“You know how Eunice is if she wants you to do something for her,” Jean Kennedy Smith explains to Jackie. “She won’t take no for an answer. She will pester you until you will either go mad or do what she asks.”
“Just give Eunice what she wants,” Jack tells his aides. In 1961, the Kennedy administration forms the Panel on Mental Retardation and in 1962, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (renamed in 2008 for Eunice Kennedy Shriver).
In 1962, Eunice invites photographers from the Saturday Evening Post to Timberlawn, her Maryland estate, where she’s established a summer camp for children with disabilities—the first of its kind in the United States—staffed by volunteers recruited from local schools, diplomacy corps, and even a prison.
Images of happy children riding in pony carts and swimming in the pool accompany Eunice’s September 1962 essay, “Hope for Retarded Children,” the first public telling of her sister Rosemary’s story (minus details of the lobotomy).
On October, 24, 1963, during what would prove to be his last weeks in the Oval Office, Jack signs into law the Maternal and Child Health and Mental Retardation Planning Bill, remarking, “We can say with some assurance that, although children may be the victims of fate, they will not be the victims of our neglect.”
Though President Johnson publicly carries through on JFK’s social programs and ensures the passage of the late president’s sweeping Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, privately he resents the power and influence Bobby retains. According to Johnson, Bobby “acted like he was the custodian of the Kennedy dream, some kind of rightful heir to the throne.”
Bobby will never forget LBJ’s planned speech closing for November 22, 1963, canceled after Jack was assassinated. “And thank God, Mr. President, you came out of Dallas alive.”
When the time comes in 1964 for Johnson to choose a running mate in the next election, his first at the top of the ticket, Bobby is last on his list.
“I’d waited my turn,” Johnson said. “Bobby should have waited for his.”
Chapter 28
In the summer of 1964, Ted is on the campaign trail, seeking the Democratic nomination for reelection to his Massachusetts Senate seat. On June 19, 1964, the Kennedys’ pilot warns against flying into weather conditions around West Springfield, Massachusetts—site of the state Democratic convention—so Ted instead charters a small plane. Disastrously, the plane crashes near Easthampton, killing two of five on board. Ted escapes with a punctured lung and broken vertebrae in his back, though his long convalescence later causes him to miss accompanying Bobby on his historic climb up—and dedication of—Mount Kennedy.
Bobby, accompanied by federal investigator and family friend Walter Sheridan, visits Ted in the hospital. “Somebody up there doesn’t like us,” Bobby confides to Sheridan when they take a walk outside, continuing, “It’s been a great year for the giggles, hasn’t it?”
On August 24, the Democratic national convention is under way in Atlantic City. When Bobby takes the stage to deliver a tribute to JFK, he is unable to speak over the delegates’ cheers and applause, which runs for sixteen minutes, confirming the enduring power of the Kennedy name. According to presidential historian Michael Beschloss, “Johnson had nightmares that he would get to the Democratic Convention in 1964, and in would come Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy—stampede the delegates to vote not for LBJ but RFK for president.”
Johnson has taken precautions, not only moving Bobby’s tribute to closing night (after the presidential and vice presidential nominations are secure) but assigning Bobby an FBI detail. As Atlantic City–based agent William Sullivan would later testify to the Watergate Committee, “Robert Kennedy’s activities were of special interest, including his contacts with [Martin Luther] King.”
These are extreme measures against Bobby, who two days before the convention had announced his intention to exit the Capital Beltway for the Empire State. He tries on the prospect of holding his first legislative office, imagining, “I’m not just a senator. I’m Senator from New York. I’m head of the Kennedy wing of the party.”
To satisfy residency laws, on September 1, 1964, Bobby and Ethel (pregnant with their ninth child) move into Marymead, a home leased for them by Kennedy brother-in-law and finance manager Stephen Smith. (“Ask not what the Kennedys can do for you, but what you can do for the Kennedys,” Smith riffs on his role.) The twenty-five room, three-story, Colonial-style white house in exclusive Glen Cove has a swimming pool and a view of Long Island Sound.
