Bill Barry wrestles the weapon away from Sirhan, but not before the gunman fires off enough rounds to wound five others. When onlookers turn on Sirhan, Barry orders Kennedy aide Jack Gallivan and football star Rosey Grier, “Take this guy. Get this guy off in a corner where people can’t hit him.” (LA police chief Tom Reddin later uses a camper-shell-topped pickup truck to transport Sirhan from jail to court so that he can’t be killed like Lee Harvey Oswald.)
Busboy Romero is still by Bobby’s side, and remembers his lips moving with words of concern. “I heard him say, ‘Is everybody OK?’”
“I could feel a steady stream of blood coming through my fingers,” Romero says of holding Bobby’s head off the cold concrete. “I remember I had a rosary in my shirt pocket and I took it out, thinking that he would need it a lot more than me. I wrapped it around his right hand and then they wheeled him away.”
At Central Receiving Hospital, 12:30 a.m., Dr. V. F. Bazilauskas tries to get a pulse. “Bob, Bob can you hear us?” the doctor pleads as a priest performs last rites.
The medical team is pumping Bobby with adrenaline and massaging his heart, bringing his vital signs back, but weakly. The doctor gives Ethel his stethoscope. “She listened,” he recalls, “and like a mother hearing a baby’s first heartbeat, she was overjoyed.”
“They put a stethoscope to my ear, and I could hear his heart beating. It was beating…beating…beating…” Ethel later tells her personal assistant, Noelle Bombardier. “I thought, Oh my God. He’s going to live. He’s going to live.”
In preparation for surgery, Bobby is transferred to nearby Good Samaritan Hospital, a facility with superior equipment. Through the halls, Hugh McDonald, assistant press secretary, carries Bobby’s size eight-and-a-half dress shoes, repeating, “I’ve got his shoes…I’ve got his shoes.”
In a ninth-floor operating room, a team of neurosurgeons performs a four-hour emergency craniotomy. Twelve hours later, at 1:44 a.m., twenty-six hours after the shooting, Bobby is pronounced dead.
A second Kennedy son felled by a crazed assassin’s bullets.
Chapter 33
The autopsy on Bobby Kennedy is conducted by Dr. Thomas Noguchi, now the Los Angeles County chief medical examiner. As a junior medical examiner, Dr. Noguchi had performed the autopsy on Marilyn Monroe in August 1962. Though he himself has called out errors he made during Monroe’s autopsy, the detailed examination he performs on Bobby is lauded by independent forensic examiners as “the perfect autopsy.” Bobby’s cause of death is a fatal head wound. “Mr. Kennedy,” Dr. Noguchi finds, “was shot from a distance of one to six inches.”
John Tunney, son of the heavyweight boxing legend Gene Tunney and a close friend since law school, advises Ted against seeing his brother in the morgue. “You can’t look,” he tells Ted. “You’ve got to get out of here. Just remember him [Bobby] the way he was. Don’t look at him.”
“They’re killing all the Kennedys,” a distraught Pierre Salinger tells his wife, Nicole. Salinger, a career press man—first for Jack and then Bobby—is on the ground in Los Angeles, coordinating Coretta Scott King’s arrival from Atlanta, and Jackie’s from London.
The Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port is plunged into chaos. “It seemed impossible that the same kind of disaster could befall our family twice in five years,” Rose later writes in her memoir. Joe Kennedy Sr.’s nurse, Rita Dallas, observes the matriarch grappling with a deeply personal pain. “With Jack, it was the death of the president,” Dallas reflects. “With Bobby, it was the death of a son.” There are unfounded rumors that the news of Bobby’s death has killed Joe Sr.; it has not. He watches the live television coverage along with the rest of the nation.
When Air Force One arrives in Los Angeles to retrieve Bobby’s body, the NBC News reporter Sander Vanocur observes, “It somehow seems ironic that on afternoons very much like this, Air Force jets bear the bodies of male Kennedys out of the west back to their resting places in the east.” Though the flight manifest was not made public, on the night of June 6, David Brinkley reports on the pathos of the journey taken “in one airplane [by] three widows of three American public figures murdered by assassins”—Jackie, Coretta Scott King, and now Ethel—seen by the Secret Service agent Paul Sweeney “consoling one another.”
