Richard Goodwin, now working for McCarthy, to pass on word of a Kennedy run (Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, 847–48).
*5 Bobby observed of McGrory. “Mary is so gentle—until she gets behind a typewriter.” Theirs was a feud between Irish, he added, and they’d work it out (Norris, Mary McGrory, 103 and 109).
*6 The proposal, the brainchild of Ted Sorensen and Mayor Richard Daley, was one Bobby advanced but had little faith in and that LBJ couldn’t accept for fear it would look like a backroom deal to keep Bobby out and would brand America’s Vietnam policy as a failure when the president didn’t think it was. Still, Bobby was swept along to the point where he had his staff type two speeches, one saying that he would run for president, the other that he wouldn’t.
*7 The Caucus Room is also where Bobby had listened to testimony against Joe McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings and faced off against Jimmy Hoffa. The room was so associated with the Kennedys that in 2009, after Ted’s death, it was renamed the Kennedy Caucus Room.
*8 In Los Angeles, a Mexican American teenager took both shoes and told a reporter, “I’m going to wear them to the senior prom this year, and then I’m going to have them bronzed.” Bobby took such incidents in stride, putting his stockinged foot on the armrest of a reporter’s chair and joking, “Don’t tell me the people of this country don’t love me….On the other hand, perhaps all they wanted was a shoe.” (Stein and Plimpton, American Journey, 300, and Clarke, Last Campaign, 248.)
*9 Goodwin worked in the White House for JFK, stayed on as one of LBJ’s prized speechwriters, then signed up with McCarthy when he was the only antiwar candidate. Nobody, including McCarthy, was surprised when he jumped to Bobby’s campaign weeks after Bobby announced.
*10 Richard Harwood, who was voicing similar concerns in The Washington Post, was reminded that Bobby still didn’t like being second-guessed and that Ethel was as protective as ever. “When I went back to the airplane to take off on the next leg of the trip,” recalled Harwood, “Ethel Kennedy came down the aisle with my story wadded up, and threw it in my face” (Whitehead, “Kennedys,” American Experience).
*11 In covertly taping their meeting, LBJ wasn’t doing anything different from what JFK had done repeatedly. But he forgot that Bobby knew all about that kind of recording and, always suspicious of LBJ, had brought along an electronic device that would interfere with the signal. When he learned afterward that his tapes were blank, “Johnson exploded,” his biographer said, “not because he needed to know the content of the meeting, which his aides Walt Rostow and Charles Murphy had dutifully captured through copious notes, but because he had been outflanked” (Updegrove, Indomitable Will, 272).
*12 The assistant chief of police, who was black, had a different message for Kennedy advance man Jim Tolan: Bobby was so well liked in the ghetto that he “could sleep all night in the middle of Seventeenth and Broadway and not be hurt” (James Tolan OH, June 27, 1969, 43, JFKL).
*13 Asked by a campaign reporter for his views on capital punishment, Bobby said, “I’m against it—in all cases.” Reminded that he’d held substantially different views as attorney general, he quipped, “That was before I read Albert Camus.” Joking aside, said Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby “had no fear of being accused of flip-flopping, of changing positions once firmly held, or of having earlier been on another side of an issue. He saw, in fact—whether the issue was capital punishment or Vietnam—not vice but virtue in being first on one side, then on the other….That’s why so many hated him—and why so many of us loved him” (Mankiewicz, So As I Was Saying, 190–92).
*14 These so-called honorary Kennedys ranged from Bobby’s old Justice Department staff to people who’d worked on Jack’s campaigns, especially in 1960. “They were awful good to us in ’60” was a familiar Bobby refrain, and one that saw him embrace a lot of political hacks who made his current staffers cringe.
*15 Labels mattered to Bobby. On the one hand, he was one of the least politically correct figures in politics, to the point of offending the faint-hearted. Yet he saw that calling impaired youngsters “wards,” as opposed to “children,” affected the way they were treated. So it was, said Frank Mankiewicz, that Bobby in the mid-1960s became the first white elected official to use the word “black” at a time when that was what African American activists preferred, and when most white politicians favored “Negro,” “colored,” or other terms that were coming to be seen as degrading (Mankiewicz, So As I Was Saying, 187).
*16 One time he was more explicit, closing a speech with “As George Bernard Shaw used to say, ‘run for the bus’ ” (Halberstam, Unfinished Odyssey, 70).
