by Thomas Maier
As he promised, Bobby made it through the poem—“just barely,” as Guthman wrote years later. “Among the stalwart sons of Erin in the audience,” said Guthman, “many a man wept openly.” That night with the Friendly Sons of Ireland marked “a turning point” for Bobby Kennedy, a night that rekindled those intense, inner fires that had seemed extinguished with his brother’s death.
THE SIZEABLE BROOD of Robert and Ethel Kennedy assembled for breakfast at Hickory Hill on a sad quiet morning soon after the president’s killing. At the family table, the Kennedy children were sometimes quizzed at dinner by their parents about current events, just as Rose Kennedy conducted examinations at meals when her children were growing up. But on this moribund morning, Bobby decided that a different conversation was in order. “At this breakfast, not long after my uncle’s death,my father had the discipline to tell the older children to write down the significance of Jack’s death to the United States,” recalled his sixth son, Michael Kennedy, years later. “I remember that incident very, very well. I remember thinking,‘Oh, I’m glad I don’t have to do that yet.’”
Bobby’s request to his children underlined his own search for answers to find any meaning in his brother’s senseless death. His struggle took on many forms, from the silent to the frenetic. “Anyone who has gone to the President’s grave at Arlington with Robert Kennedy—although never a word is spoken—gets the sense that he feels that something great was broken here, and that as his brother’s brother he has an obligation to continue it,” said one of his advisers,William vanden Heuval. After the funeral, Bobby retreated to Florida, where he played a vicious game of touch football with other grieving Kennedy aides. But action could only fill part of the void. “People were smashing into each other to try and forget that John Kennedy was dead,” recalled Pierre Salinger, “and Bobby was one of the toughest guys in the game.”
The most obvious target of Robert Kennedy’s wrath in this world was the man who took his brother’s place, Lyndon Johnson. After the Scranton speech and other public appearances, political talk obsessed on whether Johnson might ask Bobby to be his vice-presidential running mate in 1964. The idea appealed briefly to Kennedy as a way to ensure that Jack’s promises were fulfilled. But Johnson quickly scratched that plan for more than ample reason. In the past, there were many disagreements between the two, often petty and egotistical, accompanied with the sparks that fly when opposites clash. Although hagiographers embellish Bobby’s finer nature as he matured, his relationship with Johnson reminds us of his raw, competitive, sometimes vindictive side. This aspect of his personality—the side that Jack Newfield described as “too Catholic, too physical, too combative”— repelled liberals; it had even nearly landed him in a fistfight with lawyer Roy Cohn during their days as aides to Joe McCarthy. This hard-edged side forced even colleagues such as Adam Walinsky to admit that Bobby could be “a nasty little prick” when provoked. But no one irked Bobby more than Lyndon Johnson. Within close circles, Bobby constantly said that Johnson was “incapable of telling the truth”—an assessment he claimed his brother made to Jackie Kennedy the day before he was killed in Dallas. After Jack’s death, one particular rumor, passed along by Salinger, infuriated Bobby: Johnson had suggested the hand of God might have struck down President Kennedy as some biblical punishment for the deaths of Diem in Vietnam and Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. In a lengthy oral history given later for the John F. Kennedy Library, Bobby repeated Johnson’s homey Texas allegory to his interviewer, John Bartlow Martin, with vintage disdain:
MARTIN: Did he [Johnson] mean divine retribution? Or was he suggesting conspiracy?
KENNEDY: No, divine—divine retribution. He [Johnson] said that, and then he went on, I think, and talked and he said that when he was growing up somebody that he knew who had misbehaved ran down a tree—no, was on a sled or something and ran into a tree and hit his head and became cross-eyed. And he said that was God’s retribution for people who were bad and so you should be careful of cross-eyed people because God puts his mark on them, and that this might very well be God’s retribution to President Kennedy for his participation in the assassination of these two people.
Martin laughed nervously at this tale, and then there was a long pause. “But otherwise,” Kennedy added, his sarcasm dripping, “it’s a friendly relationship.”
