There was an additional problem here; Robert Kennedy’s course had been one of the traditional politician turning toward an increasingly radical position. In the process, men like Walinsky had played a considerable role. They always felt that it was an uphill one: softening your real advice on three out of four positions so that you did not look too much like a radical, and so that you looked like you had good common sense, were a professional, and then slipping in your advice on the fourth point. Now the young aides saw other men coming up and using what they considered to be self-serving conservatism: trimming on what they really felt in order to ingratiate themselves. “You-know-I’m-liberal-myself,-but-is-the-country-really-ready-for-this.” The younger men regarded Sorensen as the arch enemy; they had looked to Richard Goodwin, though he had served in the earlier administration, as a soul brother. (Goodwin, was a swing figure politically. After having run some shabby errands for Johnson on the war, he had become deeply involved with the opposition to it. Of all the Kennedy people, he alone had gone to work for McCarthy—showing up in New Hampshire and telling Seymour Hersh, McCarthy’s then press secretary, “Just you and me, Sy, and one typewriter, and we’re going to bring down the President of the United States.” When he finally came back to Kennedy, after Wisconsin, he called the candidate and made sure he realized that it was not Gene McCarthy or Bob Kennedy who had brought Lyndon Johnson down, but Dick Goodwin. It was a call which delighted Kennedy with its ego-centrism.) But Goodwin, after joining the Kennedy campaign, had busied himself becoming Kennedy’s television expert, and had participated to a limited degree in ideological conflicts. Indeed some of the other staffers felt that Goodwin seemed a little unsure of himself in the Kennedy camp, as though he felt he might be a little distrusted for his prior service in the enemy camp. The radicals’ best friend in court was the candidate himself, and they felt he had surrounded himself with too many men who were now viewed as professionals, whereas they were viewed only as amateurs.
Thus the uneven and at times contradictory tone of the campaign. The formal tone was constricted but then again and again the passion would break through, in question-and-answer sessions, where the candidate would react, more often than not, to the smugness and complacency of white America. It would jar him out of his own nervousness. One of the most poignant examples was at Purdue. It was a conservative audience, not with him at the beginning, during his dull speech. But then, during the question-and-answer period, he began to talk about the poor in America, about what it was like to grow up with rats in Bedford Stuyvesant, how the schools maim, what it was like to be in an Indian school and read only the white man’s characterization of Indian life. Finally there was a deep and moving description of the disenfranchised in America: “... the almost impassable barriers between the poor and the rest of the country.” It won a prolonged standing ovation from the audience, converted several otherwise critical reporters, and led one Washington columnist to say, “Scotty Reston always claimed that Jack Kennedy never educated the people on their country, but you’ve just seen as good an example of it as you’ll see in American politics.”
Probably the best example of the passion and the anger came in late April when Kennedy met with medical students at Indiana University. It is a fact of American life that the medical profession has become a hard core of American conservatism. In 1964, as I traveled with Goldwater, the hard core of the committee at those $100 a plate dinners was doctors, and here at Indianapolis they were in their embryo stage, the new young conservatives, Reagan country. (One looked at them and listened to their questions and recalled a great Goldwater rally in suburban Chicago in 1964, and the very posh teen-age children going around in their Madras sports jackets with huge signs saying “We Want Freedom.”) The hall was packed and, for a Kennedy audience, markedly reserved. In the balcony, a Negro, obviously a maintenance man, shouted “We want Kennedy.” Immediately about a dozen others, all students, shouted back “oh no we don’t”
“Some of my people,” he began, “have been trying to organize a committee of doctors for Kennedy in Indiana. And they’re still trying.” Mild applause. Then the speech, strong but not terribly well done, an indictment of U.S. medical programs. We are lagging behind other countries, and twelve other nations, “some of them Communist,” have a higher life-expectancy rate than the U.S.; a call for the restructuring of American medical care, which included expanded programs and greater decentralization of decision making. When he finished, the applause was polite. Then a flood of questions, almost all conservative, almost all dubious and hostile. Where would the money come from, someone asked. “The federal government will have to make some available,” he said. “Money implies control,” a student shouted. “Barry Goldwater lost that struggle four years ago,” he said. It went on, and finally, angry now, angry at the smugness, he said, “The fact is there are people who suffer in this country and some of the rest of us have a responsibility. I look around me here and I don’t see many black faces. Frankly, the poor have difficulty entering your profession. You can say that the federal government does this or fails here or doesn’t do that, but it is really our society that is responsible. That there are more rats than people in New York is intolerable; after all, the poor are the ones who are doing most of the fighting in Vietnam, while white students sit here in medical school.”
With that they began to hiss and boo, and they began to shout, “We’re going, we’re going, we’ve signed up.”
“Oh yes,” he said, “going there sometime in the future. It’s not the same thing. The dying is going on now, right now, while we’re talking.” What about college deferments? someone shouted; he was against them. What about medical school deferments, are you against them? “Well, the way things are going here, I guess the answer is yes. I don’t want to say anything you might approve of.”
