Seigenthaler also felt Bobby didn’t actually care whether or not Corbin’s antics upset LBJ personally. As a result, the attorney general wasn’t ready to give Johnson what he wanted. “He was loyal to President Kennedy,” Bobby now told Johnson, defending Corbin. “He’ll be loyal to you.”
“I know who he’s loyal to,” Johnson snapped back. “Get him out of there! Do it! President Kennedy isn’t president anymore. I am.”
“I know you’re president,” Bobby retorted. “And don’t you ever talk to me like that again.”
Johnson wasn’t about to let it lie there. That night, he phoned Bobby to let him know Corbin was being fired, whether he liked it or not. If there was one thing the president, a political manipulator of the first order, didn’t want, it was to have someone on the DNC who wasn’t answering to him. After the conversation ended, Ed Guthman, in the room with Bobby, watched the AG cross the room and then stand silently at the window, staring into the night. When at last he spoke, it was to offer a single thought. “I’ll tell you one thing. This relationship can’t last much longer.”
The New Hampshire write-in campaign continued even without Corbin keeping his hand in. It reached the point where it looked as if Bobby might outpoll Johnson, whose supporters were running their own write-in effort for head of the ticket. Finally, Bobby issued an official statement through the Justice Department: “The Attorney General has said that the choice of the Democratic nominee for Vice President will be made, and should be made, by the Democratic Convention in August, guided by the wishes of President Johnson and that President Johnson should be free to select his own running mate. The Attorney General, therefore, wishes to discourage any efforts on his behalf in New Hampshire, or elsewhere.”
However, it had little effect on Granite State voters. On March 10, Lyndon Johnson received 29,630 votes for president in the New Hampshire primary, while Bob Kennedy received 25,861 for vice president. Such a strong showing naturally encouraged Democrats across the country to push the possibility of him as LBJ’s running mate.
Early that June, Johnson’s decision was dictated by the outcome of California’s Republican primary. Senator Barry Goldwater, avatar of the new conservatism, beat New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and with the victory looked to be the inevitable GOP nominee to take on Johnson. Democrats, including the one in the White House, took the Arizonan’s success as a sign the opposition party had chosen ideological purity over a truly competitive chance in November.
• • •
Edward Kennedy, who’d won the remainder of brother Jack’s Senate term in 1962, was now running for reelection. In June, a plane carrying him from Washington to the Massachusetts state Democratic convention in Springfield crashed in an apple orchard due to a sudden thunderstorm. Although Kennedy survived, the pilot of the twin-engine craft and a Kennedy aide, Edward Moss, were killed. The two other passengers, Indiana senator Birch Bayh—who carried Teddy out of the wreckage—and his wife, also were spared. Still, Ted would be forced to spend five months in the hospital, recovering from multiple injuries.
Bobby, who’d raced across the state from Cape Cod, arrived at his brother’s bedside at four in the morning. “Is it true you are ruthless?” the anesthetized and only barely conscious Ted whispered through the tubes sprouting around his face. His question targeted the inside-the-family irony that the one stuck with the tough-guy reputation was always the one most attentive to the others.
Bobby’s concern now was not just for his gravely injured brother, but also for his mother and father. “How much more do they have to take?” he asked. “I just don’t see how I can do anything now,” he said to Guthman. “I think I should just get out of it all. Somebody up there doesn’t like us.” At this moment, any thought of his political career was put on hold.
In a matter of days, however, he had a long-standing commitment to honor. He was expected in West Berlin the following week where, as requested by Mayor Willy Brandt, he was to speak at the dedication of a memorial to President Kennedy. More than a quarter million West Berliners lined the streets for his arrival, honoring his brother’s memory and the words of his rousing “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, delivered in that divided city exactly a year earlier.
