For many months Bobby Kennedy had vacillated about whether or not to challenge Johnson for their party’s 1968 presidential nomination. He worried that from the point of view of his own ambitions it might be best to wait until 1972; that a decision to take on Johnson would appear to give credence to those who had long insisted that RFK was motivated not by principles but rather by a sick personal vendetta against his brother’s successor; and that even a fruitful bid on RFK’s part for the Democratic nomination would only divide the party and elect Richard Nixon or some other Republican.
Suddenly, however, beginning in late January of 1968, the Vietcong’s massive Tet offensive within South Vietnam, launched mere weeks after General Westmoreland had confidently prophesied that U.S. gains in 1967 would be increased manyfold in 1968, scrambled political calculations in Washington. Suddenly, the “bang-bang coverage” (as the footage of troops shooting at one another in Vietnam was known in TV industry parlance) on the nightly news seemed to underscore enemy strength and resilience, and thereby to call into question the veracity of an administration that had emphatically portrayed the Communists as in no condition to essay anything like a major offensive.
Tet transfigured the antiwar candidacy of Senator Eugene McCarthy, who came within three hundred votes of beating LBJ in the March 12, 1968, New Hampshire Democratic primary. In one fell swoop, McCarthy had proven that an insurgent bid could be viable; yet it was Bobby Kennedy who, at least by some calculations, still seemed to have the better chance of vanquishing Johnson. Four days after New Hampshire, speaking in the very Senate Caucus Room where JFK had announced his own presidential bid eight years before, Bobby Kennedy declared his intent to challenge Johnson.
From the first, he made the violent tenor of American life in the waning 1960s a campaign theme. “Every night we watch horror on the evening news,” the senator told an audience in Kansas on the eighteenth. “Violence spreads inexorably across the nation, filling our streets and crippling our lives.” He maintained that the Johnson administration offered no solution to the war—“none but the ever-expanding use of military force … in a conflict where military force has failed to solve anything.”
The specter of violence was much in Jackie’s thoughts as well when she contemplated the prospect of her brother-in-law’s candidacy. She was in Mexico to view the Mayan ruins in the company of former U.S. undersecretary of defense Roswell Gilpatric, a married man who frequently escorted her in public, when reporters asked her about Bobby’s decision to seek the nomination. “Whatever Senator Kennedy will do, I know it will be all right,” she said. “I will always be with him with all my heart. I shall always back him up.” Still, the greatest fear of any traumatized individual is that the instant of horror will be reprised. Contrary to anything Jackie said in public, that fear tinctured her anguished private remarks about RFK’s presidential bid. In the course of a dinner party at the home of Vogue magazine editor Diana Vreeland on April 2, 1968, Jackie asked Arthur Schlesinger: “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby if he is elected president?” Schlesinger indicated that he did not. “The same thing that happened to Jack,” Jackie went on. “There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack. That’s why I don’t want him to be president.” Jackie had spoken of her concerns directly to Bobby on several occasions, but he had pressed forward notwithstanding. Certain of the senator’s aides also were known to worry about his safety, but again and again he refused to take the precautions that were urged upon him.
Two days after Jackie confided her sense of foreboding to Schlesinger, she attended the installation of Archbishop Terence Cooke at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. LBJ, who had recently announced that he did not intend to seek another term and that in the meantime he hoped to negotiate a settlement in Vietnam, was also present at the installation ceremony. By this point Johnson felt as though he had been “chased on all sides by a giant stampede”: race riots and peace protests; the Tet offensive and McCarthy’s stunning performance in New Hampshire. Finally, however, it had been the realization of the fear that had possessed him since November 22, 1963, that Bobby Kennedy would openly move to seize the crown, that seems to have driven Johnson from office. To judge by the serene atmosphere in and around St. Patrick’s, the placard-wavers known to taunt and torment him wherever he went no longer saw any reason to show up. The picture of the ruined president chatting pleasantly with Jackie at the cathedral on April 4, 1968, proved to be the quiet between the heaves of storm.
