Bobby Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  Bobby, who had learned over the years not to trust Johnson’s rhetoric, now worried that he truly believed what he was saying. “These guys are out of their minds,” he reported. “They think they’re going to win a military victory in Vietnam by summer. They really believe it. The president was saying that, by July or August, the war will be over.”

  Still, despite the escalating hostility of that meeting, Bobby had told the president that he was ready, once again, to present his thoughts on Vietnam in another Senate speech. Going over it through the early morning hours of March 2, when he was to deliver it, he decided to start with a confession. The war, he said, when he stood to address his Senate colleagues, had been prosecuted by “three presidents,” including his brother. “As one who was involved in those decisions, I can testify that if fault is to be found or responsibility assessed, there is enough to go around for all—including myself.”

  Continuing, he was unsparing when it came to the shared responsibility of all involved. “Let us reflect for a moment . . . on the horror. . . . It is our chemicals that scorch the children and our bombs that level the villages. We are all participants . . . we must also feel as men the anguish of what it is we are doing.”

  What followed was not an easy time for him when it came to public opinion. Bobby was now striving to keep his political and personal balance in the dual role he found himself playing—as both a reasoned but forceful critic of U.S. Vietnam policy and as an object of presidential wrath and resentment.

  The war now threatened a new target, one at home. Up until the spring of 1967, sons of the American middle class had been largely protected from the draft. A young man could attend college for four years, gain admission to graduate or professional school, get married along the way, and never be called for induction.

  In March President Lyndon Johnson simply up and announced an end to all graduate school deferments. No longer would the pursuit of a master’s or doctoral degree safeguard those millions of college boys from a military hitch. For those of us in the class of 1967, that very June suddenly meant 1-A draft status.

  I’ll always remember the day of that announcement. Having worked hard to make the dean’s list the last two years, I’d selected excellent universities to try for, any one of which I’d have been pleased to attend. My goal was a PhD in economics, followed by a college professorship. I have a strong memory of heading up to the field house to play basketball the afternoon of when I’d learned of Johnson’s decree, convinced that my efforts were for nothing. Fortunately, however—and no doubt due to the furor he’d created—Johnson soon backed down, agreeing to a one-year moratorium. I’d have, at least, the chance to start grad school after all.

  But as much as this temporary reprieve meant to me, along with my fellow Class of ’67 seniors, it wasn’t going to make much of a difference to the swelling anti–Vietnam War sentiment around the country. In demonstrations in New York and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of Americans were making known their objections to Johnson’s stubborn commitment to victory.

  It was then that Dr. Martin Luther King chose to focus attention on a moral dimension of the war we were waging. Declaring that African Americans and “the poor, white and negro, . . . bear the heaviest burdens both at the front and at home,” he pointed out the injustice of forcing young men with few other choices to do the fighting and the dying.

  However, even as Bobby Kennedy opposed the official U.S. Vietnam policy, he refused to side with antiwar activists opposing the college draft. Speaking at the University of Oklahoma that March, he made clear the basis of his position against student deferments, declaring “the poor are carrying the burden of the struggle.” And when a majority of the student audience indicated approval of the war with a show of hands, he shocked them by turning the tables, suggesting they be willing to match their support with a readiness to fight.

  Late that spring, on both national television and radio, CBS presented an hour-long program titled The Image of America and the Youth of the World, billed as a “Town Meeting of the World.” It was a debate between Senator Robert Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, the new Republican governor of California. Fifteen million Americans tuned in.

  The war in Vietnam was the central subject. Although Bobby was willing to agree that the campus protests might signal encouragement to the North Vietnamese effort, he stopped there. He refused to go along with Reagan’s belief that antiwar demonstrations were, in fact, actually prolonging the war and contributing to the rise in casualties.

  More polished at projecting both himself and his message—he’d been, after all, a radio announcer, an actor, and also a TV host—Reagan proved the clear victor in the opinion of both sides watching. Frank Mankiewicz, who’d talked Bobby into participating, summed up the outcome this way: “One of Reagan’s many strengths was that he did not indulge in nuances, and one of Robert Kennedy’s many strengths was that he did indeed see, and ponder, nuance.” The other difference was that Bobby sympathized with the student protesters. Reagan resented them and exploited his resentment.

  • • •

  In April, Kennedy traveled with three other senators to Mississippi on a fact-finding mission. They’d come south to study the effects of a local policy requiring indigent families applying for food stamps to make cash payments. Reports had reached Washington that too many hungry families could not afford to buy them.

  Once those hearings were concluded, Kennedy and Senator Joseph Clark (D-PA) decided to go on to visit the Mississippi Delta, in order to see for themselves the stark conditions they’d heard described. At a stop in one household, a young boy shocked Bobby by telling him his diet consisted only of molasses. “I’ve been to Third World countries,” the New York senator confided to an aide, “and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  The next house at which they stopped belonged to a woman with seven children. Roaches were everywhere. A toddler, playing on the filthy floor, was covered in sores, his stomach distended. Bobby sat down and stroked the boy’s cheek. “My God, I didn’t know this kind of thing existed! How can a country like this allow it? Maybe they just don’t know.” When he talked to the child and couldn’t get him to respond, the grown man began to cry.