Bobby lies in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, a site chosen by Stephen Smith to differentiate Bobby’s funeral from Jack’s in Washington, DC, and also as a symbolic homecoming for the New York senator. After a private family service on June 7, nearly one hundred and fifty thousand mourners line twenty-five blocks as they wait to file past Bobby’s casket.
On June 8, hundreds of Washington notables headed by President Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, plus Hollywood stars and civil rights dignitaries, join the Kennedys for the funeral. Cardinal Richard Cushing says the televised High Requiem Mass, just as he did for Jack.
Ted steps to the flag-draped coffin and delivers a roll call of Kennedy siblings lost. “Joe and Kathleen, Jack” he intones, his voice breaking with emotion. And now Bobby. All three of his brothers are dead. All killed while serving their country.
To break the hold of unbearable grief, friends try to summon up some of Bobby’s mischievous spirit. Of the solemn but lengthy service, one of them says to Richard Harwood of the Washington Post, “If it had gone on much longer, Bobby would have started kicking the box.”
But the day of mourning has barely begun. In a nod to Abraham Lincoln’s historic funeral train, the Kennedys and seven hundred guests fill twenty-one train cars and embark from New York’s Pennsylvania Station. The 226-mile route runs through New Jersey, Baltimore, and into Washington’s Union Station.
Over a million people of all colors line the route, waving, saluting, and holding up signs as the train passes by. “So long Bobby”; “We love you.” The outpouring for Bobby prompts Life magazine reporter Sylvia Wright to ask herself, What did he have that he could do this to people?
Whatever it was Bobby possessed, Ethel is heartened to see the spark of it in her eldest son as the sixteen-year-old greets those on board the train, dressed in his father’s suit and exuding that same charisma. “I’m Joe Kennedy, thank you for coming,” he tells fellow passengers.
“He’s got it! He’s got it!” his mother crows.
When they arrive in DC, the family draws deep on their well of strength as they disembark at nine in the evening for the final procession toward Arlington National Cemetery.
As Bobby’s casket travels along the National Mall near the Lincoln Memorial, it passes among the peaceful demonstrators whose presence he inspired. The march that he had suggested Marian Wright bring to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had coalesced into the “Poor People’s Campaign,” which had marched on Washington on Mother’s Day, May 12, about five weeks after King’s own assassination. The demonstrators had set up a makeshift encampment called “Resurrection City” on the National Mall ever since. Jesse Jackson, who acted as mayor of the encampment, recalls, “We were still traumatized by Dr. King’s assassination. Then while in Resurrection City, Robert Kennedy was killed.”
At Arlington, Lady Bird Johnson looks up at “a great white moon riding high in the sky.” On the ground, the cemetery is dark, lit only by mourners’ candles and television cameras. The pallbearers lose their way to the gravesite, thirty yards from Jack’s. In accordance with Bobby’s wishes, it will be marked with a plain white cross.
“Somehow the Kennedys draw the lightning,” the New York Times columnist James Reston writes as the world mourns. “They seem to be able to save everything but themselves.”
Chapter 34
The Kennedys do go on to Chicago that summer, though not to the Democratic national convention. On July 20, 1968, Eunice Kennedy Shriver launches the first Special Olympics Games at Chicago’s Soldier Field.
The newest Olympians are all disabled young people, coached by professional athletes in events broadcast on national television. “When she [Eunice] told me what she wanted, I
thought, ‘Nobody is going to watch this, a bunch of crippled kids running around,’” recalls sports host Frank Gifford, whose daughter Victoria would go on to marry Bobby’s son Michael in 1981. But the former New York Giants running back quickly came around. “We captured it all on film, and it was one of the most moving things I have ever done. It took away the despair and the fear. They were just kids having fun. After we put it on television, we picked up crowds all over the country. No one could tell her it wouldn’t work.” Coverage expands in 1979 with a two-hour ABC special, and in 1987 on Wide World of Sports.
U.S. News & World Report later pronounces in a 1993 cover story, “When the full judgment of the Kennedy legacy is made—including JFK’s Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress, Robert Kennedy’s passion for civil rights and Ted Kennedy’s efforts on health care, workplace reform and refugees—the changes wrought by Eunice [Kennedy] Shriver may well be seen as the most consequential.”