AT THE 1964 DEMOCRATIC Convention, Robert Kennedy made a dramatic appearance, interrupted by a wave of emotion and sustained applause, before he could introduce a filmed tribute to his brother. As he tried sheepishly to begin (“Mr. Chairman . . . Mr. Chairman . . . ”), there was no doubt in anyone’s mind for whom they were clapping. Many thought his political career would be forever dependent on his brother’s memory. Two days earlier, Bobby had announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in New York, a race in which he faced an incumbent moderate Republican,Kenneth Keating, whose upstate patrician style resembled that of his brother’s 1952 opponent, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Saddled with the charge of “carpetbagger,” Kennedy found that many liberals opposed his bid (and some even called him “the Irish Roy Cohn”); certainly there was a long list of detractors, including Gore Vidal, I. F. Stone and James Baldwin, as well as the editorial page of the New York Times. After watching him on the stump, columnist Jimmy Breslin predicted that Bobby Kennedy “will always be confused with his brother.” Congressman John V. Lindsay, soon to become mayor of New York City, observed, “I feel sorry for Keating—he’s running against a ghost.”
Lacking the help of his immobilized father, his fallen older brother, and his younger brother, Edward, who was running for reelection in Massachusetts, Bobby relied on assistance from further down the family totem pole—his sister Jean’s husband, Stephen Smith, who had served ably for JFK in 1960. Smith became Bobby’s campaign manager. For most of the race, Keating remained close to Kennedy, partly because the traditional Democratic Party coalition was falling apart in New York. The old machine bosses such as Congressman Charles Buckley of the Bronx (one of the first and strongest of Catholic politicians to support Jack’s 1960 presidential candidacy at a time when many Catholics were wary of his chances) were losing ground to a new ethnic coalition. At the same time, many reform Democrats showed a distinct ambivalence toward the former attorney general. Even some of Jack’s former aides wondered about Bobby. “I was less attracted by what I then perceived as a kind of moral righteousness, rooted in a primitive Catholicism,” remembered speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who took a job with the Johnson administration that year.
At times, the strain of Bobby’s new life in politics showed. “This great doom which so many of the Irish live by and have in their faces made him look gaunt,” Breslin described, after watching Kennedy at a lively, sometime prickly exchange with students at Columbia University. When one undergraduate pushed him about the findings of the Warren Commission, and mentioned other conspiracy theories suggesting that perhaps Oswald was not a lone assassin, Bobby became visibly upset. “I’ve made my statement, is this one yours?” he snapped. Then, his head bowed and the gaggle of television cameras with their klieg lights continued to roll as Kennedy’s eyes moistened with tears.
That November, Robert Kennedy was swept into office largely on the strength of Lyndon Johnson’s landslide presidential victory, an irony that no one missed. In his relatively short campaign, Kennedy managed to find his own extemporaneous voice. He began to form a political coalition—not only the ethnic Catholics, who responded to his familiar, culturally conservative image—but also the new minorities in New York, the thousands of Puerto Ricans who moved from the island, and the many African- Americans who came up from the South to live in the city’s urban neighborhoods, often replacing whites who had fled to the suburbs. The machine bosses and local leaders, afraid of losing their fiefdoms, were slow to register these minority voters. So Kennedy’s campaign ran their own special registration drive, picking up thousands of new and previously disenfranchised voters, particularly in black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods
.“John Kennedy had the bearing of a patrician, but seeing Bobby, you wouldn’t know he came from a wealthy background,” recalled Herman Badillo, then a Democrat, who was elected Bronx borough president the following year. “He looked like he was from any Irish family in New York. He related to Puerto Ricans as if he were one of them, and that’s why he got such firm support.”
This hybrid Democratic coalition, probably the most remarkable aspect of Kennedy’s otherwise lackluster 1964 Senate campaign, seemed a minor miracle to those familiar with the internecine, tribal warfare of New York politics. Manfred Ohrenstein, a Manhattan Democratic politician and avid supporter, recognized the Kennedy appeal in bringing disparate and virtually powerless groups together.“They brought with them the ethos of the Catholic Church,” Ohrenstein explained about the Kennedy effect. “This whole group of blue-collar people—Irish and Italians—felt comfortable that this was one of theirs, that the Kennedys understood where they came from, these people who had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, people to whom religion was an important means of elevating themselves and of keeping their families together. . . . The Kennedys had this ability to communicate to blue-collar Catholics that they understand their concerns, just as they could communicate with poor blacks. They represented a successful immigrant family.”