Speaking later the same day at the Free University of Berlin, he encouraged the students to keep faith with his brother’s values. “There were many who felt that the torchbearer for a whole generation was gone, that an era was over before its time. But I have come to understand that the hope President Kennedy kindled isn’t dead but alive. The torch still burns, and because it does, there remains, for all of us, a chance to light up the tomorrows and brighten the future. For me, this is a challenge that makes life worthwhile.”
From there, Bobby, accompanied by Ethel and three of their children, traveled to Poland, where they attracted legions of thrilled admirers. When the family attended mass, thousands packed the Warsaw cathedral and the square outside. In Kraków, at the distinguished, ancient university there, the Jagiellonian, the excited students lifted him onto their shoulders in celebration.
Later, in a question-and-answer session at the City Council, he replied carefully when asked about his “version of the assassination.” It was the first time he’d publicly discussed Lee Harvey Oswald, his brother’s killer. The nearly nine-hundred-page report of the Warren Commission, tasked with investigating President Kennedy’s assassination, was not yet completed. Yet, there in Kraków, Bobby called Oswald a “misfit” and “antisocial,” going on to say, as the commission would conclude, “There is no question that he did it on his own and by himself. He was not a member of a right-wing organization. He was a professed Communist, but even the Communists would not have anything to do with him.”
Here, behind the Iron Curtain for the first time, Bobby and his family were allowed by the government the opportunity to pay their respects to Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. He’d become primate of Poland when elevated to cardinal by Pope Pius XII in 1953. Given this rare chance by his state overseers to meet with Americans, Wyszynski explained to his guests what he saw as the positive side of his country’s repressive rule, at least when it came to the Catholic Church. Depriving it of its historic wealth, he’d come to realize, “brought the priests and bishops much closer to the people.”
Kathleen Kennedy was thirteen when she and two of her brothers accompanied her parents on this three-day trip. During the family’s visit with Cardinal Wyszynski, she remembers that her mother, suddenly feeling hungry, asked one of those present if he might help find her something to tide her over. After the helpful cleric asked courteously what she thought she might like, Ethel soon received exactly the snack she’d asked for. (Twenty-one years later, when being introduced to Pope John Paul II, he reminded her: “I’ve met you once before. I made you a grilled cheese sandwich.”)
Upon his return home, The New York Times praised Bobby’s successes in Poland as “an act of unorthodox statesmanship,” noting the way he’d shown the regime how much further it would have to go before it became a true “people’s government.”
It was hard for Bobby to be back in Washington, however, during the July 2 presidential signing of the historic Civil Rights Act. As Nick Katzenbach put it, it was difficult to stand there, with Johnson taking the credit “and not his brother.” The moment proved equally difficult for LBJ: he had to be coaxed into handing his predecessor’s brother one of the ceremonial pens.
At this point for Bobby, the idea of running for the Senate in New York had begun to hold strong appeal. The only problem, he noted, was the obvious one that he didn’t live there. Such a candidacy, he said, presents “all the messiness of the arrogant outsider coming to take over.” Looking to the immediate future, he had other thoughts. “I might just take a year off,” he mused, “take the kids, go live in Europe.”
The option of running for governor of Massachusetts, getting out of Washington altogether, no longer struck Bobby as the right move. He’d looked into exactly what holdin
g the top executive office up there in the Boston State House entailed, and decided in the end he wasn’t attracted. “That job doesn’t have any real power,” he concluded. “It’s all divided up with the legislature and the governor’s council.” Besides which: “That’s really Teddy’s state now,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to interfere.”
On July 15, the Republicans, meeting in San Francisco, nominated Goldwater. The nominee’s acceptance speech contained a troubling call to arms. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” As William Manchester would write of it, “the nominee deepened the division in the party by giving the moderates the rough side of his tongue in a memorable passage.”
As the Democratic convention approached, against all logic and history—including his own with Johnson—Bobby continued to view the vice presidential nomination as a plausible goal. He may have been the only one to think so. It was an ambition, not different from Johnson’s own in 1960, less about serving than succeeding. It made no sense otherwise. Neither man could stand the other. It would be like two dogs fighting over the same patch of sidewalk.
