Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series)

by Talbot, David

  It was March 25, 1968, a blazing hot afternoon on the campus of San Fernando Valley State College in Northridge, California. Kennedy had just delivered a campaign speech to a tumultuous crowd of twelve thousand people, who jammed the campus and stood on rooftops to hear him. But afterwards, during the question period, he was finally confronted with the tormenting query that he knew would inevitably arise after he got into the race. If elected president, would he reopen the investigation into his brother’s murder?

  For years he had routinely endorsed the Warren Report in public, while pursuing his own investigative path in private. But Kennedy hated the rampant lying in political life—seeing LBJ as one of the worst perpetrators—and the growing “credibility gap” between those in power and the public. By the 1968 race, he was clearly finding it more difficult to keep misleading the public about his true opinion of the Warren investigation. And yet he fully realized how explosive the reaction would be if the headlines suddenly blared, “Kennedy Rejects Warren Report.” Not only would it turn the assassination into the leading campaign issue—instead of Vietnam or the country’s growing social divisions—but it might put Kennedy in more danger on the campaign trail. The assassination question was a growing dilemma for Kennedy that promised to ensnarl his campaign more and more as the race progressed.

  When he was suddenly confronted with this conundrum by the student hecklers on the San Fernando Valley State campus, Kennedy seemed ready for it, and his reply was subtly—and intriguingly—different from his standard response in the past. In effect, he split the difference, once again endorsing the Warren Report (although more haltingly this time), while at the same time leaving the door open for reopening the case. Rick Tuttle, a young campaign coordinator seated right behind the candidate that day, later recalled Kennedy’s manner as he responded to the emotionally and politically charged question: “I remember there was a slight trembling of the hands, which happened every so often when Kennedy spoke, there was a slight tensing. But I also remember saying to myself, ‘He was prepared for that question.’ I remember he handled it well. Don’t forget—at this point, we’re past the mourning period and he is running for president and he had entered that world. He was prepared to handle it. It was not one of those times when he stammered badly or fell apart or got mournful.”

  This is precisely what Kennedy said that day, as recorded by a radio reporter for Los Angeles station KLAC: “You wanted to ask me something about the archives. I’m sure, as I’ve said before, the archives will be open.” The crowd responded to this by cheering and applauding. “Can I just say,” continued Kennedy, “and I have answered this question before, but there is no one who would be more interested in all of these matters as to who was responsible for uh…the uh, uh, the death of President Kennedy than I would. I have seen all of the matters in the archives. If I became president of the United States, I would not, I would not, reopen the, uh, Warren Commission Report. I think I, uh, stand by the Warren Commission Report. I’ve seen everything in the archives, the archives will be available at the appropriate time.” At this, the crowd again broke into loud cheers.

  Kennedy’s statement was a careful tightrope walk. So cagily constructed was his reply that some assassination researchers later concluded it was simply another example of Kennedy’s perplexing refusal to push for a new investigation. But that’s not how Kennedy’s reply was heard that afternoon by the students. They were moved to cheer because Kennedy agreed that the government’s assassination archives should be opened—and opening the archives meant reopening the investigation. When they heard Kennedy pledge that the government’s investigative evidence “will be made available at the appropriate time,” to them this clearly meant when Bobby became president.

  The students who cheered Kennedy were not the only ones who interpreted his answer this way. So did his press secretary Frank Mankiewicz, a man who closely monitored everything the candidate said in public and who had been asked by Kennedy to accumulate assassination information for a future investigation. In short, Mankiewicz was the ideal person to accurately read the nuances in Kennedy’s reply—and to realize the significance of what Kennedy was saying. There was no doubt in Mankiewicz’s mind: Kennedy was calling for his brother’s assassination to be reopened one day. “I remember that I was stunned by the answer,” recalled Mankiewicz. “It was either like he was suddenly blurting out the truth, or it was a way to shut down any further questioning. You know, ‘Yes, I will reopen the case. Now let’s move on.’”

