by Thomas Maier
After his announcement, Bobby marched down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue in the annual parade celebrating the Irish in America. On this chilly, misty day when everyone wore overcoats, Bobby walked briskly in only a blue suit. With a green carnation on his lapel, he waved to the crowds and flashed his crooked, wide grin. Along the city’s main boulevard, Bobby peered up at a specific building and waved in recognition to Jackie and John Jr. sticking their heads out from a window. Many onlookers dressed in green cheered and reached out their hands for Kennedy, but some along the parade route—those with a few bucks in their pockets who came in from the suburbs—roundly booed him as a coward and opportunist. As the New York Times observed, Kennedy “heard and saw enough to realize there was strong resentment to his candidacy, even among the Irish.”
To these second– and third–generation Irish Catholics, Kennedy’s antiwar position smacked of indecency when American boys were getting killed. They were too proud of their country not to support the president’s effort. Kennedy had become too liberal for these Irish Catholics who had moved out of the old ethnic neighborhoods for the ranches, Cape Cods and split-levels in Westchester, Rockland and Long Island. At the same time, Kennedy’s late entry into the presidential race appeared to many liberals as a cynical attempt to snatch away what McCarthy had earned. These feelings intensified after Johnson announced he wouldn’t seek reelection, leaving the Democratic field wide open. “Sorry I can’t join you,” Murray Kempton, a McCarthy sympathizer, telegrammed back to an invitation for a party hosted by Ted Kennedy.“Your brother’s announcement makes clear that St. Patrick did not drive out all the snakes from Ireland.”
For all his troubles, one old problem never emerged. Religion did not become a divisive issue in Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. Perhaps America had matured on the religion issue, or the crisis of Vietnam was too pressing that year. Or perhaps because Kennedy didn’t have the Democratic nomination in hand, it was only delaying the inevitable hatred he’d face in a general election. After all, Robert Kennedy certainly wasn’t a beloved figure in the South, not after his civil rights actions as attorney general. Many liberals were uncomfortable with Kennedy’s purported authoritarian streak and with his Catholicism, a religiosity clearly more overt and devout than his brother’s. As a sign of the potential difficulty ahead, the group called Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU)—his brother’s 1960 nemesis—expressed concern about both Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, the two Roman Catholics in the race. The group claimed these two candidates failed to take an “unequivocal” stand on separation of church and state, as JFK had promised in the past. “If there is any ‘religious problem’ in the coming political campaign, it lies with these men and they alone can resolve it,” POAU warned. Although the traditional barrier against a Catholic in the White House had been broken, some national surveys showed the old prejudices lingered. Against Richard Nixon in a proposed 1968 presidential race, the Harris poll found Robert Kennedy would receive only 42 percent of the Protestant vote, a huge handicap for any candidate to face in a nation nearly three-quarters Protestant. Eventually, Nixon’s campaign developed a strategy designed to capitalize on underlying fears and resentment among white Protestants in the South, particularly their disenfranchisement from the Democratic Party over civil rights, the war and “law and order” in riot-torn cities.
To succeed in a time when the political ground was shifting, Kennedy realized he needed to build a coalition beyond the traditional Democratic base of white ethnics, liberals and Southern Democrats, one that would embrace minorities and recent immigrants in a way they’d never been courted before. These recent newcomers perceived the Kennedys as the quintessential immigrant success story. Bobby Kennedy’s politics mirrored their emphasis on family concerns as well as a progressive outlook on social issues affecting the future. “The poorer people like me—Negroes and Puerto Ricans, for instance,” Kennedy explained. “The Deprived, if you like, they are for me.”
Bobby was forging a new democratic coalition—a politics of outsiders— that he could only hope would be enough to gain the nomination. Kennedy emerged as “our first politician for the pariahs, our great national outsider, our lonely reproach, the natural standard held out to all rebels,” Kempton observed. “That is the wound about him which speaks to children he has never seen. He will always speak to children, and he will probably always be out of power.” Once the hard-charging realist of his brother’s campaign, Bobby Kennedy turned into an almost quixotic candidate who jumped into the murky waters of 1968 on impulse rather than by calculated design. Teddy Kennedy and other seasoned advisers doubted the wisdom of being drawn into this campaign. They argued that 1972 was a better choice and would allow him to attend to the needs of his family. Jackie Kennedy feared that if Bobby entered the race “they’ll do to him what they did to Jack.” But once he made up his mind, after months of vacillation, Bobby wouldn’t hear of not running. What he said about the lessons of Vietnam now seemed to apply to himself and his country:“Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.”