  Returning to Hickory Hill, standing at the doorway of his family dining room, Bobby now saw through a different prism the familiar sight of his wife and children seated around the table. Ethel described his response to me: “He was so passionate . . . and he was shaking. Saying, ‘Do you know how lucky you are?’ And he kept on repeating it.”

  Unable to dispel those lingering images, he continued to need to share with others what he’d seen and experienced. To the wife of one of his staffers, he lamented: “I’ve done nothing in my life . . . everything I’ve done was a waste . . . everything I’ve done was worthless!” For him, it was a searing reexamination of who he’d been and who he was. Now, as he saw it, the war being waged in a faraway Southeast Asian jungle was completely entangled with the failure of the country waging it.

  It was Kennedy’s idea to call child psychiatrist Robert Coles to testify before the subcommittee about the brutal and long-lasting effects of extreme poverty on young children. Later, as Bobby’s guest for lunch at the Capitol, Coles found that his host’s questions about child development—about fathers and sons, about kids who don’t easily fit in, about trying always to prove oneself—seemed, really, to be about himself.

  Coles was struck, too, by the interest his new acquaintance, a politician with a reputation for toughness, showed in the spiritual life of people like Dorothy Day and Cesar Chavez, both Catholics leading lives of Christian action. “He felt that he hadn’t been tested the way that Day had been tested, that she had the true Catholic spirit,” Coles told me. The total commitment of Chavez gripped him as well.

  Bobby, Coles could see, was drawn to know more about “the personal religious life of these people.” Yet he was aware of the Kennedy family’s history and understood that this third son “knew vulnerabi
lity alongside privilege and power.” Tough but gentle, is how he described him. “He had a willingness to put himself in the shoes of others, as well as walk in his own.”

  Bobby and fellow antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE MOVEMENT

  “You know when I first thought I might have a chance? When I realized that you could go into any bar in the country and insult Lyndon Johnson and nobody would punch you in the nose.”

  —EUGENE McCARTHY

  “The southern part of heaven” is Chapel Hill’s town motto, and it sums up the way the University of North Carolina seemed to me when I arrived there in the fall of 1967. It had the further magic of being a world I’d come across by myself. Having followed my older brother to high school and college, I now felt myself an original settler.

  One of the vintage buildings on the elegant campus, I was told, is where the occupying Union officers had stabled their horses during the Civil War. Nearly a half century before I came, novelist Thomas Wolfe had edited the student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. There was a genteel aura then to the campus town. Men thought nothing of showing up for varsity football games in three-piece suits. But even as it basked in its fine atmosphere, UNC was also the pride of the state’s forward-looking education system.

  Students from outside the state—including Yankees like myself—were welcomed in its strong academic departments, among which were political science, history, and English. Mainly graduate students lured by generous financial aid, they settled in, learning to speak more softly and slowly and becoming a subculture. I suppose I was part of it.

  The Northerners’ influence showed itself in political activism, which translated as antiwar activism. And it was all moving quickly. Within days of arriving, I was surprised to hear a fellow grad student use the term “fascists” in casual conversation. It was a word I associated with World War II—but this guy wasn’t talking about Benito Mussolini and his Blackshirts. Instead, he was throwing the terms at prominent Americans in business and politics.

  Another moment that took me aback happened at an anti–Vietnam War meeting when one of the participants yelled out “No pictures!” with the vehemence of someone expecting J. Edgar Hoover himself to pop in.

  Much talk went on about “Vietnam Summer,” which meant those efforts staged around the country against “The War” in recent months. Unlike participants in San Francisco’s “Summer of Love,” however, the Chapel Hill organizers wore no flowers in their hair. The people running the meetings I attended were deadly serious about the here-and-now. What mattered to them was stopping a war they found morally abominable, a conflict with the added immediacy of being a daily reality. It could pluck any of us from the comforts and intellectual stirrings of campuses like Chapel Hill and send us off to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

  There were frequent reminders of this. If you judged from the newspaper headlines, you might wonder if there could be any reasonable limit to the number of young American males needed to satisfy the Johnson administration’s need to fight a war they said we were on the verge of winning. General William Westmoreland seemed to keep asking for more.

  One of the antiwar speakers to appear on the UNC campus that fall was Allard Lowenstein, a member of the class of ’48. As an undergraduate, he’d served as president of the National Student Association, an organization founded in 1947 to strengthen student government and student civil liberties. He’d gone on to Yale Law School and later worked for Eleanor Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, and North Carolina’s Senator Frank Graham.

  A charismatic leader of a one-to-one kind, he was a type rare in this country, an enduring youth activist. As Theodore White observed, “Even alone in a room, in private conversation, his talk quivered with the intensity of convention oratory.”

  Lowenstein was now masterminding a national “Dump Johnson” movement. With this as his starting point, he’d dedicated himself to finding a presidential candidate who could achieve what looked to many a daunting task. His hunt began with the most popular Democrat not in the White House. “I love Bobby Kennedy more than anyone else in public life,” he said. But what he’d heard from New York’s junior senator was a plainspoken rebuff: “I’ve tried to stop the war in every way I can, but Johnson can’t be stopped.”