On September 3, 1964, Bobby resigns from the Justice Department. That day, the New York Times editorializes, “It is doubtful that any Attorney General before Robert Francis Kennedy entered or left office under circumstances of such strong public feeling.”
Not long after the thirty-eight-year-old begins campaigning against the incumbent, sixty-four-year-old Republican Kenneth Keating, more strong public feeling arises. This time, the furor is over the identity of Bobby’s new neighbor—Jackie—who has leased Creek House, a property nearby Marymead. According to Jackie’s secretary, Pamela Turnure, the former First Lady personally chooses the ten-room fieldstone house for the “maximum privacy” it affords herself and her young children. But proximity inspires a round of rumors of a Bobby/Jackie romance. “Though there was no affair,” says Florida senator George Smathers, “I believe Bobby’s wife thought there was one.”
For his part, Keating, an intense critic of the Kennedy administration’s stance on Cuba, holds zero affection for Bobby. He wastes no time blasting him as a carpetbagger who hasn’t lived in New York since the Kennedy family moved away from Bronxville when Bobby was twelve years old. “I think it’s an unprintable outrage,” a leading Democrat comments off the record to the New York Times about Bobby’s move to New York, though the same article reports that “a new figure”—Bobby—“has caught the public fancy.”
“His appearance,” Bobby’s daughter Kerry Kennedy writes, “is ever modern: the shaggy hair, the skinny ties, the suit jacket off, the shirt sleeves rolled.” And when the crowds can get close enough to the candidate, who campaigns standing atop his car, they try to claim a piece. During a swing through Westchester and the Bronx, Bobby complains to Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s running mate, that “too many young people are pulling at him.” The attention “makes me feel like a Beatle,” he jokingly declares, flashing that Kennedy smile.
On October 27, 1964, in a contentious debate televised on WCBS from two different studios—each candidate seated opposite an empty chair—Senator Keating openly mocks Bobby’s star appeal, saying, “The squeals of the bobby soxers could be registered in a juke box but not in an election box.” Three days later, on October 30, following a face-to-face debate broadcast by radio and ending after midnight, Bobby appeals to Keating, “Let’s just go home.” Keating misses the chance to remind voters that Kennedy’s home is a mansion.
As the race tightens, Bobby needs to secure endorsements. Jackie steps up, arranging an interview with the publisher of the New York Post, where instead of sidestepping Bobby’s biggest perceived character flaw (“People say he is ruthless and cold”), she offers a touching explanation: “He isn’t like the others. I think it was his place in the family, with four girls and being younger than two brothers and so much smaller. He hasn’t got the graciousness they had. He is really very shy, but he has the kindest heart in the world.”
On November 3, Election Day, the Post backs Bobby for senator.
He wins the Senate seat by seven hundred thousand votes. (By contrast, in the 1964 presidential election, Johnson took New York state from his Republican rival, Barry Goldwater, by a margin of nearly three million.)
Despite his win, Village Voice writer Nat Hentoff expresses an opinion held by many—that “Bobby the K,” as Hentoff calls the senator-elect, won’t be local for long. “I am bugged when Kennedy beaters of the bush try to con me by pretending New York State is anything but a way-stop for this man on the run.”
Chapter 29<
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During JFK’s final White House cabinet meeting, the president scrawled a single word on his notepad. Poverty.
Bobby now looks at that crumpled piece of paper every day. It’s framed and hanging on his office wall.
Though the memory of Jack is ever-present, the Kennedy brothers’ rivalry proves irrepressible. “Step back a little, you’re casting a shadow on Ted,” a photographer tells senator-elect Bobby during a visit with Ted in Boston’s New England Baptist Hospital. “It’ll be the same way in Washington,” Ted answers.
Mercurial Bobby, according to the majority leader, Senator Mike Mansfield, is “in the Senate, but not of it.” Ted, who in his second term is the more experienced legislator, helps Bobby launch his ambitious social agenda. It works. George Gallup documents Bobby’s “meteoric rise” in popularity between February and August 1966. Though negative respondents fault the first-term senator for having a “poor personality or temper” as well as being “power hungry” and “riding on the Kennedy name” (although “being a Kennedy” is also a leading positive response), Bobby ties Johnson in a “Trial Heat” poll, roughly two years out from the 1968 presidential election.