Later, on the plane, he kept shaking his head about the afternoon. “They were so comfortable,” he said, “so comfortable. Didn’t you think they were comfortable?”
Election night. The old excitement. The hotel filled with all the team: faces from the past, new faces, the good looking Kennedy women with their expensive coats (you can always recognize the rich women because they put money into their coats a non-political expert told me). A buoyant atmosphere, and the feeling that Kennedy will go to about forty-five percent and the hope that McCarthy will be disposed of, so that they can get on with the business at hand—Hubert. Early returns were very good. The Negroes were coming in just fine. One black precinct which John Kraft, the pollster, had told them to look for came in: Branigin 16, McCarthy 52, Kennedy 697. “I think that’s my favorite precinct,” said Mankiewicz. Winners’ words, winners’ smiles. The Poles in Gary came through, 2-to-l, despite the machine. More smiles. A Negro ward came in and it had Kennedy over Branigin by only 166 to 102. Someone complained about it. “There’s nothing wrong with that total,” said Larry O’Brien, “I would say that the regular organization is functioning effectively in that ward. They had the foresight to bring whiskey.” Winners’ words again. The lead seemed to be about 45-to-26-to-26. The television sets were all on that afternoon and one TV newscaster said that Kennedy’s showing was disappointing. “Disappointing to who,” said Tuck, “not to you, you sonofabitch, you never liked us anyway.” (Later that night, a reporter, wandering through the crowd, picked up a TV broadcaster and pleaded with his home office. “Yes, yes, I know the other networks have had him on, and have interviewed him, but Tuck refuses to let him go on with us until we pronounce him a winner. You declare him a winner and I’ll get him on. It’s that damn Tuck.”) McCarthy, on the television, was saying that it wasn’t a defeat. “Well, I don’t know,” Kennedy said, “I don’t know whether people think it’s so good to be second or third. That’s not the way I was brought up. I always was taught that it’s much better to win.” He was laughing. “I learned that when I was about two.” It was coming on, not exactly what they had wanted, they had wanted that fifty, but it was forty-two in a conserv
ative state and with a rushed-up campaign, and they had those Slav wards, 2-to-l; a fine gift for the omnipresent Mayor Daley. Larry O’Brien was already on the television spreading the sweet syrup; how happy they were, how they had come into Indiana and run against such a fine popular governor like Roger Branigin, and they were pleased to do so well against such difficult odds. And it had been a fine campaign, a clean one, and Roger Branigin, well, he was a fine governor, imagine beating him here in Indiana. Adam Walinsky wanted to issue a statement calling the returns a victory for social justice. Someone told him, no Adam, not this time.
And the candidate? He was celebrating by having dinner with two intense young McCarthy workers whom he had found, dispirited, in the lobby. They were still a little bitter and they complained about the quality of Kennedy’s young people, and the fact that when they went into the ghettos none of the Negroes would listen to them. Kennedy suggested that perhaps McCarthy hadn’t worked hard enough in the ghettos.
“But you’re a Kennedy,” the girl said. “It sounds like a newspaper rehash, but it still is right. You have the name.”
“Look,” he said, “I agree I have a tremendous advantage with my last name. But let me ask you why can’t McCarthy go into a ghetto? Why can’t he go into a poor neighborhood? Can you tell me when he’s been involved in those areas?”
“You’ve got a tremendous headstart in those areas,” the girl insisted. “But he was there first on the war. He declared himself first”
And with that, Indiana was finished.
III
HE WAS AN ODD and beguiling figure. Patrick Anderson had once written that Robert Kennedy was not a simple man, but many simple men; a good description. His reputation was for ruthlessness, yet in 1968, there was no major political figure whose image so contrasted with the reality. Part of it was simply the quality of change. He was a man of constant growth and change, and while journalistic stereotypes are, more often than not, accurate as long as the person involved stands still, they are likely to be several years out of date if he changes as much as Kennedy did. Most politicians seem somewhat attractive from a distance, but under closer examination they fade: the pettiness, the vanities, the little vulgarities come out. This was to hurt McCarthy as the campaign progressed, for some of the young people who worked most directly with him would find some of their enthusiasm dimmed by his lack of generosity, his cool, almost arrogant, introversion. Robert Kennedy was different. Under closer examination he was far more winning than most, with little bitterness or pettiness. For in those days, if one was a Kennedy there was little reason to feel embittered or cheated. There was little false vanity or false modesty because, as a Kennedy, the action swirled around him; he was automatically at the center of things. Even when a Kennedy is out of power his telephone still rings. He seemed like the other Kennedys, still a fresh figure in our politics, which in some measure was a benefit of his wealth. For it is true that having money as a national politician is not so important as not having money. There is a gradual erosion to a politician who lacks wealth—too many years attending too many dinners, asking too many rich men favors, listening to their inanities and then thanking them. Kennedys and Rockefellers are spared that. He was intelligent and knowledgeable about the world; indeed there was now no one in his entourage who knew more of the world. This too was indicative of the change of the past few years; for there were men who had once been major intellectual influences on his brother, who had taught the Kennedys about America and about the world. But Robert Kennedy had passed them by now. There might be people who knew more about one particular country, but none who knew as much about as many things. He had traveled too much, been briefed too often by very able people; he had access again and again to the most powerful and informed people in the world. His was the best education a rich family and a powerful nation could provide. He was quick to admit his own mistakes (the only major figure who had been involved in Vietnam to have done so; a fine index of the intellectual integrity of our times), and curiously fatalistic about himself, for if one is a Kennedy there is a sense that it can all be achieved, but also that it can all be snatched away.