Two weeks after the Republicans chose their candidate, Johnson called the attorney general to the White House to end any suspense regarding his prospects for the ticket. It was obvious that Senator Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act would be enough to promise strong support for the Republican in the South. Using that as his main argument, Johnson, now sure of his ground, pointed out that Bobby would hurt the ticket more than help it.
For his part, Bobby saw the bright side. “Being his vice president,” he told Guthman, “could be a real dead end. He could put me in cold storage and I’d suffocate.” Still, he’d longed, against all reason, for Johnson to take him anyway. It would set him on the path to a Kennedy restoration in 1972.
When, months earlier, he’d thought of running for the U.S. Senate from New York, Bobby had been honest about one very big reason not to do it. “It would be awful if I lost,” he told Guthman. But now, putting that fear behind him, he was ready to declare his intention to enter the race. The contest would be against the Republican from upstate now seeking reelection, Senator Kenneth Keating from Rochester.
Two days later, the Democratic National Convention got under way in Atlantic City. For me, it was a local event, since my family had a summer home in Ocean City, the quiet resort just ten miles to the south. Getting word of an opening-night fundraiser where the big Democratic pols would meet and greet wealthy donors, I went to see for myself what was happening. At the famed Shelburne Hotel, I politely pestered those departing, and soon enough was handed a ticket that got me in the door.
Once inside, I found myself shaking hands with Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson, Adlai Stevenson, and Eugene McCarthy, who seemed a bit surprised that I knew who he was. It was my first encounter with such figures, whom I’d avidly read about for years in the newspapers.
Having dismissed Bobby Kennedy as a vice presidential choice, Johnson was enjoying the opportunity to build suspense about his ultimate selection and was determined to keep his two finalists—both senators from Minnesota—dangling until the last possible minute. McCarthy, catching word of this power play, called it “sadistic” and publicly removed himself from contention. At the same time, he was no fan of any of the Kennedys, and was already criticizing Bobby’s decision to try for the Senate.
“It was an antipathy on McCarthy’s part that none of us ever understood,” Ted Sorensen later said. Jack had contributed to McCarthy’s Senate campaign—they’d served in the House together—yet began hearing in 1959 and 1960 that McCarthy was making adverse comments about him as he geared up to run for president.
The hostility was returned. Bobby even made it clear, when offered the chance by LBJ to make the vice presidential nominating speech, that he had no interest if that particular Minnesotan was the nominee. “If it’s McCarthy, I can’t do it. I just don’t have any respect for that man at all,” he told the president bluntly. And when the Texan finally, after building suspense until the eleventh hour, decreed the other senator from Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey, to be the one he’d run with, the Kennedy camp was relieved.
On the eve of the convention, Johnson had been unable to stop worrying that, somehow, the vice presidential nomination might be stampeded to Bobby. Fueling this fear was the effect a twenty-minute film about John Kennedy, introduced by his brother Robert, would have on the men and women from the fifty states soon to arrive in Atlantic City. None would need reminding that, under different circumstances, they’d have been there to nominate the man they now saw memorialized on the screen before them for a second term.
Thus, with such timing in mind, LBJ scheduled A Thousand Days—that being the number served by JFK before his assassination—for Thursday night, safely after the balloting. When Bobby arrived that evening, he found himself stuck by Johnson’s minions in a dingy room well below the convention floor to await his cue. Yet, even if the anointed Democratic candidate was unwelcoming, the crowd, most emphatically, was not.
As he made his way to the stage, the entire Boardwalk Hall exploded into a standing ovation. Though he made efforts for them to stop, they had no effect. The exuberant clamor continued for twenty-two minutes, most of the time with Bobby attempting to end it. To no avail.