  The following month, Kennedy again spoke revealingly about his future investigation plans, this time with a small group of campaign aides in his room at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. It was late in the evening on April 19, and Kennedy had just returned from a raucous appearance at the University of San Francisco, where a small group of antiwar radicals had charged at him, trying to hit him as he got out of his limousine. When he tried to deliver his speech, they shouted him down, screaming “Victory for the Viet Cong” and calling him a “fascist pig.” Decompressing in his hotel room later, Kennedy was in a particularly voluble mood, wanting to talk about the chaotic state of the nation and his plans to restore the country’s sanity if he reached the White House. Emboldened by Kennedy’s expansive mood, one of his aides mustered the courage to ask him about his brother’s assassination. Richard Lubic, a campaign media consultant who was in the room, later made notes on what Kennedy replied: “Subject to me getting elected, I would like to reopen the Warren Commission.”

  BY THE TIME HIS campaign reached the pivotal California primary, Bobby Kennedy was beginning to wrestle with a variety of formidable problems that he knew would confront him as president. One of them was the CIA. What was he going to do with it, he wondered out loud one day on the campaign plane with Pete Hamill, one of the journalists who grew so close to Kennedy that he briefly wrote speeches for him. “I have to decide whether to eliminate the operations arm of the agency or what the hell to do with it,” Kennedy told Hamill. “We can’t have these cowboys wandering around and shooting people and doing all these unauthorized things.”

  Fred Dutton, the political veteran who served as Kennedy’s informal campaign manager, later confirmed that the candidate was starting to confront the CIA problem. Kennedy thought the agency “was out of control,” said Dutton. “The CIA would come up in discussions” during the race, said the Kennedy advisor—“just his disgruntlement over it.” But the agency’s abuses never became a campaign issue. “My reaction at the time was let’s win the campaign and we’ll worry about that problem later,” Dutton said.

  Kennedy’s epic battle for the presidency was all coming down to California. He had won his first primary contests, in Indiana and Nebraska, but his campaign was far from the “well-oiled machine” that Richard Reeves had declared it in the New York Times magazine. It rumbled along with a rickety, improvised organizational structure and a spontaneous energy. There was no strong hand running it, as there was in JFK’s 1960 race. “Bobby did not have a Bobby,” said Edelman.

  The campaign’s weaknesses were glaringly exposed on May 28 when Kennedy lost the Oregon primary to McCarthy—the first electoral defeat ever suffered by a Kennedy. If he lost California the following week, Kennedy’s campaign would likely be finished.

  Kennedy was fighting a tough, two-front war, battling not just the rival peace candidate but the party establishment’s choice, bland and genial Hubert Humphrey, whose front-runner status was ensured by the backroom process of selecting candidates that was still in operation in 1968. Hum phrey, LBJ’s vice president, had entered the race, in effect, as Johnson’s pro-war surrogate. Johnson had stunned the nation on March 31 by announcing he would not run for the presidency. The wounded leader could not bring himself to risk defeat at the hands of his longtime enemy. But the Johnson-Kennedy rivalry continued as a shadow play with Humphrey’s entry in the race. Though he had promised to stay neutral in the Democratic contest, LBJ worked closely with Humphrey behind the scenes to thw
art Kennedy whenever he could. Loath to test his popular appeal against that of Kennedy by entering the primary races, Humphrey quietly used the party machinery to amass delegates while stand-ins took his place on the state ballots. (In California, the Humphrey place-holder was the state attorney general, Tom Lynch.)

  Meanwhile, McCarthy fought bitterly on. Despite his victory in Oregon—where the white suburban population responded to the former professor’s cerebral charm—even McCarthy, a quirky and diffident campaigner, knew his chances of winning the nomination were remote. Instead, he seemed increasingly intent on spoiling Kennedy’s chances. McCarthy never let go of his resentment of Kennedy for entering the race, after he had taken the initial risk of challenging Johnson.