*17 Most journalists already knew how wry his humor was, although it was situational rather than telling man-goes-into-a-bar jokes. When his campaign plane had problems in Indiana, Bobby turned to reporters and teased, “I don’t want to seem immodest, but if we don’t make it you fellows are all going to be in small print.” When he saw a sign saying NIXON IS THE ONE, he teased the crowd, “Nixon’s the one what?” (Blackburn, “Personal Thoughts”; Unfinished Odyssey, 68; and Mudd, Place To Be, 236.)
*18 McCarthy suggested early on that if Bobby would drop out in 1968, the Minnesotan would agree to serve just one presidential term, then clear the way for Kennedy to succeed him. Almost as absurd was Bobby’s proposal that if McCarthy would drop out, he could serve as secretary of state in a Kennedy administration.
*19 The antipathy between the sisters-in-law was legendary and true. Jackie called Ethel a “baby-making machine—wind her up and she becomes pregnant.” Ethel teased Jackie about her dream of being a ballet dancer: “With those clodhoppers of yours? You’d be better off going in for soccer.” (Martin, Seeds of Destruction, 375–76, and Adler, El
oquent Jacqueline Kennedy, 51.)
*20 Larner is one of a series of high-level McCarthy aides who say today that they might have defected to Bobby, because he stood a better chance not just of winning but of keeping the promises he was making (Author interview with Jeremy Larner).
*21 LBJ would order such protection for all major presidential candidates after Bobby’s shooting, and soon after that, Congress made it the law.
Epilogue
GOODBYES
AMERICA HADN’T SEEN a sendoff like this since Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train a hundred and three years before. More than a million people turned out along the Penn Central tracks as the train carrying Robert F. Kennedy’s body made its 226-mile run from New York to Washington. The crowds were a panorama of the nation on that sticky Saturday afternoon in June 1968. Girl Scouts came with Little Leaguers. Factory workers stood alongside ragpickers and nuns, stretching on tiptoes to see. Husbands embraced sobbing wives. They arrived in yellow pickup trucks and flotillas of boats, wearing Bermuda shorts and hair curlers, tossing roses. A pair of corpulent policemen stood at attention beside their squad car as the train surfaced in New Jersey. Some climbed water towers and hung from girders to get a better look. Outside Newark, three firemen saluted from the deck of their vessel, The John F. Kennedy. There were brass bands, police bands, school bands, Catholic bands. Hands were cupped in prayer or held over hearts, hats off. As the locomotive slowly pulled through the station in Baltimore, seventy-five hundred mourners led by the mayor sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the same sorrowful tones that had greeted President Lincoln a century before.
It was Bobby’s America, bearing, as always, signs that spoke from its collective heart, WE HAVE LOST OUR LAST HOPE, WHO WILL BE THE NEXT ONE? REST IN PEACE, ROBERT. And, hand-lettered and held aloft by Negro youngsters on the platform in Baltimore: WE LOVES YOU, BOBBY.
Michael Harrington looked out the window of the twenty-one-car train for as long as he could bear. “Every time I did, I began to cry. The sorrowing faces along the way were a mirror of my own feelings,” said the author whose writings helped launch the War on Poverty and who saw Bobby as “the man who actually could have changed the course of American history.” As for those with him inside the railcars—politicians of the old school and new, intellectuals and trade unionists, blacks, Irish, Chicanos, and Jews—they were, said Harrington, “the administration of Robert Kennedy that was never going to be.” Frank Mankiewicz was struck by the distinctive ways that different groups grieved during the ride, which took twice as long as its normal four hours: “The Irish were drinking, singing, telling great stories about Bob. ‘God, do you remember the time in Butte?’ The Jews were sad, weeping. I think in an earlier time they would have been tearing up their clothes, right? The Protestants were just staring straight ahead. You could tell, as you walked through the cars, who was who.”
Ethel left the casket and walked down the aisles greeting guests like the generous hostess she had always been. “Nice you were able to make it” to one. To others, “We’ll cry later.” Pollsters would pronounce her America’s most admired woman for how she carried herself in the aftermath. Friends watched as she soldiered through those days and the years that followed, raising eleven children and burying David and Michael,* never removing her wedding ring or contemplating remarrying. It wasn’t just that she was an experienced griever, but that her faith let her imagine Bobby in a better place, looking down. It sustains her still. “They’re in Heaven, they’re in Paradise with the angels,” she says of those she has lost. “They can see everything….I feel very, very sure of that.”
Bobby had been equally sure. “He asked me one day if I had a choice of dying and going straight to heaven, or of living and taking my chances, which would I choose—I said I would live and take my chances and he said he would choose the other,” remembered Kennedy cousin Polly Fitzgerald. “It comforts me now to know this and to remember his simple faith in God’s promises.”