In his last days as attorney general in July 1964, Bobby testified in support of his brother’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s restrictive immigration laws, which he called “cruel” and a “source of embarrassment to us around the world.” As a Democratic candidate for the Senate, he turned immigration into a campaign issue in his race against Keating. He pointed out that President Kennedy’s bill, introduced in July 1963, remained stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Keating was a prominent member. “The truth is that [Keating] does not have enough influence in his own committee to secure a hearing on immigration reform,” Kennedy charged. Keating, who actually favored the bill, said that Bobby’s newfound interest in immigration was simply a matter of election-time expediency. Nevertheless, in immigrant–filled New York, Kennedy’s accusation carried weight.
Discrimination and the reuniting of families were the two reasons for immigration reform that Kennedy emphasized. Ironically, the flow of Irish immigrants had slowed to a trickle by the mid-1960s. But thousands of applicants from southern and central European nations still waited for years under this system. Those from Latin America, Asia and Africa were often denied. The last effort by Congress to deal with this system—the 1952 McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, passed over President Truman’s veto— only confirmed these racial quotas. “Everywhere else in our national life, we have eliminated discrimination based on one’s place of birth,” Bobby stated.“Yet this system is still the foundation of our immigration law.”
Kennedy’s efforts in New York were aided inadvertently by Republicans who injected their campaign with some old-fashioned nativism. Vice-presidential nominee William E. Miller denounced the proposed Kennedy changes to the nation’s immigration laws, and the party’s presidential candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, declared that “Americans are sick and tired” of having “minority groups run the country.”The furor over Goldwater’s remarks forced his aides to claim he meant “pressure groups,” not “minority groups.” But the old battle lines on immigration were drawn. The mayor of New York City, Robert Wagner, chairman of the All Americans Council of the Democratic National Committee, a group representing immigrants and minorities in the party, blasted Goldwater for his “woeful ignorance of the role of immigrants in the history of America.”To emphasize his point,Wagner told the press of his plans to send Goldwater a copy of President Kennedy’s book, A Nation of Immigrants.
More than any family member before him, Robert Kennedy learned to embrace as part of his constituency those immigrants, farm hands and factory workers earning less than minimum wage, those who worked in the most dangerous jobs or were given the least desirable tasks outside the purview of government or labor unions. He became, in Schlesinger’s term, a “tribune for the underclass.” Kennedy’s politics were slowly transformed, starting almost imperceptibly with the 1964 campaign. He was no longer an insider, no longer a confidant to the president, but rather an irritant in Lyndon Johnson’s White House, deliberately kept at bay. Physically, Bobby Kennedy looked, spoke and acted like an outsider, regardless of his vaunted status as a United States senator. No longer would he rail against things in the same defensive, sometimes reactionary, conservative mode as he had in the 1950s and early 1960s, when he operated under the protective wing of both his brother and father. Only in retrospect would those closest to him realize how far he had traveled.
ROBERT KENNEDY’S spiritual odyssey after his brother’s death is difficult to trace. Friends, relatives and former colleagues recall Kennedy from their own particular experiences or vantage, but their memories provide only limited insight. Kennedy’s public comments are recorded in more than a dozen books and biographies, yet the private struggles of his soul remain largely ignis fatuus, a metaphysical will-o’-the-wisp difficult to grasp. As Anthony Lewis, a New York Times columnist and Harvard classmate, remarked of him: “Most people acquire certainties as they grow older; he lost his.”