  As the California campaign heated up, the Humphrey and McCarthy campaigns seemed to be collaborating to drive Kennedy out of the race. The ties between the two campaigns began to grow when a former CIA official named Thomas Finney, who was close to Humphrey, took over as McCarthy’s new campaign manger in the final weeks of the Oregon campaign. Finney’s sudden emergence as McCarthy’s campaign boss—and reports that Humphrey partisans had funneled $50,000 to McCarthy—drove some of the peace candidate’s staff to resign in protest. It is possible that the CIA and the Democratic Party establishment were working to split the peace vote to hand the nomination to Humphrey. But McCarthy himself was surprisingly popular in CIA circles, where Kennedy was reviled and there was growing disaffection with the war, which some intelligence officials believed was damaging the country’s national security interests. Dick Helms—who advised President Johnson in a secret 1967 memo that the CIA believed he could withdraw from Vietnam without any permanent damage to the United States—was one of the McCarthy sympathizers in the agency’s upper ranks. Over the years, Helms wrote in his memoir, he and the Minnesota senator “lunched occasionally and encountered one another at the usual Washington events, or as guests in owner Jack Kent Cooke’s box at Redskin football games. McCarthy was always good company, intelligent and witty.”

  Reeling from his Oregon loss and ganged up on in California by his two Democratic rivals, Kennedy was facing political disaster. If his campaign crashed on the West Coast, not only would it be a personal humiliation for Bobby but the end of his national crusade to revive the Kennedy dream. But California was not Oregon. It was densely populated with the white blue-collar workers and the black and Hispanic voters who were his base. It was also a media-saturated state that thrilled to his starry aura. And in the weeks leading up to the June 4 California primary, Kennedy’s supporters roared to life. As he trekked up and down the nation-sized state, putting in seventeen-hour days, Kennedy was swarmed by screaming mobs. In the overgrown Central Valley farm town of Fresno, the crowd toppled the barriers at the airport as he got off his plane and engulfed him. “I touched him. I touched him!” shrieked one girl. “I won’t wash this hand for a week!”

  His motorcades through the streets of California were pageants of ecstatic democracy. By the time his campaign convertible had completed its slow, meandering journey through the shouting swarms, Kennedy’s shirt would be hanging out and matted to his back with sweat, his forearms would be scratched and bleeding, and his cufflinks and PT-109 tie clip long gone. But the candidate’s spirit would be rejuvenated.

  In the black neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles, teenagers ran alongside his car, lunging for his outstretched hands as Bill Barry crouched beside him, holding onto Bobby’s slight frame with all his might. Women came running out of their homes and beauty parlors in curlers, men came running out of bars—they all wanted to see him, shout out to him, touch him. Reporters riding with the candidate stared with stunned disbelief at the explosive energy he unleashed. “These are my people,” said Kennedy. It was the race of his life and Kennedy was pouring his very soul into it. And the people in the streets responded with a fervor that was like a wild hunger.

  Kennedy was greeted with the same frenzied celebration in Latino neighborhoods, where crowds shouted, “Viva Bobby!” and mariachi bands serenaded him with brassy versions of Woody Guthrie’s populist anthem, “This Land is Your Land.” The state’s large Mexican-American vote was mobilized by the United Farm Workers union, whose charismatic leader, César Chávez, had been devoted to Kennedy ever since the senator took up the UFW cause. In 1966 Kennedy held hearings in California on behalf of the union, whose nonviolent Catholic leadership and bitter struggle with the state’s agribusiness industry deeply appealed to the senator’s sense of justice. The senator hauled union-busting local sheriffs before his panel—the kind of redneck lawmen who had been harassing California farm workers since the The Grapes of Wrath era—and subjected them to the same grilling that gangsters once suffered at Kennedy’s hands, acidly suggesting that they read the U.S. Constitution before they illegally arrested any more UFW members.

  Most of the labor movement was under the control of pro-war union leaders who were solidly behind Humphrey. But UFW members fanned out all over the state to campaign for Bobby, including Chávez himself, who—still debilitated from a long hunger strike to protest farm workers’ conditions—pushed himself so hard on Kennedy’s behalf that he was bedridden for the following year. The union’s all-out drive would prove critical for Kennedy. “It was,” said Chávez, “a product of respect, admiration [and] love.” Kennedy had come to the farm workers’ aid when they needed it most—now they were doing the same for him.