Scoop Jackson, his old colleague from the McCarthy committee, was standing there to introduce him. But whenever Bob raised his hand to try to stop the outpouring of emotion, Jackson discouraged him. “Why don’t you let them get it out of their system, Bob?”
Though this address to the convention has come to be known as the “Stars” speech for the quotation from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet he applied to President Kennedy (“When he shall die take him and cut him out into stars . . .”), the first words Bobby uttered were these below. His rapt audience had no trouble taking them to heart.
No matter what talent an individual possesses, what energy he might have, no matter how much integrity and honesty he might have, if he is by himself—and particularly a political figure—he can accomplish very little. But if he is sustained, as President Kennedy was, by the Democratic Party all over the United States, dedicated to the same things he was attempting to accomplish, he can accomplish a great deal.
• • •
And then, before concluding by quoting his brother’s favorite poet, Robert Frost, he predicted that, “If we do our duty, if we meet our responsibilities and obligations, not just as Democrats, but as American citizens in our local cities and towns and farms and our states and in the country as a whole, then this generation of Americans is going to be the best generation in the history of mankind.”
Afterward, alone on a fire escape, Robert Kennedy broke down in tears.
• • •
A carpetbagger is a candidate for public office who moves into a new area for that obvious purpose. Running for the Senate from New York, Bobby tried softening the charge with humor. “I could have retired. And my father has done very well and I could have lived off him,” he told students at Columbia University in October. “And I don’t need the money and I don’t need the office space. Frank as it is—and maybe it’s difficult to believe in the state of New York—I’d like to just be a good United States senator. I’d like to serve.”
“I think it’s going to be very difficult,” he told an NBC interviewer. “I have the obvious problem of coming in from another state.” He’d been clear on that point in his announcement. “I recognize that some voters have misgivings about considering a man for high office who has left that state and has only recently returned.” He had, of course, lived in both Riverdale and Bronxville before heading off to England with his family.
Even those working on the campaign kept reminding him he was an outsider. “Inevitably, during the briefing sessions,” Guthman remembered, “there were comments—some needling and some patronizing—about his lack of detailed knowledge of the state he hoped t
o represent.”
Moreover, under the best of circumstances—and these were anything but—Bobby did not seem born for the part of candidate. His mother admitted as much. “Although by this time Bobby knew all the ins and outs and behind-the-scene techniques of politics, he had never himself run for public office, never been a candidate in a way that would oblige him to come through to the general public as a personality,” Rose Kennedy recalled. “And he was not overly endowed by nature and temperament for that different role. It hadn’t been his style, and he had never had reason until then to develop it. He took on the challenge but not entirely happily and not easily.”
Asked if he was going to “run against Keating’s record,” Kennedy dodged the issue. He tried turning the question to his own credentials, alluding to his experience in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the push for civil rights. However, the reporter, after listening to him, then simply repeated the question. “Are you going to run against Senator Keating’s record?”
“I’m going to run in a positive way,” Bobby finally replied.
Nor would he build his campaign on his brother’s reputation. Peter Edelman was the campaign staffer assigned to studying the New York senator’s record. “At the beginning, he was very reluctant to be negative about Senator Keating. Also, in terms of political tussle, he wasn’t particularly interested in campaigning that way.”
What he didn’t want, Edelman went on, was “to trade on being his brother’s brother. He didn’t think that was right.” At the same time, Edelman noted that Bobby hadn’t yet managed to come up with an actual agenda of his own for the state of New York.
From the beginning, crowds could see Bobby acting out the mannerisms of his brother—for example, having one hand stuck in his suit coat, the other gesturing. Jack had done that. He also began smoking those little cigars the late president had liked.
But when Ed Guthman tried boosting his spirits with talk of the excited crowds he was drawing, he resisted. “Don’t you know?” he said. “They’re for him.” Watching the reception he received from his audiences, it seemed to him they were entirely about his brother’s legacy. And about his own celebrity because of it.
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