Even now, he was still playing the role of strategist. He predicted a jump in the polls would follow his entry into the race. He could foresee, however, that once the torch-passing excitement had cooled off, the challenge would come in making the necessary recovery. There would be an inevitable period in which he would have to execute a comeback.
Early on, Bobby faced resistance from New York City’s liberal community. Committed readers of the newspapers they trusted, they were intense in their politics, holding strong opinions and skeptical attitudes. This was true especially of how they felt toward Irish Catholic politicians. The reasons went back to the inbred politics of Tammany Hall, and its too often outright corruption. Their favorite politicians were those of memory—Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt—and of defeat, Adlai Stevenson, and this made them resistant to the thrill of a Kennedy showing up asking to be made their United States senator. It didn’t help that Bobby had shown he wasn’t comfortable with them, either. Quite simply, he’d never called nor viewed himself as a part of the liberal faction.
He chose, in fact, to apply the term as one of values rather than affiliation. “I think labels are so difficult. What I think, what my idea is of a liberal, my concept of it is, somebody who has compassion for those who aren’t well off. Now under that category, I’m a liberal and want to be a liberal.”
His deeper challenge was more personal, the need to free himself of the emotional darkness haunting him from Dallas, still stalking his spirit out on the stump. Paul Corbin noticed one day that Bobby had chosen the same route through the state that his brother had once taken. “Get out of this mysticism! Get out of your daze! God damn, Bob, be yourself! Get hold of yourself! You’re real. Your brother’s dead.” Only he could talk to him like that. (“God love Paul,” Ethel said, hearing this recounted decades later.)
With a new poll showing Kennedy surging, the incumbent suddenly decided it was time to meet his challenger in a debate. However, when the two sides couldn’t agree on a format, the Republican went ahead, appearing on camera seated across from an empty chair meant to represent his absent opponent. But Bobby called him on the move. Surrounded by television cameras and newspaper photographers, he showed up at the studio and demanded to be admitted. “Kindly inform Senator Keating I am here and ready to go on the air,” he told those guarding the locked studio door.
All of this was being recorded by the media: Keating talking to that empty chair inside the studio, Bobby trying to enter from the outside. The half hour broadcast completed, the Republican was told reporters wanted to interview him about why he’d kept his opponent from entering the debate studio. At that, Keating panicked, running out of the building, turning over potted palms and furniture in his way.
The next day’s newspapers showed Keating and the empty chair, Bobby standing at a door marked KEEP OUT—NO VISITORS—KEATING.
With this failed maneuver—and the resulting humiliation—Keating’s campaign was basically doomed. On election night, Kennedy beat his rival by 700,000 votes. Though this was far less than Johnson’s state margin of 2.7 million, it was Bobby’s first election victory. “He was back on his feet, out of his brother’s shadow,” noted Guthman, “and he had the inner satisfaction of knowing that at the crucial moments in a difficult political struggle he had made the right decisions.”
On election night, Bobby echoed what he’d said at the convention: “I believe this vote is a mandate to continue the efforts begun by my brother four years ago—the effort to get something started in this country.”
But he also said: “If my brother were alive, I wouldn’t be here. I’d rather have it that way.”
Bobby is made an honorary Sioux and given a warrior’s name: “Brave Heart.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
BRAVE HEART
“John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic; Robert Kennedy, a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist.”
—ARTHUR SCHLESINGER
In September 1963, two months before Dallas, Bobby had traveled to Bismarck, North Dakota, for a meeting of the National Congress of American Indians. Earlier in the year, President Kennedy had received these Native American leaders in the Rose Garden. He said his administration was committed to getting them better educational and job opportunities. Now his brother was crossing the country to affirm that.
The speech he gave at the Grand Pacific Hotel sounded the theme that was more and more engaging him—the need to keep moving America forward “toward the fulfillment of its destiny as the land of the free, a nation in which neither Indians nor any other racial or religious minority will live in underprivilege.” Afterward, the Native Americans presented Bobby with a war bonnet, and gave him a warrior’s name: Brave Heart.