On September 25, 1966, politics falls away when, barely two years after Ted’s plane crash, yet another one leaves Bobby’s family bereaved. A light plane carrying Ethel’s brother George Skakel Jr., president of New York’s Great Lakes Carbon Company, and four other passengers, crashes near Riggins, Idaho, during a failed landing. The fatal incident intensifies lingering grief over the 1955 deaths of Ethel’s parents, George and Ann, who also’d died in a plane crash, in an Oklahoma field.
Following the loss of his brother-in-law, “Kennedy immediately went into seclusion,” UPI reports. “It was not known if Mrs. Kennedy was with him.” Not long afterward, Bobby tells Ted Sorensen, “You had better pretend you don’t know me. Everyone connected to me seems to be jinxed.”
On October 30, 1966, Bobby and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. meet at P.J. Clarke’s saloon in New York City to discuss the newly released Warren Report on JFK’s assassination. “RFK wondered how long he could continue to avoid comment on the report,” Schlesinger recalls. “It is evident that he believes that it was a poor job and will not endorse it, but that he is unwilling to criticize it and thereby reopen the whole tragic business.”
The following spring, Bobby receives a pointed reminder of the broad scope of human suffering. The source is Marian Wright, a twenty-seven-year-old Yale Law School graduate and the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar, who testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Labor, and Poverty on behalf of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Wright invites committee members to see for themselves the dire living conditions poor people endure. Bobby and Pennsylvania senator Joseph Clark accept, traveling with Wright to Mississippi on April 9, 1967. On April 11, John Carr, a young reporter for the Delta-Democrat Times in Greenville, Mississippi, gets a tip from his editor. “There’s a big story checking out of the Holiday Inn.”
Driving his own VW Bug, Carr follows Bobby’s blue sedan nearly to the cotton fields and a cluster of fenced-off houses known in Mississippi as “quarters.” Bobby “spoke in a low, breathy voice,” Carr writes, “and at times we reporters and the blacks we had inflicted ourselves on had to strain to hear him.” What most startles Carr is a repetitive gesture Bobby makes as he talks, first to the impoverished residents—one family’s refrigerator contains only a jar of peanut butter—and then to the press. “Kennedy would…touch his neck right above the collar with his right hand. It got to be eerie; it reminded me of his brother’s reaction to the first shot that had hit him.”
“I’ve been to third-world countries and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bobby tells his aide, Peter Edelman. For Marian Wright (who fifteen months later marries Edelman), Bobby has an immediate and activist recommendation: “Tell Dr. [Martin Luther] King to bring the people to Washington.” King agrees, and announces the Poor People’s Campaign, saying that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of which he was president, “will lead waves of the nation’s poor and disinherited to Washington, DC, next spring to demand redress of their grievances by the United States government and to secure at least jobs or income for all.”
Some who encounter Bobby speak of sensing a transformation in his character at this time. As Wright remembers, “I’d formed an image of him as a tough, arrogant, politically driven man from the Joseph McCarthy era. These feelings dissolved as I saw Kennedy profoundly moved by Mississippi’s hungry children.”
“I’ve been with him many times since he entered the United States Senate, and I still find him growing and changing,” Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen states in his memoir. This man is the opposite of the “Bad Bobby” of 1960, described by a JFK aide as “a petulant baseball player who strikes out in the clutch and kicks the bat boy.”
“Somewhere in this man sits good” is Martin Luther King’s assessment, while still wary of Bobby’s conservative politics dating to his days as a McCarthy acolyte—and later as an attorney general who favored wiretapping many of the individuals the government was monitoring, including King himself. “Our task is to find his moral center and win him to our cause.”
Bobby’s cause, he himself insists, is to effect social justice, not to seek the presidency. “I would say that the chances for a Kennedy dynasty are looking very slim,” he says in 1967. “Bobby had a psychic violence about him,” actress Shirley MacLaine observes, adopting wartime language. “Let’s be violent with our minds and get this thing changed. Let’s not be violent with our triggers.”