That same day, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Cities across the United States erupted. Neighborhoods burned. Businesses were looted, Molotov cocktails thrown. The nation that had recently chided Jackie to let Americans put the past behind them was suddenly, ineluctably, hurled back into that very past, as commentators linked the civil rights leader’s murder to the assassination of President Kennedy. “Have four and a half years really gone by since Dallas?” asked the New Yorker writer Michael Arlen. To Bobby Kennedy, it seemed as if his brother’s assassin had “set something loose in this country.” Whatever narrative resolution or redemption, if any, the Warren Commission Report and The Death of a President had managed to provide vanished along with the waves of gray smoke that rose from countless torched buildings on the evening news.
No longer alone in associating present-day bloodshed with the events of November 22, 1963, Jackie released a public statement of sympathy for King’s widow and children. “When will our country learn that to live by the sword is to perish by the sword? I pray that with the price he paid—his life—he will make room in people’s hearts for love, not hate. Some people would never kill—but even to speak of another with hatred is the same and causes death.” But would Jackie attend the slain civil rights leader’s funeral in Atlanta on April 9? Coretta Scott King broached the subject of the former first lady’s participation with Bobby Kennedy, who planned to march in the next day’s funeral procession, as well as attend the church service.
RFK replied: “This would be very hard because of her own experiences, but if it meant anything to you perhaps she would try to come.” When Mrs. King indicated that it would indeed count for a great deal, once again RFK arranged to produce Jackie. As he had foreseen, she did not want to go to Atlanta. She dreaded the crowds and the inevitable reminders of President Kennedy’s funeral. A new burst of violence in American cities over the weekend, the likes of which had not been experienced since the Civil War, had led to anxiety in some quarters about what might happen in Atlanta on the day of the funeral. Still, Jackie agreed to fly in that morning because Bobby had asked her to be there.
When Jackie arrived at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where great numbers of chanting, weeping people had gathered in oppressive eighty-degree heat, she looked tense and terrified as, caught up in a surging crowd, she found herself being “pulled and pushed” into the church, which had but 750 seats. During the memorial service that ensued, Jackie, in one of the pews, scrutinized the faces of certain of her fellow mourners. The objects of her roving gaze were black Americans, who, she later remembered thinking, knew death—that is, violent death—because they saw it “all the time” and were “ready for it.” Her perceived affinity with them was based on the fact that she too knew death; she too was ready. On her return to New York, Jackie predicted that the national outpouring of sympathy for the King family that had been manifest in recent days would not last. “Of course people feel guilty for a moment,” she sardonically observed to Arthur Schlesinger. “But they hate feeling guilty. They can’t stand it for very long. Then they turn.” That repudiation was something Jackie had experienced firsthand.
Since he had been Jackie’s host in 1963, Aristotle Onassis, reluctant to abandon such a splendid connection, had telephoned at intervals, as well as dined with her privately. On Jackie’s side, there had always been a certain amount of guilt attached to her interlude on the Christina after the death of baby Patrick. Still, there could be no denying that Ona
ssis had acted beautifully to her after the Kennedy assassination. Immediately, he had appeared in Washington to attend the funeral in the company of the Radziwills. More recently, he had cut an incongruous figure at the christening of the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy, where Jackie had been surprised and, apparently, not a little pleased to spot him among all those familiar Washington faces. As her sister Lee was to say of Onassis in another context: “For him, life was a chess game.… His patience was enduring.” In the anxious aftermath of the King funeral, Onassis seemed to perceive his opening at last. He offered to transport Jackie and the children on his private jet to Palm Beach, where she was due to spend the Easter holiday. She gratefully accepted. At a moment when she and the Kennedy assassination were again much in the news in connection with her dramatic and much-noted presence in Atlanta, the flight would at least spare her the ordeal of traveling in public view on a commercial airline. Not incidentally from Onassis’s perspective, it also afforded him an opportunity to personally accompany her on the jet, before continuing on to Nassau, where he was to meet his daughter. A month later, when most other Kennedy family members were out campaigning for RFK in the Democratic primaries, all of which Bobby had insisted he must win, Onassis offered Jackie a refuge in the form of a four-day cruise of the Virgin Islands on the Christina, beginning May 25. In advance of her arrival, the consummate host had adorned the saloon, the smoking room, and the teak-paneled study with silver-framed photographs of President and Mrs. Kennedy. But the pictures were promptly taken down when Jackie’s maid, who had come on board beforehand, informed Onassis that the widow still could not bear to have images of her murdered husband about.
