Bobby Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  Demanding from Wallace his “unequivocal assurance” that he’d do his “constitutional duty,” Katzenbach made clear what both men knew: “From the outset, Governor, all of us have known that the final chapter of this history will be the admission of these students.”

  The stalemate lasted until nearly five hours later when National Guard troops, summoned into service by President Kennedy, made sure the doors opened for Malone and Hood.

  As Wallace could be seen on television leaving the doorway, President Kennedy turned to Sorensen, “I think we’d better give that speech tonight.” Personally contacting all three networks, he requested a prime-time slot for a speech that night to air at eight. Until the moment he stepped before the cameras, he was editing what he would say.

  It was the speech Bobby had pushed him to make, and for which he had assembled the arguments. “He urged it, he felt it, he understood it. And he prevailed,” said Burke Marshall.

  Opening with the announcement that the two black students had been admitted that afternoon, the president went on. “I hope,” he declared, “that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents. This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.”

  He put the crisis in historic context: “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

  He recognized, too, the issue thrown in his brother’s face by Jerome Smith. “Today, we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops.”

  The speech lasted fourteen minutes. Martin Luther King, in tears, while listening, called the address “the most sweeping and forthright ever presented by an American president.” And to another activist watching with him, he expressed his admiration more colloquially: “Can you believe that white man not only stepped up to the plate, he hit it over the fence?”

  The sense of accomplishment following the president’s address was assaulted by news late that same night from Jackson, Mississippi. Shortly after midnight, Medgar Evers, an army veteran who’d served in the invasion of Normandy and was state field secretary of the NAACP, was shot in the back by a white supremacist. He’d been sitting in his car in his own driveway.

  Taken immediately to the nearest hospital, Evers wasn’t at first admitted, owing to the color of his skin. He died forty-five minutes after arriving. Five thousand people led by Martin Luther King marched in Jackson following his funeral.

  The attorney general now could read the mood of the country in his mailbag, with harshly anti–civil rights letters daily arriving, postmarked from north as well as south. He’d hear other sorts of sentiments addressed to him in person. Guthman remembers their walking together in Manhattan one day. From above, a construction worker yelled down at him from the girder of a new building: “Hey, Bobby, don’t forget about the Irish and the Italians!”

  Just over a week later, President Kennedy submitted to Congress a strong civil rights bill. “How can we say to the Negro in Jackson,” Bobby Kennedy asked in Senate testimony supporting it, “that when war comes you will be an American citizen, but in the meantime you’re a citizen of Mississippi and we can’t help you?” As in his brother’s speech, the echoes from that evening in New York were still coming through to him. So was the tragedy of Medgar Evers.

  Yet the Kennedy brothers held back from fully embracing Martin Luther King. Eleven days after his civil rights address, the president took advantage of a June White House meeting with civil rights leaders to take King aside. He told him that two of his most trusted aides, Stanley Levison and Jack O’Dell, were both known to have been active members of the Communist Party and could still be Soviet agents.

  In the president’s mind, and also Bobby’s—as well as in that of J. Edgar Hoover, who was the source of such concerns—there existed the likelihood these men had infiltrated King’s movement with an agenda different from his own. Whether it was a matter of stirring up unrest in the U.S., or simply embarrassing its government, either mission could have been dictated by Moscow. “Get rid of them,” was the president’s message to King.

  But King hesitated. Reluctantly, he let O’Dell know that he would have to go. Yet soon relenting, he told him he could stay on until he found another job. Bobby, hearing of that delay, pushed King to enforce the firing. Despite his slowly increasing connection to the cause of civil rights, his anti-Communism far outweighed the other when it came to both his worldview and his conscience.

  For King, finding himself strong-armed into banishing the invaluable Levison—a gifted speechwriter as well as a trusted adviser and confidant—was far from easy. In fact, the idea of it proved so wrenching that he attempted to strategize a way to work around the situation without the Kennedys knowing. Levison, it was decided, would stay away from King, and the two men would maintain their communication through intermediaries.

  Levison had been under FBI surveillance. Now, as it became clear that there would be no real break between him and Dr. King, an angry Bobby Kennedy felt the need to act. Displeased at the sidestepping of the president’s directive and convinced that Levison had to be under Kremlin control, he came to believe he had no choice but to have a wiretap put on King himself.

  • • •

  As the summer of 1963 was drawing to an end, President Kennedy was confronted by a Cold War struggle far more distant than Cuba, one that had been brewing through more administrations than his own. Eight years earlier, after the French army’s defeat at the hands of the Vietminh—a Communist revolutionary force determined to overthrow the country’s longtime French colonial masters—Vietnam was divided between a Vietminh-controlled North and a pro-Western South.