Ever mindful of his numbers—a May 10, 1967, Gallup poll shows Kennedy support declining—it’s no wonder that on US Senate stationery Bobby directs Sorensen:
Teddy, old pal—Perhaps you could keep down the number of adjectives and adverbs describing me in 1955 and use a few more in 1967. OK? Bob
On March 2, 1967, Bobby gives a speech on the unpopular and ongoing war. “Three Presidents have taken action in Vietnam,” Bobby said. “As one who was involved in those decisions, I can testify that if fault is to be found or responsibility assessed, there is enough to go around for all—including myself.” Ironically, by taking a portion of the blame, he effectively transfers the burden from himself and his brother Jack and onto President Johnson.
That summer, antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein approaches Bobby with an ambitious plan to attack Johnson on the “immoral” conflict in Vietnam, with the ultimate goal being to “dump” Johnson from presidential contention. Bobby is intrigued, but ultimately declines to participate: “People would say I was splitting the party out of ambition and envy. No one would believe I was doing it because of how I felt about Vietnam and poor people.”
Bobby sends Lowenstein a note quoting the transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. “For Al, who knew the lesson of Emerson and taught it to the rest of us. They did not yet see…that if a single man plant himself on his convictions and then abide, the huge world will come round to him. From his friend, Bob Kennedy.”
During the last two days of January 1968, celebration of the Lunar New Year veers into a strike known as the Tet Offensive. The wave of surprise attacks by North Vietnamese forces on targets throughout South Vietnam results in headline-making US and South Vietnamese casualties. Addressing the Washington press on January 30, the question of a presidential run inevitably arises. Bobby declares that “under no foreseeable circumstances” will it happen.
Despite Bobby’s public projection of certainty, the Kennedy inner circle is roiling with indecision on the matter.
“Is my Daddy going to run for President?” Arthur Schlesinger recalls “little David Kennedy,” age twelve, asking him “gravely.”
David’s mother, Ethel, newly pregnant with her and Bobby’s eleventh child, votes yes, even going so far as to send out an election-themed Christmas card. SANTA CLAUS IN ’67 read the signs Ethel and the children are pictured holding on the front of the card; a
nd on the back, a photo of a smiling Bobby embellished with the thought bubble “Would you believe Santa Claus in ’68?”
“She [Ethel] wanted to be First Lady, that’s true,” says Rose Kennedy’s secretary, Barbara Gibson. “But she also believed that Bobby had so much to give.”
Ted’s on the no side. Bobby tells Life magazine reporter Sylvia Wright, “My brother thinks I’m crazy. He doesn’t like this. He doesn’t go along. But then, we’re two different people. He doesn’t hear the same music. Everyone has to march to his own music.”
“He usually follows his own instincts and he’s done damn well,” Ted admits. But while he’s unsure what Jack would’ve advised, he’s confident how Joe Sr. would lean if he wasn’t incapacitated by the stroke. “I know what Dad would have said…Don’t do it,” he tells aide Richard Goodwin.
News from Jackie further complicates the situation. Her romantic relationship with wealthy, divorced Greek industrialist Aristotle Onassis—whom she first met through her sister, Lee, in August 1963 after the death of baby Patrick—is deepening. Their age discrepancy (she is thirty-nine; he is sixty-two) and religious differences (Onassis is Greek Orthodox, not Catholic) makes him highly controversial as a potential second husband to America’s most famous widow. “For heaven’s sake, don’t marry him,” Ethel begs. “Don’t do this to Bobby. Or to me!” Jackie knows how to be a good Kennedy. Bobby’s decision comes first.
On March 16, 1968, Bobby returns to the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building in Washington. He’s forty-two years old. Eight years earlier, he had watched proudly when Jack, then also age forty-two, had launched his 1960 presidential campaign from this very room. Now it’s Bobby’s turn.
Finally, Bobby is granted the respite that’s been eluding him since Jack’s death. Soon after his announcement, Bobby tells Nicole Salinger (wife of press secretary Pierre Salinger), “I’m sleeping well for the first time in months. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but at least I’m at peace with myself.”
The House of Kennedy Page 14