The success of the Special Olympics is a bright spot in an otherwise dark time in the Kennedy family. Less than three months after Bobby’s death, in the last week of August 1968, party leaders callously pit a deceased brother against a grieving one on the floor of the Democratic national convention. Johnson has long openly preferred Ted to Bobby (“I like Teddy. He’s good”), but it’s a low blow when Eugene McCarthy declares to Ted via his brother-in-law Stephen Smith, “I wouldn’t support your brother.”
Many whose lives Bobby touched are struggling in his absence.
When asked to name a favorite among her nine children, Rose always gives the same answer. “I do not have a favorite,” Jean remembers her mother insisting. “Every one of you brings your own unique quality to this family and I love you all the same.”
But Bobby is the only one Rose calls “my little pet,” the one whose bond with children and animals draw comparisons to Saint Francis of Assisi. “It is so very difficult to speak of him,” Rose tearfully tells Look magazine not long after his death.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who ultimately becomes the 1968 Democratic presidential nominee but loses the election to Richard Nixon, senses that Bobby’s death brought down the entire party. “I said it and I meant it that the bullet that shot and killed Bobby Kennedy fatally wounded me…Had Bobby lived I think there’d have been a Democrat in the White House.”
Ted Sorensen had watched from Bobby’s hotel room as the sounds of Sirhan Sirhan’s gunshots rang out over national television. “I could not believe that what I had gone through five years earlier [with Jack] was happening again,” Sorensen says, never letting go of his suspicions that his deep opposition to Bobby’s candidacy caused his late entry into the race, which somehow led to this tragic outcome.
“I am a much better man for knowing him [Bobby] than I ever was before,” Bill Barry says. The former FBI agent and RFK bodyguard spends the rest of his life reliving those moments in the hotel kitchen, imagining how he himself might have taken the bullets that killed Bobby.
Juan Romero receives letters addressed to “the busboy” at the Ambassador Hotel. One writer accuses Romero of “being so selfish,” maintaining, “If he hadn’t stopped to shake your hand, the senator would have been alive.”
On Bobby’s funeral train, Coretta Scott King paid tribute to Ethel by saying, “I don’t see how she has been able to go through this awful experience with such dignity,” but Jackie sees a different side to her sister-in-law. Over lunch when talk turns to Ethel, Jackie tells Jean, speaking as someone who’s endured similar tragedy, “I’m telling you here and now, she’s in trouble.”
The suddenly widowed mother of ten, soon to be eleven, children was four months pregnant when Bobby was killed. Although Ethel’s spent around eight years of her life pregnant, she’s never done so under circumstances like these before. “I don’t know what will happen to Ethel if anything happens to this baby,” Ted frets. As her final pregnancy progresses, she becomes increasingly reliant on Ted and his wife, Joan.
On December 12, 1968, Ethel safely delivers her and Bobby’s eleventh child, whom she names Rory Elizabeth Catherine Kennedy. At a press conference at Georgetown Hospital, Ethel calls out her newfound closeness with Ted and Joan, saying, “With an aunt and uncle like these two, this new Kennedy can’t miss.”
The week before Christmas, on the way home to Hickory Hill, Ethel, Ted, and baby Rory share a poignant, private moment. They take the newborn to Arlington National Cemetery, where Ethel carries her to the lonely gravesite, the only place where Rory can meet her father.
PART SIX
The Senator
Edward Moore Kennedy
Chapter 35
Now that Bobby’s gone, you’re all we’ve got. You’ve got to take the leadership,” Al Lowenstein says to Ted Kennedy, in the elevator down to the morgue at Good Samaritan Hospital, where Bobby lies dead.
Barely a day earlier, Bobby had asked Lowenstein to defect from the McCarthy camp to Kennedy’s. He agreed. Now Lowenstein’s audaciously suggesting that Ted Kennedy take his late brother’s place in the 1968 presidential campaign.
“Uh, uh,” says civil rights leader Charles Evers, “you’re not going to do it to that family a third time.”
Ted declines, anticipating a three-pronged attack from Richard Nixon—“that I was too young, that I had no record in public life strong enough to recommend me for the high office of President, that perhaps I was trying to trade on my brothers’ names.” He will not resume Bobby’s candidacy.