By this point, Bobby Kennedy had triumphed in Indiana and D.C. on May 7 and in Nebraska on the fourteenth. His concern with those members of society who are without power and privileges had finally allowed him to formulate a distinctive political identity apart from his late brother’s. Still, RFK’s numbers thus far had not been sufficient to eliminate Eugene McCarthy. Oregon and California loomed, and McCarthy seemed poised to do well in both critical contests. Jackie would later recall that she had spoken to Bobby of her concerns about his safety—“several times.” Nonetheless, more than ever after the death of Martin Luther King, RFK seemed weirdly intent on disregarding the danger to himself. Certainly he acknowledged the existence of that danger. Had he not remarked in the hours after the King assassination, “That could have been me”? Yet, a week later, when the Kennedy campaign was notified that a gun-wielding stranger had been observed on a nearby rooftop, RFK balked at an aide’s efforts to lower the blinds in the candidate’s hotel suite. “If they’re going to shoot,” Bobby said chillingly of any would-be assassins, “they’ll shoot.”
Jackie disembarked from the Christina on Tuesday, May 28. That day, McCarthy won Oregon. RFK, while seeking to downplay previous statements about what a single loss might mean, suggested that if he did not win the following Tuesday in California he would withdraw. After what the Los Angeles Times was calling Oregon’s “body blow” to the Kennedy campaign, California emerged as “the ultimate test.” Even a modest win by McCarthy threatened to poison Bobby Kennedy’s chances not just in 1968, but in 1972 as well. During the whirligig final week of campaigning, Jackie persisted in her unwillingness to join other family members on the hustings. Like them, however, she understood that, for Bobby, it might well be now or never. So on June 4, despite her abiding fears for him, she was thrilled to learn that he had won California. Jackie was in New York, where it was three hours later than on the West Coast. She went to bed before she could watch him speak on TV at midnight Los Angeles time.
It was about four A.M. in Manhattan when the light on Jackie’s night table telephone flashed on. The caller proved to be Stas Radziwill, who was in London.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Jackie asked him, still fueled by the enthusiasm and expectancy of the past few days. “He’s won. He’s got California.”
Stas countered: “But how is he?”
“Oh, he’s fine. He’s won.”
Stas persisted: “But how is he?”
“What do you mean?”
Many nights in this very bed, she had struggled with intrusive recollections of her husband’s murder. Many nights she had helplessly, endlessly relived the assassination in the form of dreams and reveries. But what Stas went on to tell her, about the gunman who had been waiting for Bobby Kennedy after he delivered his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, was no nightmare from which Jackie would eventually awaken screaming. The shots that had rung out that night had been all too real.
Lee Radziwill, also in London at the time, spoke to Cecil Beaton of the effect this new shooting was likely to have on her sister’s already tortured state of mind. “You don’t know what it’s like being with Jackie,” she explained. “She’s really more than half round the bend! She can’t sleep at night, she can’t stop thinking about herself and never feeling anything but sorry for herself! ‘I’m so unprotected,’ she says. But she is surrounded by friends, helpers, FBI.… She takes no interest in anything for more than two minutes. She rushes around paying visits but won’t settle down anywhere or to anything. She can’t love anyone.… The new horror will bring the old one alive again and I’m going to have to go through hell trying to calm her. She gets so that she hits me across the face, and apropos of nothing.”