• • •
In January 1965 Robert Kennedy’s heart was still sore, its great wound in no way healed. He needed a warrior’s courage to face the new world before him. He was being sworn in as the junior senator from New York. His brother Ted, meanwhile, was starting his first full term as the junior senator from Massachusetts. Not since 1803 had a pair of brothers served simultaneously in the United States Senate.
Both Kennedys arrived on Capitol Hill still in mourning for their cherished elder brother. It was unclear to Bobby whether the Senate was what he wanted or where he needed to be.
The problem for Bobby—taking his place in what’s been called “the world’s greatest deliberative body”—was that the challenge of these new responsibilities and duties wasn’t enough to displace what James Stevenson, the New Yorker writer, observed to be his “resident, melancholy bleakness.” The black necktie he hadn’t yet stopped wearing could be seen as a symbol of the unlifting darkness he felt in a city filled with such sharply etched memories.
Adam Walinsky, his young legislative assistant, could sense the conviction Bobby seemed unable to dispel, that no matter what he did heading forward—“whether he got to be president or not . . . it had been the most fun before, when John Kennedy had been president, and that he would never be that young again, that he would never have that kind of joy again.”
Yet the freshman senator knew the choice had been his and his alone. “I remember and regret the situation that gave rise to my being here,” he said. “It will be a totally new life. But I would not be here unless I wanted to come.”
Still, in those early weeks, as a friend noted, he seemed to be “impotent, frustrated, floundering.” Today we might recognize his symptoms as similar to those displayed by a soldier back from war. We’d understand the inevitability of their grip on him. But in both Kennedy terms and those of the era—with Jack’s death only fifteen years after the end of World War II—toughing it out was what was expected.
Restlessness, too, afflicted him, and in March he was offered a remarkable opportunity to indulge it—one that took him across North America to Canada’s Yukon Territory. There, the Canadian government had just christened the continent’s highest unclimbed peak Mount Kennedy in honor of the fallen president.
The National Geographic Society and the Boston Museum of Science now joined together to sponsor an expedition to map the unknown terrain. They invited both senators Kennedy to participate in the trek to the fourteen-thousand-foot summit. Ted, still not fully recovered from the previous year’s plane accident, had to decline. Bobby, though having no experience as a mountain climber, and admittedly afraid of heights, accepted, seeing this as both a personal pilgrimage and a test of himself.
James Whittaker, the first American to have climbed Mount Everest, led the three-man party making the ascent. On the last ridge, fifty yards from their goal, Bobby was un-roped in order to head on alone. This way, he’d be the first at the top, and alone when paying homage to his brother. Arriving there, he bowed down on one knee and made the sign of the cross.
“I planted President Kennedy’s family flag on the summit,” Bobby wrote in a cover story that appeared in Life magazine the following week. “It was done with mixed emotion. [And] with
a feeling of pain that the events of 16 months and two days before had made it necessary.”
He also left behind a copy of his brother’s inaugural address. The man who’d delivered that stirring call to his fellow citizens, and for whom the peak was named, would have been “greatly pleased” by the mountain and the views, Bobby wrote in the Life piece. Then, once having made the descent and eaten—steak, instant mashed potatoes, and ice cream—he traveled back to Whitehorse, the nearest city. There, he bought a round for everyone gathered in the bar at the local hotel. Its owner kept the check with which his guest had paid for the drinks and framed it. “I told him I wanted to keep it as a souvenir of the next president of the United States,” he said.
• • •
Back in Washington, on Capitol Hill, he and Ted found themselves in new roles in the Senate. Seven years younger than Bobby but already in place for two years, Ted now took on the odd role of pathfinder, even mentor. It was clear—and surprising—that both enjoyed the change of pecking order. Of the two Senate buildings, Ted’s office, owing to his seniority, was in the older, more historic one and his brother’s in the newer.