Bobby Kennedy must be understood against the backdrop of the 1960s, a period of tremendous social changes within the United States, when the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement unleashed a torrent of moral unrest. Nearly every institution seemed under scrutiny or, in some way, under siege, to the extent that some even wondered, as Time magazine posed on its front cover,“Is God Dead?” President Kennedy’s death seemed to leave America unhinged, suspicious that the old verities provided by church and state no longer held true. Bobby’s individual agonies, his search for answers, became part of this larger national drama. These changes in Kennedy—from the zealous 1950s McCarthyite engaged in anti- Communist crusades to the reflective, ecumenical progressive of the mid–1960s—also embodied the remarkable changes in the mindset of the American Catholic Church. The almost reactionary hierarchy personified by Cardinal Spellman gave way to the reforms of Vatican II. In this respect, Robert Kennedy’s journey reflected the experiences of thousands of Irish- Americans.“In this era, the Catholic Kennedys traced the same narrative arc as their church,” James Carroll later observed, “from the worship of aristocracy to a liberating preference for the poor.”
Some former aides tend to cast Kennedy as an existential hero and downplay whatever role his Catholic culture played in his decisionmaking. “While he [Kennedy] remained a good Catholic, he was freshly infused with a skepticism that loosened the rigidities of his belief and the personal moral code that had ruled his conduct,” Richard Goodwin wrote.“Painful experience had drawn him closer to the Greek wisdom that a man’s destiny was governed by an arbitrary, often whimsical fate; led him away from the loving protective God of his earlier, literal Catholic belief.” But these assessments are at odds with many closest to the Kennedy family, and, ironically, with Robert Kennedy’s own words.
Family intimates, such as cousin Joseph Gargan, say Bobby’s sense of being a Catholic was “a very important influence on what he did,” such as his efforts to improve civil rights and his championing of migrant workers. His eldest daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, said the family’s Irish Catholic heritage played a significant role in his public actions and in dealing with personal tragedies. When asked about her father’s most identifiable Irish trait, she replied,“I think the stoicism, the sense that you have to work, and go forward, even in the toughest of times. Clearly, there was a sense that religion was a very strong part of our life, in the sense that we would never miss Mass on Sunday. We had prayers at every meal. And of course, nightly prayers. . . .We would quote St. Luke’s admonition—‘To those who have been given much, much will be expected.’ So there really was a sense of duty and responsibility . . . as well as an empathy for those who are less fortunate.”
Many aspects of Irish Catholi
c life in America—the devotion to large extended families, the deference to clergy and church, the allegiance to Democratic politics—were a part of Robert Kennedy.“Because he was so pure Irish, he seemed part of a company,”wrote Murray Kempton in 1964, predicting that Bobby Kennedy would “begin again down, one suspects, a road entirely unexpected, unconventional, intimate and Irish.” Kempton, a more astute observer than most, was unique in his perception of the deeper currents in Bobby Kennedy’s psyche.“There are persons so constituted that they can go nowhere without some piece of faith to serve as light,” he wrote. “Robert Kennedy is a Catholic; and naturally he sought his faith there.”
The evidence of Robert Kennedy’s beliefs, the remnants of his private and public search, abound. On a yellow sheet, shortly after his brother’s death, he scribbled: “The innocent suffer—how can that be possible and God be just.” In politics, he learned that church and state could not be antiseptically separated, as his brother had been compelled to promise in the 1960 election. Rather, the lessons of the 1960s reaffirmed for him that the most effective struggles against war, poverty and racism often require the actions of those motivated by religion. In the personal postscript to his last book, To Seek a Newer World, Kennedy underlined the power of religion and faith in his work in the U.S. Senate and, presumably, as a future president. “It is not realistic or hard-headed to solve problems and take action unguided by ultimate moral aims and values. It is thoughtless folly,” he declared. “For it ignores the realities of human faith and passion and belief, forces ultimately more powerful than all the calculations of economists or generals.”
Because religion, like money and sex, was generally a private matter, the Kennedys were often portrayed solely in secular terms by journalists and historians who could not become acquainted with an Irish-Catholic culture that made them uncomfortable. “Many liberals could not understand him,” Schlesinger wrote in his 1978 biography. “They found him hard to understand because he was a Catholic. Not many liberals believed in original sin.”