  In 1955, Ngo Dinh Diem, a non-Communist nationalist, declared the Republic of South Vietnam with himself as president. Descended from a family of the earliest Vietnamese converts to Catholicism in the seventeenth century, he enjoyed strong backing from American Catholics, including then-Senator Jack Kennedy, who’d been an early member of the pro-Diem “American Friends of Vietnam.” However, the corruption of his regime became increasingly an issue, as did his brutal persecution of the country’s majority Buddhists, who in 1963 comprised 90 percent of the population.

  With sixteen thousand American “military advisers” now stationed there, the United States was counting on the Diem government’s ability to push back the Communist Vietcong guerrillas steadily encroaching from the North.

  In Washington, the Kennedy government was divided over whom to support—the restive generals, who appeared to Washington the more aggressive anti-Communists, or President Diem. President Kennedy now named Henry Cabot Lodge, his onetime Senate opponent, as the new ambassador to South Vietnam.

  On August 24, after Diem had ordered synchronized attacks on Buddhist pagodas across South Vietnam, Kennedy, who was spending the weekend in Hyannis Port, approved a cable to Lodge. It authorized him to side with an army coup against Diem—but only if Lodge’s efforts to persuade the Vietnamese leader to separate himself from his unpopular brother, Nhu, who seemed to encourage his more oppressive impulses, were unsuccessful. “Diem must be given chance to rid himself of Nhu or Diem cannot be preserved,” the cable read.

  Yet Lodge took the cable as a license to immediately back the coup. “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back,” he notified Was
hington five days later. “We should make all-out effort to get generals to move promptly.”

  Bobby, no fan of Lodge’s, saw their man in Vietnam as out of order, failing to acknowledge the proper chain of command. “I told you he was going to be trouble,” he reminded the president. “You know what’s terrific about you?” Jack replied dryly. “You always remember when you’re right.”

  By the end of October, Bobby was heard to say about Vietnam “that we’re just going down the road to disaster.” He was raising the radical possibility that the United States should cut its losses in South Vietnam and leave. The question he asked was whether a Communist takeover could be resisted successfully by either Diem or the generals.

  On November 2, news arrived that the generals had overthrown Diem, and that he and Nhu were dead. Originally reported by the coup leaders as suicides, they had, in fact, been viciously executed.

  Ted Sorensen recalled the “shock and dismay in JFK’s face when he heard the news. “He’d had no indication or even hint that anything more than Diem’s exile was contemplated.”

  In a memo he dictated to himself that Monday, President Kennedy took the blame for what had happened. He wrote of his government being “divided” as to whom to support in Vietnam, with the “attorney general” among those opposed to the coup.

  • • •

  That month, Jack Kennedy initiated the first major campaign meeting for 1964. Present were Bobby, Ted Sorensen, Ken O’Donnell, and Larry O’Brien. It was the same tight group that had met first in Palm Beach and later in Hyannis Port in 1959; they’d proven themselves before and were ready to do so again.

  On Friday, November 22, two days after his thirty-eighth birthday, Bobby was interrupted by a phone call while having lunch at home. On the other end of the line was FBI director Hoover. “I have news for you,” he said bluntly. His tone held no sympathy or softness. “The President’s been shot.”

  Bobby immediately phoned Ken O’Donnell, who was traveling with the president in Texas. But he couldn’t get through. “Jack’s been shot,” he told Ethel. “It may be fatal.” Reaching the hospital, he wanted to make sure they’d found a priest. He wanted to save his brother’s soul.

  Then came a second call from Hoover. “The president’s dead.”

  Ed Guthman arrived at Hickory Hill soon after that. “There’s so much bitterness,” Bobby said to him as they paced the lawn. “I thought they’d get one of us—but Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it. I thought it would be me.”

  He now wanted answers. Summoning CIA director John McCone, he asked him point-blank whether agency officials were involved. He took care—McCone being a fellow Roman Catholic—to phrase his questions “in a way that he couldn’t lie to me.” Thus, from McCone he learned, and was satisfied with his answers, that “they hadn’t.”

  But his concern was with the succession. Even before seeing McCone, he asked McGeorge Bundy to change the locks on his brother’s files.

  That night, after Air Force One, carrying its tragic cargo, had landed outside Washington, Robert Kennedy drove with his sister-in-law, Jacqueline, to Bethesda Naval Hospital where the autopsy was being performed. He listened carefully as she described to him her eye view of what had happened at Dealey Plaza when the motorcade passed through.

  Afterward, he slept at the White House. Chuck Spalding accompanied him as he headed to the Lincoln Bedroom. When they’d arrived there and Bobby had walked in, Jack’s old, dear friend closed the door. On the other side he could hear Bobby starting a conversation. What Spalding quickly realized was that he was talking to God. “Why?” he was asking. “Why? Why?”

  As the president’s body was readied to lie in state at the Capitol on Monday, Bobby decided to forgo the public viewing and close the coffin for the last time. He was, as always, looking out for his brother. What was left inside didn’t look like Jack.

  Bobby leads family at the Capitol, where Jack lies in state. Chief Justice Earl Warren reads a tribute to the fallen president.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  RELIC

  “I thought it would be me.”