A senator’s position on any legislative issue is determined by voice vote in the Chamber, a proceeding carried out in alphabetical order. This put “Edward” ahead of “Robert,” and gave Bobby the chance to hear whether his brother was voting “Aye” or “Nay.” He’d then, often, choose to do the same.
Observers on the Senate floor could see the brothers communicating with each other, which they did by way of eye contact and facial expressions. As a reliable system, however, it was hardly foolproof.
Ted described one occasion when his brother came to the floor late:
He looked over at me from his seat to see how I was voting. I looked back at him, not understanding what he wanted. He kept looking at me, and finally shook his head as if to ask, “Is the vote no?”
I got it. I nodded back at him, meaning, “Yes, the vote is no.” But Bobby thought I meant “The vote is yes.”
So Bobby voted yes. I then voted no. Bobby then shook his head no—in agreement, he thought, with the no vote.
But I thought he meant, “No, I’m not voting no” so I vigorously nodded my head yes, as if to say, “Yes, you are supposed to vote no.” Bobby shook his head, changed his vote to no.
It was like Abbott and Costello doing their “Who’s on First?” routine.
The rules of seniority meant that the freshman senators had to wait their turn. Thus it happened that one day, Senator Kennedy (D-NY) sat from ten in the morning, when a committee hearing got under way, until two in the afternoon. His turn to question the witness had still not come.
“Is this the way I become a good senator?” he asked Ted, who was assigned to the same panel. “By sitting here and waiting my turn?” That’s right, his brother told him. But then Bobby wanted to know just how many more hours he’d need to keep on sitting there “to be a good senator.” Just “as long as necessary, Robbie,” came the answer.
As Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who’d served in the House and the Senate with Jack and had warm regard for the family, phrased it, Bobby was “in the Senate but not of it. He did not become a member of the club.” Teddy, seeing this and knowing his brother’s loner tendencies, worried simply that Bobby might never regain his relish for life, including the political life.
“He understood power well,” the younger Kennedy would write of his brother’s initiation into the hierarchical world of Capitol Hill. “He knew that there was an inside Senate and an outside Senate, and that his fast-blossoming idealism made him an outsider.” Ted noted that a number of historians had attributed the changes Bobby underwent in his Senate years—his growing concern for the downtrodden in American life—to Jack’s death. He agreed.
Frank Mankiewicz, the Peace Corps regional director for Latin America, recalls getting a surprise phone call from Bobby. After first thinking a talented mimic was playing a trick on him, he realized it was Senator Robert Kennedy himself. He told Mankiewicz he was phoning because he hoped soon to make a fact-finding mission to South America. There his first stop would likely be Peru. Since Mankiewicz had been country director there from 1962 to 1964, Bobby was interested in hearing what he thought of the itinerary the State Department was suggesting for him.
Mankiewicz quickly saw that the prescribed trip was to be a classic in-and-out tour: a visit to the American school, lunch with the Peruvian-American chamber of commerce, dinner at the embassy. “Why are you going to Lima, Senator?” he asked, sensing a kindred spirit. “You could accomplish all that staying right here in Washington.”
Intrigued by his forthrightness, Kennedy asked the Peace Corps official for an alternative schedule. Mankiewicz proposed the barriadas, shantytowns where millions of Peru’s poor lived, along with a visit to the University of San Marco and one to a copper mine, a leading industry. He wanted Bobby to see the country from a Peace Corps volunteer’s perspective, from that of the desperately poor. Those were the people Americans like Mankiewicz spent two years in Peru trying to help, not the well-off who’d spent generations taking care to help themselves.
Three days later, at a meeting at the State Department, Mankiewicz was impressed by Bobby’s handling of the officials organizing the trip. At one point, the senator interrupted the person instructing him on the U.S. boilerplate answers to give reporters: “I don’t talk that way,” he curtly informed the briefer.
