Bobby now became convinced that poverty was his brother’s last unfinished agenda. The riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles worried him. For six days in August, this African American community had exploded in violence, looting, and arson. Thirty-four people were killed, and over one thousand were injured. Forty million dollars’ worth of property was damaged or destroyed. It took the arrival of four thousand National Guardsmen to bring order.
California governor Pat Brown appointed a commission to investigate the causes of the lawlessness. Headed by John McCone, just retired from four years as director of the CIA, the commission met sixty-four times in a hundred days, interviewing 530 witnesses. Its conclusions blamed the riots on high unemployment, inferior schools, and poor living conditions.
Bobby, concerned about the same underlying causes, feared the protests would spread. There’d been earlier riots in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood as well. Finally, by year’s end, he came to the decision to speak out on poverty and race. It turned into a series of addresses delivered in New York in January 1966, each on successive nights.
“I don’t think that it’s possible in our society and with our government to tolerate lawlessness and disorder and violence. But at the same time I think that we’ve got to make more progress than we have in the past to be more effective with the programs that we’ve instituted. And to have some imagination to try to deal with the lack of hope that exists in many of these communities.”
The plight of African Americans was getting worse, he believed. And this led him to question whether reliance on welfare—a standard of liberal social policy—was working. Personally, he detested the term “Great Society,” a proud coinage of the Johnson administration for its domestic programs of poverty and racial injustice. His own ideas focused on the residents of poor neighborhoods being able to participate in policy decisions. He also wanted to encourage more private investment to act as economic engines in those communities.
In February, he toured a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn in quest of ways to put his words into action. It would lead to the formation of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, whose purpose was to bring economic hope to one of New York’s most desperate communities.
That same month, the Senate began two weeks of hearings on the Vietnam War, where Lyndon Johnson had greatly expanded American involvement. He’d begun the previous year with a major, ongoing air campaign against North Vietnam. To protect our airbases in South Vietnam, he had for the first time sent in U.S. combat troops: 3,500 marines to begin with, 125,000 by July, 184,000 by year’s end. The strategy was to end North Vietnam’s efforts to win control of the South through an expanding campaign of aerial bombardment.
One weakness in Washington’s position lay in South Vietnam itself, meaning those now running it. In backing the military coup against President Diem, the country’s last leader with the authority to ask America to leave, the U.S. had eliminated the only man with the same authority to ask the U.S. to stay.
As one military-led government in Saigon continued to replace another in successive coups, the U.S. bombing only hardened North Vietnam’s commitment to reunite with the South at whatever cost. The Americans kept sending in troops only to have Hanoi match each buildup. However it had begun, it was fast becoming an American war against North Vietnam, with incessant bombing of the North and bloody combat in the South.
Also in early February, Robert Kennedy became absorbed by the hearings the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was holding on the war in Vietnam. The committee chairman, Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR), had initiated them to challenge the Johnson administration’s optimism that if the United States kept up its war of attrition “the communists would eventually give up.” Fulbright played the role of prosecutor. For the first time the country was being offered a far different, far less rosy assessment of our chances. Often, Bobby would arrive, then stand in the back of the Senate Caucus Room, where the hearings were taking place, and listen.
On February 19, 1966, Bobby held a Senate press conference that marked his break with the Johnson administration on Vietnam. Proposing that the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the insurgent Vietcong forces, be invited to join in negotiations, he offered a simple rationale. “There are three things you can do with such groups,” he argued. “Kill or repress them; turn the country over to them; or admit them to a share of power and responsibility.” It was clear what option he was now advocating.
For expressing such thoughts, Robert Kennedy—who until this moment had been known throughout his career in Washington as a hard-line anti-Communist—was now accused of endorsing the unthinkable. He was saying the Communist insurgents should be included in a coalition government in South Vietnam. Vice President Hubert Humphrey was among those who rushed to attack. “It would be like putting a fox in the chicken coop,” he jeered.
Such derision had the effect of making Bobby feel politically vulnerable. He’d allied himself with an antiwar movement that still represented only a minority of Americans. He expressed no further thoughts on Vietnam for the rest of 1966. His silence from that point on arose also from the belief that LBJ increased the U.S. commitment there after hearing criticism from him. “I’m afraid that by speaking out I make Lyndon Johnson do the opposite, out of spite.”
President Johnson himself was convinced that pulling back from Vietnam would cast him as an appeaser. “Everything I knew about history,” he would later write, “told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I’d be giving a big fat reward to aggression.” Again, it was the shadow of Munich.
