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

by Talbot, David

  Dick Goodwin stayed in politics for awhile, rejoining the McCarthy campaign, although he knew it had no hope, and drafting the doomed peace plank at the 1968 Democratic Convention—a gathering that, instead of uniting party warhorses like Mayor Daley and the antiwar movement as RFK’s nomination would have ensured, pitted them violently and disastrously against each other. Afterward, Goodwin dropped out of the action. “Dick went kind of nuts after Bobby’s murder,” Newfield told me before his death. “He moved up to Maine and invited me up there to do rifle practice. He told me, ‘They got my friends, but they’re not going to get me.’ He had a dark view of the whole thing.” Today, Goodwin makes light of the rifle practice but confirms that he was in a bad way. “I had to get away. I was very disturbed by what happened.”

  For the Kennedy circle, once again, the world was off its axis, and this time the country seemed an even more strange and threatening place. On Bobby’s funeral train, Jacqueline Kennedy—so stoic after Dallas—threw herself on his coffin, sobbing, “Oh, my God, oh, my God.” It was McNamara who finally calmed her down, grabbing her and holding her in his arms. Later, her sorrow turned to bitterness. “If they’re killing Kennedys, then my children are targets,” she said. “I want to get out of this country.” She would soon find a way, by marrying Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

  John Frankenheimer too would flee the country, moving to Europe for five years, drinking heavily and largely ignoring his movie career. That night at the Ambassador sent him to a dark place, the director later recalled. “If you want to date a moment when things started to turn, it was after that night. I went through sheer hell. I went to Europe, and I just lost interest. I got burned out. I was really left very disillusioned and went through a period of deep depression. It took a long time to get it back.”

  Bobby Kennedy himself would have scorned this feeling of alienation, Adam Walinsky contends today—this growing dread that America was lost. “He would have had no tolerance or patience for such a sentiment. His reaction would have been, ‘What do you mean we’ve lost America? It’s a great country—are you telling me the whole heritage of Washington and Lincoln and everything that Americans and their ancestors have done is all going down the drain because I’m not around? What the fuck is the matter with you? Grow up, get to work, cut that out!’”

  But Bobby was no longer there to rally his family and fellow warriors. The flag carrier they had always looked to had been carried from the field. JFK’s death had been cataclysmic. But they still had Bobby. For years, after Dallas, he had been the one they looked to, the one who kept the mission alive. His disappearance left a final void.

  There was also no Bobby to hunt relentlessly for the truth about what happened in those chaotic moments at the Ambassador Hotel. And so the men who had followed him grappled privately with their suspicions, and many never reached a satisfying conclusion about his death. Some thought Sirhan Bishara Sirhan—the luckless young Palestinian immigrant who was arrested and convicted of the murder—was the whole, pathetic story. Others thought the assassin, who seemed in a trance that night, was programmed—or that he was not the only shooter, perhaps even a decoy. Ironically, Sirhan had brushed by Frankenheimer during Kennedy’s victory speech, as the director stood watching Bobby on a TV monitor in the ballroom’s archway. “It was The Manchurian Candidate,” Frankenheimer later said. “I felt this shaking inside me.”

  As pandemonium swept through the pantry that night, Jesse Unruh, the powerful California politician and Kennedy supporter, had shouted, “We don’t want another Oswald!”—urging the enraged crowd that swirled around Sirhan not to kill him. But for many people in the Kennedy circle, that’s precisely what that night at the Ambassador would become—another Dallas, with the same type of mysterious gunfire, murky characters, and shockingly inept investigation.

  Mankiewicz and Hamill were among those who accepted the official version of Robert Kennedy’s death—that Sirhan alone put an end to everything that night. While both men strongly suspected that JFK had been the victim of a conspiracy, they believed that Bobby simply had been dispatched by “a pimply messenger…from the secret filthy heart of America,” in Hamill’s disgusted words. This was the anguished, metaphorical way that the American liberal media generally reacted to RFK’s murder. As time went by, Hamill would see the convicted assassin in less symbolic terms. Sirhan was the kind of Palestinian extremist you would later find blowing up cafes in Israel, Hamill says today. “It just seemed weird at the time because we didn’t know anything about Palestinians.”