BACK IN NEW YORK, the hour was late, well after midnight. On television from Los Angeles, those who stayed up saw the image of a victorious Bobby Kennedy, smiling sheepishly, squeezed between his family and supporters gathered on the podium, as he thanked everyone for helping him win the California primary.
Kennedy’s appeal to the disenfranchised worked. The turnout in the minority communities of Southern California proved tremendous, nearly 90 percent of some precincts casting their votes for this white millionaire’s son. Mexican-Americans, at the urging of Chavez and the United Farm Workers, voted for Kennedy by wide margins and pushed his overall statewide lead over McCarthy by nearly 5 percent. Overall, seven of every eight Mexican-Americans who voted were for Kennedy. Blacks also favored Kennedy in such large numbers that McCarthy complained about “bloc” voting among minorities and immigrants. Among high-income predominantly white Democratic voters in California, McCarthy won two of every three votes statewide.
Without his band of immigrants and minorities, Kennedy would have lost. His victory marked the first time Hispanic voters played such a prominent role in presidential politics, a harbinger of their growing power in large states around the nation. Kennedy’s win was, in a sense, a more significant milestone for them. In his brief remarks that night, Bobby mentioned Chavez and the United Farm Workers, expressing his gratitude for support “in the agricultural areas of the state, as well as in the cities” of California. He promised to bring all Americans together to end “the divisions, the violence, the disenchantment in our society.” Ethel, dressed in a silk green outfit and pregnant with their eleventh child, stood beside her husband as he stuck up two fingers in a victory sign to the crowd of well-wishers. Then she followed him as he made his way toward a back exit in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel.
BOBBY SHARED his dead brother’s fatalism. “I know that there will be an attempt on my life sooner or later,” he told French writer Romain Gary in Los Angeles shortly before the primary.“There is no way to protect a candidate during the electoral campaign. You must give yourself to the crowd and from then on you must take your chances.” Schlesinger, his biographer, said Kennedy didn’t court death but he possessed “an almost insolent fatalism about life. No one understood better the terrible fortuity of existence.”
In the final hours of the California race, Kennedy’s words seemed heavy with foreboding, of a man ready, if not willing, for death. “It is less important what happens to me than what happens to the cause I have tried to represent,” he assured. After Martin Luther King’s assassination in April, friends and allies worried about Kennedy’s safety more than ever. “There was just about nobody else left but Bobby Kennedy,” recalled Hosea Williams, an aide to King, who, like many blacks, looked to Bobby for answers following King’s death. “I remember telling him he had a chance to be a prophet. But prophets get shot.” Late on th
e night of King’s death, Kennedy seemed lost in thought as he mumbled to an aide “that fellow Harvey Lee . . . Lee Harvey; he set something loose in this country.”
Inside the Ambassador Hotel’s kitchen, a Jordanian nationalist named Sirhan Sirhan, a thin young man with curly dark hair, waited with a .22-caliber revolver while Kennedy shook the hands of nearby cooks, waitresses and busboys. According to a notebook later found by police in his apartment, Sirhan burned with an “unshakeable obsession” to kill Kennedy, to become a hero in the Arab world, or so he believed, for eliminating such a prominent friend of Israel. As a New York senator,Kennedy proved a consistent ally of the Jewish state and a close friend of many Jews—a far cry from the anti-Semitism in the Kennedys’ private letters years earlier. In the bustle of the kitchen, Sirhan suddenly shrieked Kennedy’s name and a volley of gunshots went off. The rapid popping noises sounded like firecrackers. Screams and panic poured out from the kitchen doors. Television cameras, still beaming their signals nationwide, recorded the mayhem. Friends wrestled Kennedy’s assailant to the ground and disarmed him. Newfield remembered a young woman in a bright red party dress sobbing,“No, God, no. It’s happened again.”