He was haunted, also, by a closer specter—the accusation that the Truman administration had been passive in allowing the Communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong to take control of mainland China in 1949. He recalled the Republicans—and Jack Kennedy—taunting the Truman administration with “Who lost China?”
Johnson understood the role that Mao’s crushing of the U.S.-backed Nationalists and his victorious establishment of the People’s Republic of China had played in the rise of Joe McCarthy, whom he despised. He was convinced that both legacies, Munich and Mao, “taken together, were chickenshit compared to what might happen if we lost Vietnam.”
• • •
In March, Bobby, serving on the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor, flew to California to look into the causes of the strike being staged by migrant pickers in the grape-growing town of Delano. Its leader was a Mexican American named Cesar Chavez. His family had arrived in California’s Central Valley during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Quitting school when he was fifteen, he worked in the fields until he joined the U.S. Navy in 1946, serving in the Western Pacific.
Chavez’s career as a community organizer had begun in the early 1950s. In 1962 he founded what would become the United Farm Workers of America. At its inception, it had just ten members: Chavez, his wife, Helen, and their eight children. In 1960 he’d helped register voters for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
Though he wanted higher wages, Chavez’s primary goal was the right to organize and bargain collectively. In 1964 he won the backing of the United Auto Workers, a labor organization that had won Bobby’s respect during his Rackets Committee days.
As often was the case, Bobby arrived on the scene in a mood of skepticism. “Why are we taking this trip?” he asked as they flew westward. That attitude quickly shifted to engagement. The fight was between the migrant laborers led by Chavez and the big farmers and the local governments they controlled. Senator Kennedy soon found himself outraged at the rationale he was given for the arrests of forty-four picketing workers. The local sheriff testified to the visiting subcommittee that they’d done so preemptively. They were “ready,” he said, “to violate the law.”
The former attorney general couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I suggest that during this lunch period that th
e sheriff and the district attorney read the Constitution of the United States.”
Beyond that, Bobby had immediately taken sides, identifying instinctively with the farmworkers’ struggle—especially that of their leader.
Chavez, whose heroic models were Gandhi and Martin Luther King, now saw Bobby as a champion for his cause. “He crossed a line that no other American politician ever crossed,” he told Jack Newfield. What so impressed him, he said, was the intensity of Bobby’s feeling for the poor, his authenticity as a human being, and his ability to grow and be changed by experience.
The feelings were mutual as witnessed by Kennedy aide Peter Edelman. “The chemistry was instant.”
• • •
A “Day of Affirmation of Academic and Human Freedom” was proclaimed at the University of Cape Town for June 6, 1966. It had been organized to assert the students’ commitment to human freedom and opposition to the oppression of black and mixed-race South Africans. Invited by the National Union of South African Students—whose president at the eleventh hour was banned from attending—to deliver a speech for the occasion, Robert Kennedy found eighteen thousand people waiting outside to welcome him when he arrived at the majestic Jameson Hall. It took him a half hour just to make his way through the enthusiastic welcomers.
His procession into the building had been led by a student holding an unlit torch to represent the extinguishing of academic freedom. According to those observing him, the American visitor had tears in his eyes as he climbed to the stage.
“I came here,” he began, “because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself as a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage.”
Then he paused. “I refer, of course, to the United States of America.”
With this perceptive matching of histories, that of his own country with that of his hosts, he offered a moral humility expected least of all by those defenders of the country’s system of white supremacy who’d criticized his coming to South Africa in the first place. He was setting a marker down: the United States might be further along on its historic course regarding race, yet that did not put it on a higher national pedestal.
“For two centuries,” he told them, “my own country has struggled to overcome the self-imposed handicap of prejudice and discrimination based on nationality, social class, or race—discrimination profoundly repugnant to the theory and command of our Constitution.” He then reminded his audience of a reality he carried always with him, of how his grandfather, growing up in Boston, too often had been confronted by anti-Irish sentiment.
“Two generations later,” he continued,
President Kennedy became the first Catholic to head the nation. But how many men of ability had, before 1961, been denied the opportunity to contribute to the nation’s progress because they were Catholic, or of Irish extraction? How many sons of Italian or Jewish or Polish parents slumbered in slums—untaught, unlearned, their potential lost forever to the nation and human race? Even today, what price will we pay before we have assured full opportunity to millions of Negro Americans?