Thus again and again, during the campaign, reporters would ask him what his long range plans were, and he would answer that you never really knew; you lived day to day; it was all like Russian roulette. He could talk with striking detachment about his own career (though not about John Kennedy’s, that was still emotional. One could easily criticize anything Robert Kennedy had done in his lifetime, but one did not criticize aspects of Jack Kennedy’s career without quickly and sharply changing the tone of the conversation; his voice getting a little icier, the eyes getting a little harder). He could sit one night and talk fatalistically about Indiana, on the eve of the primary, about the people, they had given him at least a fair chance, about the people who hated him in the state, the transplanted Kentuckians, and Tennesseans, out of place, scared for their jobs, scared by the Negroes, scared by Robert Kennedy. Sometimes, he had said that night, you could feel them hate straight at you. “I can understand that.” As for the kids working for McCarthy who hated him, he understood that too. He probably would feel exactly the same if he were one of them; but they were good, weren’t they? What he wouldn’t give to have them on his side. McCarthy had the A lads, the best of them, and that was hard to take. They’ll come back some day, someone said. He answered, Oh, perhaps eventually but it will probably never be the same thing. They may never forgive themselves or me for making it happen.
His sense of humor was very good in small groups and he could be very funny. Yet he often seemed ill at ease in his public appearances, and he performed worst in a sterile television studio without any audience. He performed best under intense critical, indeed emotional, circumstances and under heckling. In public he would be cool toward a business group, unless they were so smug that he was angered, and he would spend long hours with a young people’s group or with Negroes. (Nevertheless, he could, on occasion, flash moments of almost absent-minded rudeness for such a normally sensitive man. A reporter traveling in upstate New York in early 1968 would come across a pleasant congenial Democratic functionary who hated Robert Kennedy with a very special passion. The reason was simple. In 1964 he had driven Kennedy around his section of the state in his own car. Kennedy had sat in the front seat and said to him snappishly, “Turn off the heater!” The driver had done nothing, waited ten minutes, and then, “It’s a little warm in here, would you like the heater turned down, Mister Kennedy?” Kennedy had answered, “Yes, please.”) Conversation with him was never particularly easy, and he was often abrupt. A reporter did not really interview him; at best he talked his way through with him, not so much asking questions as proffering ideas and judging his reactions. “You have to learn to read the pauses,” his former press secretary Ed Guthman once said of him. Young radicals uneasy and distrusting of him would find him interested in their ideas and willing to listen at great length. High ranking labor leaders expecting to tell him about their demands on minimum wage might find themselves questioned sharply, even rudely, on what they were doing to end discrimination in their unions. He lacked Jack Kennedy’s absolute confidence in himself and his charm, and most important, his confidence that he could project that charm. “More than any man I ever knew,” John Kenneth Galbraith once said of Jack Kennedy, he “liked being himself and was at ease with himself.” The people around Robert Kennedy were regularly telling him to loosen up, but it did not come easily: his knuckles would be cracking away, his hands wrestling with each other—he was not a loose man. He was less graceful and more committed than his brother.
Kennedy had the dual advantage of being rich, which gave him one kind of asset, and of coming from a home where the Anglo-Saxon prejudice against the Irish had generated a rage to succeed and to excel, and which would prevent the squandering of money. The Kennedys would not let their money distort or soften them. They would dominate the money; the money would not dominate them. They understood, as few we
althy families in this country understood, its advantages and its liabilities. Joe Kennedy, said a contemporary, “is sort of like a caterpillar. He couldn’t quite become a butterfly, but his boys were going to fly, no matter what.” Robert came from way down the list of children, the seventh of nine (“When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive,” he later said). He was by far the smallest of the boys and in a family in which there was a relentless success cult, his lack of size drove him even harder. That, and the fact that he came along at the tail end of World War II, and always felt a strong sense of disappointment at not having seen combat, were frustrations which drove him even harder in the postwar years. He did not learn much at college but he learned from his personal experience. As his life touched things in the outside world, he would become interested in them. He had had, as a young man, a special quality which would later set him apart from most men in public life: that indignation, an almost primitive and innocent anger—that things were not what they should be or were supposed to be. Had he not had the wealth and family position which springboarded him into immediate public service, he might either have lost this indignation through the erosion of a thousand smaller deals and battles at a lower level, or his very intensity might have blocked out a public career, for men that intense are not always trusted by their peers; they are often considered extremist, in the American vernacular. But because of his family he was able both to enter public life at a very high level and retain that intensity.
The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy Page 12