Immediately, Jackie flew to Los Angeles, where Chuck Spalding, now Bobby’s fervent supporter as once he had been Jack’s, met her at the airport. “I took her to the hospital,” Spalding later recalled. “And the whole thing had that whole same feeling for everybody of just being replayed again, just the business of going through with it … everybody overwhelmed by the repetition of the same event.” In the hospital room, Bobby, near death, lay in a tangle of medical equipment. Ethel Kennedy, pregnant with their eleventh child, was beside him. Teddy Kennedy, on his knees, prayed at the foot of the bed. The attack by a young Palestinian who had been in the United States for more than a decade had left RFK with irreversible brain damage. There was no improvement, no hope. In the course of a twenty-four-hour vigil, each time press secretary Frank Mankiewicz emerged to issue an update to the TV cameras, his face seemed somehow more ravaged than before.
At one point when Jackie and the press secretary were alone in the corridor, she mused about some of the people she had observed two months previously at the funeral of Martin Luther King, people who, she explained, really knew death because they saw it constantly and were ready for it to happen again. As she had following her husband’s murder, she spoke disturbingly of the attraction that dying held for her as a consequence of what had happened: “Well, now we know death, don’t we, you and I?” she told Mankiewicz. “As a matter of fact, if it weren’t for the children, we’d welcome it.”
Jackie was at RFK’s bedside when he was pronounced dead, nearly twenty-six hours after he had been shot. Bobby had been known to lament that Jackie lived in the past too much. But after he too had been murdered, how could she ever get unstuck from the past? How could she ever learn to see the first Kennedy assassination as an isolated episode that, whatever brain and body persisted in telling her to the contrary, was unlikely to recur? How could she accept the events in Dallas as an instance of life’s randomness, when the killings of Martin Luther King and RFK seemed, along with JFK’s, part of an emergent pattern, which she was far from alone in perceiving? What did it mean any longer for Bobby to have called Jackie his crazy sister-in-law when so many other people—sane, reasonable, responsible people—suddenly shared her sense of dread?
David Harlech, set to be a pallbearer at Bobby’s funeral, publicly decried the violence that was igniting late-1960s America as “an international scandal.” Lyndon Johnson and Teddy Kennedy both worried that the same tragic fate awaited them as had befallen JFK, King, and RFK. Since the death of her husband, Jackie had been tensed in expectation of another assault. In view of what had happened to Bobby, she feared she was
the next target. Under the circumstances, who could say with confidence that she was wrong?
Johnson sent a presidential jet to transport RFK’s remains, along with Ethel, Jackie, Teddy, and the rest of the Kennedy party, to New York, where there was to be a requiem Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Jackie, when she arrived at Los Angeles International Airport, initially refused to board in the mistaken belief that the aircraft was the one on which she had accompanied Jack’s coffin from Dallas. It was characteristic of the day, however, that she was not the only person to be painfully reminded of that earlier journey. The scene at LaGuardia Airport in New York, where some of the people who had been at Andrews Air Force Base had gathered again, was all too familiar, Arthur Schlesinger observed in his diary; the identical sadness penetrated everything. In 1963, Bob McNamara had been waiting with RFK in the rear of a military truck. Knowing Bobby’s temperament as he did, however, McNamara had declined to accompany him onto Air Force One to collect Jackie. McNamara’s decision to stay behind spared him from being immediately drawn into RFK’s inevitable struggle with LBJ, who was the defense secretary’s new boss after all. In 1968, though it was Bobby who lay in a maroon-draped mahogany casket, that struggle absurdly continued. At a time when Johnson was already seeking to prevent his old foe from being buried near President Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery, McNamara quietly appealed to him to let RFK be interred in keeping with his survivors’ wishes. But all of that was merely the frenetic offstage action. As the aircraft from Los Angeles came in, McNamara, who also had been asked to serve as a pallbearer at the funeral, lingered in a nearby automobile, out of sight of the TV cameras. Finally, in the words of an onlooker, “he leaped out of the car, dragging his wife after him.” He rushed to Jackie, who dropped her head on his shoulder and wept. Surely, that night it was he who wished he could change the world for her.
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story Page 26