On the concrete floor, Bobby lay dying in a pool of blood, his arms stretched out limply and his face looking up with almost a tranquil expression. A busboy named Juan Romero placed a small crucifix and rosary beads in his hand. “Is everybody safe, OK?” Bobby asked, before he passed out, never to regain consciousness. Later at the hospital, Ethel made sure, like her sister-in-law before her, that her husband received last rites from a priest. A bullet had shattered Bobby’s brain, though his body kept functioning for several more hours, as his family, friends and the whole world learned of his fate. In the end, his heart was the last to fail.
THE SOUNDS OF LATIN and smell of incense—the residue of church rituals for the dead—were no longer foreign nor peculiar for America. Even the television network cameramen in the back of St. Patrick’s Cathedral seemed to know where to station themselves. The second funeral for a Kennedy in less than five years carried a haunting familiarity, a shared national trauma in which the Catholic Mass became part of a larger civic remembrance. So much of that day’s oratory about Robert Kennedy placed his death in the context of America’s destiny, as a martyr for his country. On this day, the Catholic liturgy seemed to transcend itself, providing comfort, solace and spiritual reflection to Americans regardless of their denomination. In death, if not always in life, the Kennedys, as Catholics, finally appeared accepted on their own terms.
The personal toll of Robert Kennedy’s assassination didn’t become fully apparent until his children mournfully walked up the aisle, past their father’s casket, as their mother, clad in black, followed them into a stiff wooden pew.Somehow the lofty goals and soaring rhetoric of the campaign trail seemed to pale at the painful reality of ten children left without a father.“This was the terrible culminating hour of all the dreaded apprehensions of almost five years,” Norman Cousins observed about Kennedy’s widow. “One would never know which was greater, the grief or the courage, for her face revealed both.”
Ethel Kennedy made sure the priests for Bobby’s Mass wore purple robes, a color signifying hope, instead of funereal black.“If there’s one thing about our faith, it’s our belief that this is the beginning of eternal life and not the end of life,” she insisted.“And I want this Mass to be as joyous as it possibly can be.” Bobby’s funeral, far more than his brother’s, reminded Americans that the Kennedys were more than just one notable individual, but rather an extended family of considerable talents and sizeable ambitions, including in-laws such as Sargent Shriver, who was then U.S. ambassador to France. The Kennedys’ sense of being a clan, devoted as much by shared loyalties as by blood, emerged in death as in life as one of their most resonant qualities. “Family was clearly the leit-motif,” said one editorialist of the RFK funeral.“Not family in the sense of the glamorous qualities that have, at times, made the Kennedys a political or social prodigy, but of the homely ability to band together for strength in adversity.”
There were words and songs that reminded the gathering of the Kennedys’ Irish Catholic background, of the sense of tragic fate so much a part of the family’s history and the Irish-American experience. Yet nothing at the Mass struck the soul as much as his remaining brother’s tortured voice as he delivered the eulogy. Teddy had been up for most of the night,working with aide Adam Walinsky to make sure his words captured his brother’s spirit. By dawn, he was seen sitting alone in the eleventh pew, just staring at the plain mahogany casket flanked by six tall candles, their flames flickering. In his eulogy,Teddy quoted from a speech that Bobby had given to a group of students in South Africa in 1966.After that, he gave his own summary of Bobby.
“My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life,”Ted reminded.“He should be remembered as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” In closing,Ted Kennedy used the same words of Irish-born writer George Bernard Shaw that Bobby had borrowed so often on the presidential campaign trail, just as Jack had done before him. “Some men see things as they are and say, why,”Teddy repeated, his voice cracking. “I dream things that never were and say, why not.”