  But others who were in the Ambassador pantry when the shots rang out were deeply disturbed by what they witnessed. They could never reconcile their observations with the official version of Kennedy’s killing. Gunpowder burns found on Kennedy’s right ear during the autopsy indicated the fatal shot was fired directly behind his head, from a distance of only three inches or less. But not one witness saw Sirhan shoot Kennedy in the back of his skull at point-blank range. According to witnesses, Sirhan attacked Kennedy from the front, and he was standing between three and six feet away from his victim.

  Frank Burns, a lawyer and aide to Jesse Unruh, was standing at Kennedy’s right shoulder when the gunfire erupted. He was among those who jumped on Sirhan, who held on to his gun like a man possessed while much bigger men wrestled to disarm him. “There is no question that Sirhan was trying to assassinate Kennedy,” Burns told me. “But I don’t believe that Sirhan’s gun got within a couple of inches of Kennedy’s head, as the powder burns showed. So I’ve never been able to reconcile that. And I was standing right there. Now Kennedy could have circled completely around into the muzzle of the gun while we were waltzing with Sirhan—but I didn’t hear any other shots while we were wrestling with him.

  “In the years since Bobby’s assassination, every conspiracy researcher in the world has called me up, from Dan Rather on down. But what it all comes down to for me is that the official story is just not believable—nor are other explanations and theories for who could have killed him. It’s still an unsolved mystery in my mind.”

  Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles coroner who conducted the autopsy on Robert Kennedy, came to the same unsettling conclusion—though it received surprisingly scant attention when he revealed this in his 1983 memoir. Disturbed by the gunpowder evidence, eyewitness testimony, and indications that twelve bullets were fired that night—more than Sirhan’s eight-bullet revolver could hold—Noguchi wrote that it “all seemed to indicate there may have been a second gunman,” speculating that Sirhan’s role might have been to divert attention from Kennedy’s principal assailant. The coroner acknowledged that “crowd psychology” during moments of mayhem like the night at the Ambassador often made eyewitness testimony unreliable. Nonetheless, Noguchi wrote, “Until more is positively known of what happened that night, the existence of a second gunman remains a possibility. Thus I have never said that Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.”

  Richard Lubic, the Kennedy media consultant, did see another drawn gun that night. He too was standing next to the senator as he was shot. As Lubic kneeled down to help the fallen Kennedy, he saw a security guard with a gun in his hand, pointed toward the floor. The guard, Thane Eugene Cesar, was standing behind Kennedy when he was shot. He later insisted he did not fire his gun that night, but police never tested it. And Cesar—who held strong anti-Kennedy, racist views, telling one interviewer that the Kennedys had “sold the country down the road…to the commies” and minorities—has long since figured in conspiracy theories about RFK’s death.

  After the assassination, Lubic was visited at his home by members of Special Unit Senator (SUS), the Los Angeles police task force set up to investigate the crime. To Lubic, the investigators from SUS, which had ties to U.S. intelligence, seemed like “government people.” When he tried to tell them about Cesar—asking them, “Why would a security guard have his gun pointed toward the floor, instead of at Sirhan?”—they cut him off. “It’s none of your bus
iness,” the investigators told Lubic. “Don’t bring this up, don’t be talking about this.” Later, at Sirhan’s trial, Lubic was never questioned about the mysterious security guard.

  Frank Burns discovered the same lack of curiosity when he was called to the witness stand. He was never asked about the position of Sirhan’s gun. “Everybody was certain they had the right guy—Sirhan was convicted before the trial ever began,” Burns said. “I had felt the same way until I began to see some of the evidence about the bullet holes and trajectories and so on.”