In Chile, at the University of Concepción, the radical students there refused to let Kennedy speak, drowning out his attempts to address them. Even when he offered his hecklers equal time, they refused to let up. And when, at their invitation, he tried to join a group of student Communists, a protester spat in his face.
However, when he learned that much of the strength of this anti-government sentiment in Peru was related to the harsh and dangerous conditions in the copper mines, he insisted on being taken down in one. It was an extreme experience to go down 1,500 feet in an elevator, then five miles horizontally, out under the Pacific Ocean. Yet this was where the miners themselves year in and year out earned their pittance of a daily wage. The spectacle caused Bobby to ask a simple question.
Would you, he queried a high-level manager, be a Communist if you were working down in the mines? “I’m afraid I would,” the man answered. “We breed them here.”
Bobby, along with Ethel, had left Washington on the 1st of November. They were to visit five countries, finishing up in Venezuela. On November 22, the second anniversary of Jack’s death, they attended mass in the state of Bahia in northeastern Brazil. He’d planned the trip so he could be out of his country when the day arrived.
Back in Washington, the senator phoned Mankiewicz to thank him again and also to report how impressed he’d been with the Peace Corps projects he’d seen on the trip. Then, a week or so later, he called him again, this time to ask if the man who’d given him such good advice was interested in becoming his press secretary.
Mankiewicz could see that Bobby wasn’t looking merely for a spokesman—the duties of which he knew would take only a couple of hours a day—but for something more. Getting “advice on a million things” was how he described it.
Because of Bobby’s stint working as minority counsel for the McCarthy committee, and later on the Rackets Committee, Mankiewicz saw that those who didn’t really know him viewed him as an Irish cop. “He wasn’t,” Mankiewicz said, “but he permitted that image to get abroad and it was very tough to knock down.” He also grew to appreciate Bobby’s attitude toward the press, including his opinion of The New York Times as “an anti-Catholic newspaper.” The senator once joked to columnist Jimmy Breslin that the newspaper’s idea of a great story was “More Nuns Leave Convent than Ever Before.”
One characteristic of Bobby’s that Mankiewicz came to know well and increasingly admire was his willingness to change his mind. An example was his view on capital punishment. “I’m against it—in all cases,” Robert Ken
nedy now declared. When reminded by Mankiewicz that he’d held the opposite view when serving as attorney general, Bobby paused a moment, then explained: “That was before I read Camus.”
Eight years earlier, the French author and moral philosopher Albert Camus had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, honored for his persistent efforts to “illuminate the problem of the human conscience in our time.” In his essay “Reflections on the Guillotine,” first translated into English in 1961, he’d made three main arguments against state execution: that it is no deterrent, and it therefore serves only as revenge, and that it harms the survivors of the executed in the same way as a victim’s were.
It could well have been this last thought that resonated most strongly for Bobby, his own grief still so present. His interest in Camus’s thought could have represented the evolution he was going through. His passion for bringing down predators was now giving way to an expanded empathy for life’s victims.
His brother was an intimate witness to this transformation. “He decided,” wrote Ted, “that he would take on issues that championed America’s dispossessed, such as anti-poverty bills and further civil rights reform. He searched for injustices and moral causes. His involvement in them lent them a sense of urgency they might not otherwise have inspired. As he grew and learned, he became more and more interested in people as opposed to abstract ideas.”
Yet while Bobby was changing in ways of his own, thoughts echoed also from the Kennedy presidency. Among a pile of final documents on Jack’s desk was a sheet of paper with a word scribbled on it that held him in thrall. “Poverty,” it read.
It may have been jotted following a conversation about Michael Harrington’s recent book, The Other America: Poverty in the United States. A Holy Cross graduate, Harrington was a follower of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. He came to identify himself as a democratic socialist, which for him meant working for change within the Democratic Party. The Other America, his first book, was an immediate bestseller and was said to have triggered President Kennedy’s and later Lyndon Johnson’s interest in trying to reverse the deepening of America’s economic divisions.
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