Then there was Rose, seated in the compartment with Bobby’s casket in her familiar black mourning dress, ever unruffled as she had been as one after another of her children had impossibly fallen. She waved lightly to the crowds because, as she explained afterward, “I felt that if people cared enough to come out and pay their respects we ought at least to give them some sign of appreciation. As for my being composed—I had to be. If I had broken down in grief I would only have added to the misery of the others….How sad are our hearts when we realize that we shall never see Bobby again, with his tousled, windblown hair, his big, affectionate smile, carrying one child piggyback and leading another by the hand—his dog close behind.” Joe, meanwhile, wouldn’t let anyone turn off his television set in Hyannis Port, watching and silently weeping as every detail of the murder was reconstructed. “After Bobby’s death,” Rose remembered, “Joe’s condition declined until by the fall of that year he was approaching helplessness.” He died a year later, with just one of his four sons alive to mourn him.
Ted tried to step in for Bobby in countless ways, starting with his eulogy. “My brother,” he told us, “need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life. He should be remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” Five months later, in a letter to Bobby’s children, he filled in the image: “When I think of Bobby, I shall always see Cape Cod on a sunny day. The wind will be from the southwest and the white caps will be showing and the full tide will be sweeping through the gaps in the breakwater. It will be after lunch, and Bob will be stripped to the waist and he’ll say, ‘come on, Joe, Kathleen, Bobby and David, Courtney, Kerry, come on Michael and even you Chris and Max—call your Mother and come on for a sail.’ …The tide is gentle—the sand shifts—the sky is blue—the seagulls watch from above and the breeze is warm. And there will be happiness and love and we are together again.”
Jackie continued her transit away from the Kennedy orbit once Bobby was gone. At his urging, she’d slowed her romance with Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping tycoon who was twenty-three years older than she and who Bobby thought wanted to exploit her celebrity. Now things were different. Jackie and Ari were married, four months after Bobby’s burial, on Ari’s private island of Skorpios.
Hubert Humphrey, who captured the Democratic presidential nomination that summer in Chicago, bore the biggest cross politically. “It was after Bobby’s death that everything went to pot,” he explained. “I said it and I meant it that the bullet that shot and killed Bobby Kennedy fatally wounded me….I felt it from the minute it happened….I think the whole Democratic Party lost momentum….Had Bobby lived I think there’d have been a Democrat in the White House.” Monday morning quarterbacking is easy, but Humphrey is right. Had he beaten Bobby for the nomination, Bobby would have supported him in the fall campaign and there might not have been angry demonstrations in Chicago or a bitter third-party bid by George Wallace, who captured 13.5 percent of the vote in an election in which Nixon edged Humphrey by just 0.7 percent. Who better than Bobby to answer Nixon and Wallace on fighting crime and restitching the social safety net into a trampoline?
The questions that everyone asks, and none can answer, are whether Bobby would have been the Democratic standard-bearer rather than Humphrey—and the president instead of Nixon. Nixon himself thought the former, telling his family the night of the California primary, “It sure looks like we’ll be going against Bobby.” Bill Daley thought so, too, saying that his father, the powerful mayor of Chicago, believed that Bobby “was going to stop in Chicago on his way back from L. A. I would say there was a 70 percent chance [Dad] was going to endorse him….Then the momentum would have shifted to where other people like my dad who were still left would have been hard pressed not to go there.” While that is speculation, what is certain is that if Bobby had been the Democratic nominee, he knew Nixon’s vulnerabilities better than anybody else, having orchestrated the campaign th
at beat him eight years before.
Last goodbyes for the slain candidate poured in from across the globe, with Ethel receiving 350,000 letters of commiseration. “Somehow the Kennedys draw the lightning,” James Reston said in The New York Times. “They seem to be able to save everything but themselves.” The Times of London wrote that “if American presidents were elected by the suffrage of all countries Robert Kennedy would have gone to the White House next January.” Bill Barry, who never forgave himself for not taking the bullets meant for Bobby, said, “I am a much better man for knowing him than I ever was before.” TV’s Jack Paar quipped that he “would like everything about Bobby’s movie but the ending.” Fifteen journalists who covered his presidential campaign paid their tribute with an annual award for the best stories on Bobby’s constituency of the forgotten and neglected, which is one in a series of memorials to his passions for human rights and justice for children.
Almost on cue with Bobby’s prediction that there’d be a black in the White House early in the new millennium, Senator Barack Obama, who was six when Bobby died, remembered more than forty years later that “this man who was never president, who was our attorney general for only three years, who was New York’s junior senator for just three and a half, still calls to us today. Still inspires our debate with his words, animates our politics with his ideas, and calls us to make gentle the life of a world that’s too often coarse and unforgiving.”