* * *
Rose is forty-two when her youngest child, Edward Moore Kennedy, is born on February 22, 1932, exactly two hundred years after George Washington. Fitting, in a family where Rose states, “My babies were rocked to political lullabies,” but while fourteen-year-old Jack’s request to be his baby brother’s godfather is granted, his other wish—that they name him George Washington Kennedy—is not.
Ted’s education on world issues starts early. He’s only six when his father is appointed ambassador to Great Britain in 1938, and in the fall of 1940, Joe Sr. writes to eight-year-old Ted of the nightly German bombing raids on London, “I am sure, of course, you wouldn’t be scared, but if you heard all these guns firing every night and the bombs bursting you might get a little fidgety…I hope when you grow up you will dedicate your life to trying to work out plans to make people happy instead of making people miserable, as war does today.”
“We were serious about serious things,” Rose says of the Kennedy family, “but we liked laughing at things that weren’t, including sometimes, some of our own foibles.”
“I think that [Jack] really liked Teddy a lot, he really did, because he loved his sense of humor and he loved his esprit, the fact that he had such a good sense of humor about things and could laugh and joke,” Ted’s friend John Tunney remembers of the brothers’ adult relationship.
“And the last shall be first,” reads the Gospel of Matthew. Ted treasures these words Jack later inscribes on a silver cigarette case for his youngest brother. But first Ted must live the teaching, growing up with scant Kennedy allies.
Ted, whom The New Yorker later describes as “the youngest and reputedly stupidest of Joseph P. Kennedy’s nine children,” is teased incessantly about his mediocre schoolwork and his weight.
During Ted’s time at the Fessenden School, a private academy in Newton, Massachusetts, Rose writes to Joe Sr., “Teddy really is such a fatty.” His sister Eunice agrees, telling Joe, “He looks like two boys instead of one.” And of his grades, Joe Sr. writes his eleven-year-old son, “You didn’t pass in English or Geography and you only got a 60 in Spelling and History. That is terrible…You wouldn’t want to have people say that Joe and Jack Kennedy’s brother was such a bad student, so get on your toes.”
Looking back, Ted puts a humorous spin on what must have been a terrible, even terrifying, stint: “The school had sent a notice to all the fathers of the entering boys for permission to paddle their sons, and my father was the first one to send it back, approved. In four yea
rs there I was paddled thirteen times. (This may not be good campaign material for a US Senator, but there it is, thirteen.)”
In 1946, Ted follows Bobby to Milton Academy in Massachusetts, where Bobby writes home that Ted (younger by seven years) is still struggling—by Kennedy standards—with his weight. “Teddy had his usual line of stories and seemed fat as ever,” he writes.
“But Teddy was a big physical presence too. He was strong as hell,” says the Boston Globe reporter Robert Healy. In some cases, his size worked to his advantage. His Milton coach Herbert Stokinger recalls, “Ted had really sticky fingers. He was a good all-around football player. He was able to do his blocking assignments well.”
Admitted to the Harvard class of 1954 as a Kennedy family legacy, Ted pays more attention to freshman football than to his first-year coursework. In the spring semester, he is in danger of failing Spanish. Without a passing grade, Ted will lose his spot on the football roster the following fall.
He concocts a scheme to swap exam booklets with another student, but they’re caught red-handed. “Ted was a bright guy. He didn’t have to cheat,” says Ron Messer, who played freshman football with Ted. Joe Sr. disagrees. “Don’t do this cheating thing, you’re not clever enough,” he rails at his errant son, then is outraged anew when Ted flubs his chosen path toward redemption: joining the military.
On June 25, 1951, one year into the Korean War, nineteen-year-old Ted enlists for a four-year term in the army, though only two are required under the draft. “Don’t you even look at what you’re signing?” Joe berates Ted, then smooths his way. After basic training at New Jersey’s Fort Dix, Ted is assigned rarified duty in Paris, as honor guard in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters. While he’s there, Rose insists Ted learn about fine French wines, in spite of Joe’s prohibition (enforced by a generous financial incentive of two thousand dollars) against any of his children drinking or smoking before age twenty-one. During an Alpine ski trip with sisters Jean and Pat, Jean writes their mother of Ted’s military physique: “He may weigh 215, but it’s all meat and muscles.”
The House of Kennedy Page 16