  By the final days of the campaign, Kennedy was so drained that he seemed to be sleepwalking through his events. On a plane ride to Los Angeles, the candidate grabbed Jack Newfield as he walked down the aisle with a Bloody Mary in his hand and steered him into the empty seat next to him. He wanted to talk about Bob Dylan, whose music Newfield had been urgently recommending to him. Kennedy had a hard time listening to Dylan’s voice, which he found whining. But after hearing Bobby Darin, whose vocal style was more to this taste, sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” at a campaign rally, he was suddenly intrigued by the songwriter. “Do you think you could introduce me to Dylan?” he asked Newfield. Talking with him up close on the plane, the reporter was taken aback by Kennedy’s haggard appearance: “His face looked like an old man’s; there were lines I had never noticed before. The eyes were puffy and red and pushed back into his sockets. His hands shook, as they often did when he was speaking in public.”

  June 3, the last day of the race, was the most punishing of all, a twelve-hour marathon that took Kennedy from Los Angeles to San Francisco to Long Beach, through Watts, then to San Diego for a late-night rally and finally back to Los Angeles. In San Francisco, he rode through Chinatown as always, in an open car so the people could see him. “He felt he had to ride in a convertible because his brother had been killed in a convertible,” Newfield observed. When a string of Chinese firecrackers suddenly shattered the air, violent as gunfire, Ethel—pregnant with their final child—collapsed into a protective fetal crouch on the car seat, visibly trembling. “I was walking alongside the car,” remembered John Seigenthaler, who had taken a leave from the Nashville Tennessean to help his old friend’s campaign. “I saw the sheer terror in Ethel’s eyes. It scared the hell out of me too.” But Bobby kept standing and waving, refusing to show any fear.

  By the time they reached Long Beach, Kennedy was groggy with fatigue, stumbling almost incoherently through his speech. When he got back to the car, Fred Dutton stated the obvious: “You had a little trouble with some words that time.” Kennedy confessed that he did not feel well, something he would have normally hidden from his staff.

  The final event of his long day’s journey was a rally at the El Cortez Hotel in San Diego. The crowd was so massive that it had to be divided in half and Kennedy was forced to deliver two back-to-back speeches. After the first one, he walked offstage and collapsed into a chair, burying his face in his hands. Bill Barry and Rafer Johnson, the former Olympic athlete who had begun to help out as a volunteer bodyguard, eased the ailing Bobby to a men’s room. He didn’t vo
mit, he later insisted to Dutton, he was just dizzy for a few minutes. “I just ran out of gas,” he said. But he gathered himself one more time to return to the stage and deliver his last speech of the campaign. And then it was over. Robert Kennedy’s political fate was in the hands of the California people.

  ON ELECTION DAY, KENNEDY recuperated at the Malibu beach house of John Frankenheimer with Ethel and six of their children. The director’s Cold War movies, The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May, had been embraced by JFK as warning messages against totalitarian impulses in Washington. And when Bobby jumped into the presidential race, Frankenheimer volunteered to direct his TV ads, trying to capture the electricity of the campaign by following the candidate around with his camera. The two men grew close on the campaign trail, and Frankenheimer even got Bobby to talk about his suspicions about Dallas. But when the director gingerly touched on one aspect of the case—Joe Kennedy’s ties to organized crime and how the Mafia might have felt betrayed by the family—Bobby made it clear that area was off-limits. Frankenheimer was sensitive enough to drop the subject, and Kennedy felt sufficiently comfortable with the director to accept his invitation to use his beach house as a retreat from the campaign’s tumult.

  Nine days before Election Day, Kennedy had been relaxing on a Sunday afternoon at Frankenheimer’s house with a group of his supporters from the entertainment world, including Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, Burt Bacharach, Angie Dickinson, and actress Jean Seberg. While talking with Kennedy, Seberg’s husband, French novelist Romain Gary, suddenly said out loud what everyone found too terrible to mention: “You know, don’t you, that somebody’s going to try to kill you?” The room fell deathly silent. But Kennedy, sitting cross-legged in his swim trunks on the floor, simply stared into a glass of orange juice that he was swirling in his hand and answered, “That’s the chance I have to take.”