  Within weeks of RFK’s death, questions began to emerge about the LAPD investigation, including charges of destroying evidence and intimidating witnesses. “Big Daddy” Jesse Unruh, California’s most formidable Democrat, was disturbed by what he was hearing about the investigation, and he alerted the Kennedy family. But irreparably broken by the death of Bobby—who, even more than Jack, had been the heart of the family—the Kennedys were in no condition to focus on the mysteries of the case. According to Burns, “Unruh talked to Kenny O’Donnell and Steve Smith. He told them we had some questions about the investigation in L.A. And he wanted to know if they had any concerns and if they had anything they wanted us to pursue. If the family had been troubled by any concerns, Jess would have been willing to do whatever he could to look into them. After all, he had a lot of clout, he was the California Speaker. But the answer came back from the Kennedy camp: ‘No, we don’t want to pursue it.’ The family’s attitude was clearly, ‘Thanks for your concerns, but please butt out.’”

  Ted Kennedy was now the head of the family, but he lacked Bobby’s burning sense of political mission—nor did he have his brother’s investigative drive. Family members became consumed by their own private torments. No Kennedy would take up Bobby’s secret quest to solve Jack’s murder, and none would dedicate himself or herself to ensuring justice for Bobby.

  Allard Lowenstein, the bespectacled whirling dervish of liberal activism, made the RFK assassination a cause until his own strange murder in 1980 by one of his former political protégés. And, over the years, various lawyers for Sirhan tried without success to reopen the case. But, overshadowed by the JFK mystery, Bobby’s assassination received scant media scrutiny.

  WITH JOHN KENNEDY’S DEATH had come the birth of Camelot—endless TV specials and magazine spreads on the dashing, storybook king and his tragic, inexplicable end. With Robert Kennedy’s assassination, the Kennedy Curse was born—countless media ruminations on the once charmed family’s dark fate. This gauzy coverage had the effect of making the double killing of the Kennedy brothers seem like something preordained, something the family had brought upon itself like characters in a Greek tragedy.

  Ted Sorensen tried to counter the creation of the Kennedy Curse. At a memorial service held at his New York law firm the day after Bobby’s death, he delivered an eloquent tribute to the fallen brothers. John and Robert Kennedy were killed not because they were cursed, Sorensen declared, but because they dared to change history. “There is no curse upon the Kennedys,” Sorensen told his colleagues. “They have met their share of ill-fate because they had more than their share of the courage and the conviction required to dare and to try and to tempt fate…. They died heroic deaths because they lived heroic lives.”

  As time passed, it became clear that the curse was not on the Kennedy brothers. It was on America. Years would go by, and no new leader would appear to take the country to the same heights.

  “We’ve been on an endless cycle of retreat ever since the Kennedys,” Goodwin remarked. “A retreat not just from liberal ideals, but from that sense of excited involvement in the country. I was asked by a magazine once what I thought John Kennedy’s greatest contribution was, and I said, ‘He made us feel that we were better than we thought we were.’ That was the big loss. There’s so much a president can do to inspire a nation—it’s hard to even remember that nowadays. I mean JFK just liberated an enormous energy in the country. And Bobby would have done even more, I think.”

  Once again, Walinsky intervenes to put the Kennedy memorializing in perspective. He refuses to indulge in the senseless “what if they had lived” ritual. “I was at one of those memorial events once,” Walinsky recalled, “and Arthur [Schlesinger] got up and went into this long deal about if John Kennedy had lived, this would be different, that would be different, and this struck me wrong. So when it came my turn to talk, right after Arthur, I just put aside what I was planning to say and I said, ‘Look, the entire time I worked for Robert Kennedy, I never heard him say, ‘If only President Kennedy had lived, this would be different.’ Because to him that would have been a statement of weakness. That would have been saying, ‘My brother didn’t succeed in doing it, therefore we can’t.’ The question to him was not ‘what if?’ It was ‘what now?’ He felt ‘Here we are, we are responsible, it’s up to us.’ And there’s a real logic in this. Because if you say, ‘Too bad President Kennedy isn’t still alive’—why stop there? What about Lincoln, Washington—isn’t it a pity George Washington isn’t still here with us! And how about Socrates, Moses? Jesus could walk among us again! The fact is, other people can’t solve your problems for you—they can only give you an example of how to live, then it’s up to you what to do about it.”