  —ROBERT KENNEDY

  On November 22, 1963, in my freshman year at Holy Cross, I was on my way to world history class. I was checking my mailbox after lunch when a classmate hit me with the incredible news that President Kennedy had just been shot. What? Could it be true? How bad was he hit? In my mind, “shot” didn’t mean dead. Then, after learning we’d be allowed to skip classes I headed straight to the nearest TV and spent the afternoon watching Walter Cronkite anchoring the coverage on CBS. That evening I watched with others, flipping through the channels, to see the network features on Kennedy’s life, his political career, and his presidency.

  Heading home from Worcester that week on the bus, I needed to go through Port Authority in New York. There a woman stopped me, wanting to know where I went to school. Startled, I answered politely. Hearing my reply, she immediately commented how sad it must be up there now in Massachusetts, especially at a Catholic college.

  This was the first person I’d spoken to beyond the insulated world of my campus. And our brief exchange there in the busy terminal gave me my first personal experience with the human impact of what had just occurred. I can truthfully say that I still see my life ever since as a before-and-after experience. If it felt like that for me, as well as for millions of others, what could it have been like for Bobby Kennedy, who’d spent his entire adult life devoted to his beloved brother?

  Ed Guthman was with him. “His eyes were haunted, his complexion ashen and his mood desolate and stoic. The center of his life had been shot away; the brother he had idolized, to whom he had given so much and with whom he had worked so hard. For a dozen years he had been immersed in advancing his brother’s career and the causes for which his brother stood, with no thought about what he would be doing at thirty-five or forty-five or fifty.”

  “He looked to me like a man who is just in intense pain,” John Seigenthaler recalled. “Hurt, I mean, you know—just physically hurt.”

  Harris Wofford couched his description of what he witnessed in a different way, picturing Jack in the same situation. “I could not imagine John Kennedy sinking into such long, dark melancholy for any reason. Gaiety was the key to his nature. Robert Kennedy was a brooder who carried the agony of the world.”

  Even those who’d long been close to Jack and him were struck by the enormity of Bobby’s near-paralyzing grief. Said Lem Billings, “Everything was pulled out from under him.” His brother Ted’s recollection was especially poignant: “It veered close to being a tragedy within a tragedy,” he would write. “Ethel and my mother feared for his own survival; his psychic survival at least. He seemed to age physically.”

  At Jacqueline’s suggestion, Bobby began to read poetry, which he’d never done, and found himself most drawn to the ancient Greeks. One line that seemed to reach him most deeply was from the playwright Aeschylus: “He who learns must suffer. Even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

  • • •

  Early in the new year, Robert Kennedy traveled to Japan for the start of a diplomatic mission. He was being sent to Southeast Asia by the Lyndon Johnson administration in a spirit of goodwill, an attempt at positive distraction. It was less than two months since November 22 when he arrived in Tokyo for the first of two meetings with Indonesia’s President Sukarno.

  At Tokyo’s Waseda University, he was greeted by thousands of cheering students, their enthusiasm providing a sharp contrast to the heckling he’d received on a visit there the year before. Next, in the Philippines, he experienced another rousing welcome. In the speech he delivered there, he emphasized the need for political involvement. “Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. . . . And it’s not sufficient just being against,
just saying, ‘Well, I don’t think I like the way things are going.’ We have a responsibility to offer an alternative.”

  It seems likely he was talking about himself and how he was beginning to see the way ahead. His brother Ted regarded that Far East journey as a turning point. “Bobby and Ethel witnessed a tumultuous outpouring of friendship from the people who wanted to show their respect and love for John Kennedy through Bobby’s presence. I believe that reception restored his faith that life was worth living after all, and that President Kennedy had achieved something lasting and worthwhile.”

  One person who suspected the attorney general of more specific ambitions, including the idea of offering himself as that alternative to the status quo, was the man now in the White House. Their mutual hostility had never been very well kept in check. When LBJ now summoned Bobby to a one-on-one meeting after his return, it was to air a fresh grievance.

  Johnson wanted him to know, in no uncertain terms, how unhappy he’d been to hear that Bobby’s guy Paul Corbin had been recently spotted in New Hampshire stirring up interest in a Kennedy for Vice President write-in campaign. Corbin, a freewheeling political operative, was by now a true favorite of Bobby’s. He’d made him part of his extended family. But Corbin held no such appeal for Johnson, who wanted him immediately fired from the Democratic National Committee where Bobby had arranged a spot for him.

  “If he’s such a good fellow, you pay him,” an irate Johnson told Bobby. “He’s around town knocking my head off and has been for three years—and I never met the bum in my life. Why should I have him on my payroll?”

  For his part, John Seigenthaler thought that Bobby had been enjoying the Corbin gambit. “Knowing Paul, Bobby knew, probably, what was going on, didn’t think it was too serious, and probably was amused by the fact that it created some discomfort for some of Lyndon Johnson’s supporters.”