FROM NEW YORK, a train carried Robert Kennedy’s body on a long slow pilgrimage headed toward Washington. The senator would be buried not far from his brother’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery, the same site that Bobby and Jackie approved in 1963. When Jackie heard that Bobby had been shot, she flew immediately from New York to Los Angeles and offered her help in the family’s preparations for the funeral. Despite her own moments of doubt, Jackie had developed a profound respect for the Catholic faith and what it meant to the Irish.“The Church is . . . at its best only at the time of death,” she explained in Los Angeles to Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby’s campaign spokesman.“The rest of the time it’s often rather silly little men running around in their black suits. But the Catholic Church understands death. I’ll tell you who else understands death are the black churches. I remember at the funeral of Martin Luther King. I was looking at those faces, and I realized that they know death. They see it all the time and they are ready for it . . . in the way in which a good Catholic is.” The Kennedys knew the ritual and emotions all too well.“We know death,” Jackie added. “If it weren’t for the children, we’d welcome it.”
The train ride with Bobby’s casket became a traveling Irish wake. So many friends and family members tried hard to remember the good times of the past rather than dwell on the agonizing moment. “One particular aspect of the train ride that stood out was its Irishness,” recalled author Michael Harrington, as the drinking, jokes and storytelling conveyed an “affirmation of life in the presence of death.” Down the aisles of the train, Ethel ushered her eldest son, Joseph Kennedy II, who shook hands and embraced all those assembled like a politician working a crowd. The press later recounted this long pilgrimage as an odd, inebriated, almost eccentric event rather than a deeply felt celebration of Bobby’s ascent into an eternal life, as so many of the Kennedys and their Catholic friends believed. They tried to be brave for each other and emphasize with their actions that somehow life would still go on.“You could look around and absolutely see which of those people were strong Catholics,” remarked Geraldine Brooks, who was married to writer Budd Schulberg, an old RFK pal. Dave Powers, part of Jack’s “Irish Mafia,” entertained Kennedy family members and friends with his humorous tales of Wakes O’Shaughnessey, a legendary old Boston pol who scouted out obituaries from the newspapers. He’d curry favor from survivors by attending the wakes of their beloved dead, even though he never knew them. Eventually, O’Shaughnessey became a connoisseur of the Boston Irish’s most macabre but uplifting observance.
“Wakes, what do you think of this one? Are you enjoying it?” one widow asked, as Powers told it.
“This is one of the greates
t wakes of all time,Mrs. Murphy,” says Wakes. “In fact, I think you ought to put him on ice and keep it going for another two days.”
The uninitiated were told, somewhat to their amazement, how much President Kennedy enjoyed Dave’s audacious stories, providing a small glimpse into the unexplored ethnic side of Camelot. This wistful humor became part of the atmosphere on the eight-hour funeral train ride for Jack’s dead brother. Mankiewicz later noted the differing “religious culture” among those on the train. “The Irish were having a wake, the Protestants were at a funeral, and the Jews were weeping and carrying on,” he said. Columnist Joseph Alsop, who had observed the Kennedy clan for decades, described the funeral as “medieval,” something tribal and Celtic in root.“It was the funeral of the Irish chieftain,” said Alsop.“One had the feeling that the clan had lost its chieftain and was going to bury him.”
All the talk of succession, of the next in line to take charge of the Kennedy mantle, of hopeful speculation by usually sober voices suggesting Bobby’s surviving brother run for president in 1968, seemed like the old days of the chieftains when the sept leader fell.“The Kennedy forces are for the moment leaderless,” wailed the Nation, a usually sober publication. It urged Ted Kennedy to enter the race, assuring that “his policies are sound and . . . his heart is stout.” Christ-like allusions and Catholic imagery were invoked by others to recall Bobby.“The last time I shook hands with him, I remember thinking of the stigmata,” said radical Tom Hayden, who had watched Kennedy’s frenzied crowds stretch out their arms, striving for a glimpse, a touch of him. “His hands reminded me of someone who had been crucified.”Alsop said he received a dozen “supremely silly letters from outwardly perfectly intelligent people, saying that now that Bobby’s gone, the only thing we can do is run Teddy for President. It was exactly as though now that O’Neill is gone, O’Neill’s son is the only possible chieftain for the clan. It is not at all the normal thing in America, let me tell you.”