  With his gleaming shaved head, flashing eyes, and disputatious style—a cross between a courtroom lawyer and Talmudic scholar—Walinksy presents himself as the tough, unsentimental guardian of Robert Kennedy’s legacy. As Bobby himself would insist after Jack’s death, Walinsky doesn’t want to be caught up in the misty past. But as he’s talking, sitting in a sunny breakfast nook off the kitchen of his Scarsdale home, he’s watched over by another saintly photo of Bobby. This one is a black-and-white picture of Kennedy with the small child of migrant farmworkers, crouching in the dirt next to the family’s home, an abandoned, rust-eaten car. Walinsky is not so different from the other men who served John and Robert Kennedy. The Kennedy years remain their touchstone, their reminder of what is best in them. Like the others, Walinsky’s eyes are sometimes stung with tears as a particular memory comes suddenly to mind. And like the others, his house is filled with Kennedy memorabilia. The mementos—framed photos, stirring quotations, political cartoons—cover the walls in these men’s studies, living rooms, even breakfast nooks. These men’s homes are shrines to that heroic past, when they all were young and the country was beginning anew. When Robert Kennedy called to them, telling them, “Come, my friends, it’s not too late to seek a newer world.” And they believed him.

  9

  TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION

  “Never let me hear that brave blood has been shed in vain; it sends an imperious challenge down through all the generations.”

  —SIR WALTER SCOTT

  After Robert Kennedy was killed in 1968, there was no major figure in Washington with the drive to solve the JFK assassination—or investigate the lingering questions around RFK’s own death. But in the early 1970s, the Watergate scandal began to lift the cloak that hid some of the country’s darkest secrets. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” Leonard Cohen sings. And Watergate—along with years of senseless bloodletting in Vietnam—cracked the system enough to let the light seep in.

  The closest the U.S. government came to solving the JFK mystery was in the post-Watergate period, as the Church Committee and then the House Select Committee on Assassinations reexamined the Warren Commission’s conclusions. These congressional inquiries unearthed important new evidence of a conspiracy and raised troubling questions about the role of government agencies in the assassination cover-up, if not the crime itself. But, in the end, these probes were frustrated by political limits imposed from within and without. They underlined how doomed any investigative effort was bound to be that depended on the voluntary cooperation of agencies like the CIA and FBI—deeply secretive institutions that had already blatantly misled the Warren Commission and would prove equally obstructionist during the 1970s inquiries.

>   The Church Committee was convened in January 1975 under the leadership of Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho, to investigate abuses of power in the CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies. The committee produced a string of revelations—from the CIA’s illegal opening of American citizens’ mail to the FBI’s pathological obsession with Martin Luther King Jr. But its most explosive discovery was the CIA’s secret efforts to assassinate hostile or simply inconvenient foreign leaders, including Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, and Chile’s General Rene Schneider, who was seen as an obstacle to the overthrow of President Salvador Allende. It was news of the CIA’s assassination program that made the deepest impact on the American press and public, leading to cries for more congressional oversight of the agency—which Senator Church famously castigated as a “rogue elephant.”

  Among those who were shaken by the CIA assassination disclosures was Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania, one of the more active members of the Church Committee. A moderate Republican who had been inspired by JFK’s call for a new era of public service, Schweiker was stunned to learn how the CIA and FBI had withheld critical information from the Warren Commission, including the CIA-Mafia collaboration against Castro. And he began to wonder what more the Senate committee would learn if it turned its spotlight on Dallas. In late 1975, as the panel was winding down its investigation, Schweiker persuaded Church to let him set up a subcommittee—composed of himself and Gary Hart of Colorado, a young post-Watergate reformer recently elected to the Senate—to investigate an assassination closer to home, that of JFK.