There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People starve in the streets of India, a former prime minister [Patrice Lumumba] is summarily executed in the Congo, intellectuals go to jail in Russia, and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere in the world. They are differing evils; but they are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our sensibility toward the suffering of our fellows; they mark the limit of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human beings around the world. And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and around the world.
He’d traveled to the tip of a distant continent and there had spoken, thrillingly. He called on the world’s youth—which he said was “not a time of life but a state of mind”—to join the cause of greater human fairness. It was his greatest speech.
Bobby greets local residents in the Mississippi Delta.
CHAPTER TWENTY
AFFIRMATION
“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
—ROBERT KENNEDY, SOUTH AFRICA, 1966
As 1967 dawned, nearly 400,000 U.S. troops were in South Vietnam. More than 6,000 Americans had been killed just in the previous year. At home, critics were calling the war an immoral pursuit unlikely to ever end. President Johnson dismissed them as “nervous Nellies” or “sunshine patriots.” But a main target of his angry resentment was the junior senator from New York. This was despite the fact that, for months, Kennedy had been holding his fire ever since making that antiwar speech in February 1966.
At the end of January 1967, on a trip to Europe that included a stop in Paris, Bobby met there with Charles de Gaulle. It was the second time he’d been received at the Élysée Palace, having called on the French president once before, in 1962 when he was attorney general. On this visit, they discussed the situation in Vietnam, a conflict fraught with both human peril and political danger—as the French themselves knew only too well.
De Gaulle—a graduate of St. Cyr, the French West Point, and a heroic officer in both world wars—had headed the Free French against the German occupation. “I am an old man,” he told Bobby, “and I have lived through many battles and wear many scars. So listen to me closely. . . . Do not become embroiled in the difficulty in Vietnam.”
His advice was based on his belief, as both soldier and veteran statesman, that his American visitor should steer clear of divisive national debate in order to protect his chances for future leadership. Better to stand aside, de Gaulle urged, so that he could be available to later help his country “regain its proper course.” It seemed unlikely advice from a man who’d become his country’s greatest leader by his lonely act of opposition to the capitulation of 1940.
Bobby then spoke to reporters who clustered around as he left the meeting. “France and General de Gaulle,” he replied to one questioner, “are going to play an important role in any successful effort we may have in finding a peaceful solution to the trouble in Vietnam. And if that’s not recognized by the spokesman in Washington then we are in greater difficulty than I had thought.”
But back in Washington in the Oval Office, the “spokesman” to whom he’d made the not-so-veiled reference was becoming steadily angrier. That was because Senator Kennedy had seen another French official in Paris, a representative of the Foreign Ministry. From this diplomat he’d learned that North Vietnam would now agree to participate in peace talks, though only if the United States agreed to halt its bombing campaign. When a State Department official who’d sat in on that meeting filed his report to his Washington superiors, the story was leaked.
The result was, first, a major piece in Newsweek describing how a “significant signal” from Hanoi had been conveyed to Senator Kennedy. A later one in The New York Times termed it a “peace feeler” from the North Vietnamese. For President Johnson, seeing these stories confirmed his suspicions. He imagined Bobby’s own hand behind them, and an effort to portray himself as a leader searching
for peace at the same time he, Johnson, was ramping up the war.
Meeting with Johnson upon his return, Bobby found himself, over the course of forty-five minutes, confronted by a furious president. His response to LBJ’s charge that he’d tried to embarrass him was blunt. “The leak came from someone in your State Department,” the senator informed him.
“It’s not my State Department. Goddammit—it’s your State Department!” Johnson shot back, his anti-Kennedy suspicions flaring up. It was his deeply held suspicion that New Frontier loyalists still lurked in his administration.
At one point, according to Ted Kennedy, Bobby now suggested that he himself act as a go-between, trying to work out a Vietnam peace agreement. He offered, said his brother, “to shuttle back and forth between Washington and Saigon and even travel to Hanoi and China if necessary—and Moscow—if Johnson would trust him to be the U.S. government’s agent.”
Bobby proposed that Johnson as a preliminary step stop the bombing of North Vietnam to see if its leaders would then agree to talks. “There isn’t a chance in hell that I’ll do that, not the slightest chance in the world,” the president assured him.
Praising the increasing successes the U.S. military campaign was having, the president went on to insist that the war in Vietnam would soon be won, removing any need for the negotiations Bobby and others were calling for. Keep pushing for that, Johnson told him, and “I’ll destroy you and every one of your dove friends. You’ll be politically dead in six months!”
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