  Besides which, Bobby was reluctant to put himself forward, believing that his well-known antagonism toward Lyndon Johnson was a handicap. “People would say that I was splitting the party out of ambition and envy,” he told Jack Newfield. “No one would believe that I was doing it because of how I feel about Vietnam and poor people.”

  Kennedy wasn’t the only one to turn down Lowenstein. “I must have spoken to twenty senators or congressmen,” he said in frustration. “Some thought I was a kook. Some of them listened. No one defended Lyndon Johnson or the war. I told them we had the strength. I told them there was a base in the student movement. But no major figure would take the lead—I couldn’t find a trigger or a fuse.”

  Deciding to call together a group of his most trusted advisers, Bobby scheduled a meeting for October 8. Up until that time, he’d said “nothing about running for president,” Ted Kennedy later recalled. “Although he’d burned to challenge Johnson at least since the summer.” He was aware that his brother was getting pushed to run by Lowenstein and by Jesse Unruh, an influential California Democrat who was speaker of the State Assembly.

  Ted was one of those at the session at New York’s Regency Hotel, which included aides who’d worked for Jack: Ken O’Donnell, Pierre Salinger, Richard Goodwin, Ted Sorensen, Fred Dutton, Chuck Daley, as well as brother-in-law Steve Smith, Jean’s husband.

  But, in fact, Bobby wasn’t at the meeting. That was Ted’s call. He thought it would keep the participants from speaking candidly about the pluses and minuses of Bobby running against a sitting Democratic president. His being there would also make it more difficult to keep the fact of the meeting from the press. Even though Bobby called at the last minute and said he wanted to come, Ted convinced him not to.

  “The consensus of the meeting was not to challenge Johnson unless his political position became much weaker than it seemed to be at the time,” wrote Bill vanden Heuvel, a Bobby ally who attended. “We had a good give-and-take and decided at the end of the day not to confront Johnson at that time, but not to endorse him either.” The decision was profoundly political. The belief of those assembled, with one or two exceptions, was that if Bobby ran for president the following year, it would badly damage what seemed to them his otherwise sure shot in 1972.

  Meanwhile, the antiwar movement was broadening itself. On October 21, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam organized the March on the Pentagon. A crowd of seventy thousand showed up on the Washington Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Among the speakers were Dr. Benjamin Spock, Norman Mailer, and poet Robert Lowell. The folksinger Phil Ochs, famed for his antiwar ballads such as “What Are You Fighting For?,” was a presence whose plaintive voice and passionate lyrics embodied the spirit of what was occurring. Once the Mall demonstration ended, fifty thousand women, men, and children walked across Memorial Bridge to the Department of Defense headquarters.

  It was my first large-scale antiwar event. What I recall from that sparkling Saturday was the smell of trampled grass—the lawn kind—the innocence of the young parents pushing baby strollers and of the young nuns I saw, along with the prevailing good cheer of the vast crowd. Whatever politics—whether old-style or new—were being proselytized at the many tables and kiosks, one truth was clear: the one successful recruiter there was the chance to oppose the war.

  Though I kept my emotional and physical distance—I chose to walk across the bridge along its sidewalks rather than in the ranks of the marchers—I found myself getting increasingly engaged. At the Pentagon parking lot, there was something about the crack U.S. infantry unit I saw there executing crowd-control maneuvers that struck me as disgustingly provocat
ive. At that moment, I understood how you can find yourself caught up in mob psychology. I saw good people being treated as if they were bad people which they clearly weren’t—and they knew it.

  • • •

  “It was like looking for your father.” Al Lowenstein would say that his hunt for an anti–Vietnam War leader felt like looking for a father. I knew the feeling. Our own parents couldn’t believe that their sons and daughters were daring to challenge a president’s call to arms. “You were down there with those Communists!” Mom cried out when I came home to Philadelphia that Thanksgiving. Though I didn’t know it at the time, I desperately wanted some grown-up to come along and say we were right, that it wasn’t that we were just afraid to fight a war the way our fathers so unquestioningly had.

  Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota now rose to the challenge. A member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in that state, he’d been, variously, over the past three decades, a public school teacher, an army code breaker, a Benedictine novice, a college professor, and finally a U.S. congressman before entering the Senate in 1958. He was the one credible leader who said “yes” when Lowenstein came courting, the serious challenger who could bring the antiwar sentiment up to the surface and start Lyndon Baines Johnson tumbling down.

  For a candidate to excite campuses, McCarthy was from central casting. He had the reserve of a popular lecturer along with the wit and apparent detachment of the professor you’d hope to have as a friend but liked him all the more for not needing someone like you. His diffidence, his lack of political bluster—seemingly even of personal ambition—made him the understated hero perfect for the taking down of the “my fellow Americans” orator sweating to us from the White House in prime time.

  To use the descriptions popularized by media guru Marshall McLuhan, Gene McCarthy was cool. Johnson, on the other hand, was hot. We didn’t need a lie detector to tell us which of the two we dearly wanted to believe.