Bobby Kennedy

by Chris Matthews

  As McCarthy began to ready himself to take the leap, Senator Robert Kennedy was moving to widen his difference with Johnson. Asked by a historian if his brother would have brought in 500,000 American troops to the Vietnam struggle, he was now sharp, direct, and impossible not to understand. “Never. The president would never have done it. He was determined not to send troops. If the South Vietnamese could not do it, the United States could not win it for them.” He said his brother had been hoping to neutralize Vietnam, in the same way he’d done with neighboring Laos in 1962.

  Then, in an appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation, Kennedy reasserted his conviction that Lyndon Johnson had deviated from his brother’s Vietnam policy. The war, he said, had become “immoral.”

  Still, he wasn’t running, not even now. “His general feeling is that it would be a great mistake for him to challenge Johnson at this point,” Arthur Schlesinger jotted in his journal after a Saturday-night dinner at Hickory Hill in early November. The historian felt that his host thought it “would be considered evidence of his ruthlessness, his ambition and a personal vendetta. On the other hand, he fully recognizes that the situation has changed a great deal and may change a lot more.”

  Schlesinger also observed: “He thinks that McCarthy’s entry into the primaries will help open things up, though he is perplexed as to how he should handle this himself. He acknowledges the danger that McCarthy might be successful enough to prevent the emergence of another anti-LBJ candidate, but feels he has no alternative but to wait. His hope is that, as McCarthy beats LBJ in primaries, state political leaders, faced with the prospect of local disaster if LBJ heads the ticket, will come to him and ask him to run in the interests of the party. In the meantime, he is refurbishing his national contacts.”

  Unlike Bobby, Gene McCarthy had kept to himself his actual feelings about the man sitting in the White House. Outwardly, he’d positioned himself as a loyalist, supporting him on matters before the Senate that were of specific Texas interest. The rousing speech he’d given nominating Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 Democratic convention was another example of his careful Johnson allegiance. It was, in effect, an LBJ blocking maneuver, a ploy to prevent Jack Kennedy from a first-ballot win.

  But there was, perhaps, payback in Eugene McCarthy’s candidacy. Four years earlier in Atlantic City, Johnson had shown his disrespect for the senator by dangling the vice presidency in his face, just to gin up some needed convention drama. Now, going to see Bobby, Senator McCarthy let him know he planned to run in New Hampshire—the earliest Democratic primary—even if he didn’t expect to get more than five thousand votes to Johnson’s projected forty thousand.

  On November 30, McCarthy made it official. His hat was in the ring. “They say I’m committing suicide,” McCarthy said, following his announcement. “Well, I’d rather do that and face up to the wrongness of the war than die of political old age.” For him, he emphasized, it was more about principles than personal political gain. He also explained that he wanted no future regrets, no thinking “I should have made myself available in 1968.”

  Bill Clinton, a Georgetown University student at the time, was one of those college students impressed by what they saw: “As the party’s heir apparent to Adlai Stevenson’s intellectual liberalism, McCarthy could be maddening, even disingenuous, in his efforts to appear almost saintly in his lack of ambition. But he had the guts to take on Johnson.”

  Meanwhile, the men around Bobby Kennedy were considering the new situation. A meeting at Bill vanden Heuvel’s New York apartment—to discuss what now—was scheduled. This time, with the potential candidate there in the room, the advisers were divided. Arthur Schlesinger and Richard Goodwin backed Bobby’s entering the race. Salinger and O’Donnell, too, leaned heavily in that direction. The two Teds, Kennedy and Sorensen, were firmly against.

  “We both believed that Johnson would win reelection and that my brother should wait until 1972 when he would be the logical successor,” the younger Kennedy recalled. To this, Bobby wondered aloud if the world could endure another Johnson term.

  Schlesinger would sum up the meeting as “troubled and inconclusive” and Bobby as “torn, rueful,” though clearly “sorely tempted.” Persisting in the need for caution, the noncandidate’s own summation was, “We haven’t decided anything—so I guess I’m not running.”

  In the year-end issue of The Village Voice, Jack Newfield wrote an astute appraisal:

  If Kennedy does not run in 1968, the best side of his character will die. He will kill it every time he butchers his conscience and makes a speech for Johnson next autumn. It will die every time a kid asks him, if he is so much against the Vietnam War, how come he is putting party above principle? It will die every time a stranger quotes his own words back to him on the value of courage as a human quality.

  Kennedy’s best quality is his ability to be himself, to be authentic in the existential sense. This is the quality the best young identify with so instinctively in Kennedy. And it is this quality Kennedy will lose if he doesn’t make his stand now against Johnson. He will become a robot mouthing dishonest rhetoric like all the other politicians.

  The subject’s reaction to the article was direct and candid. “I just have to decide now whether my running can accomplish anything. I don’t want to run only as a gesture. I don’t want it to drive Johnson into doing something really crazy.

  “I don’t want it to hurt the doves in the Senate who are up for re-election,” he continued. “I don’t want it to be interpreted in the press as just part of a personal vendetta or feud with Johnson.

  “It’s all so complicated. I just don’t know what to do.”

  Bobby touring a tenement in New York’s Lower East Side.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  VIGIL

  “My problem is that I don’t have anyone to be for me what I was for my brother.”

  —ROBERT KENNEDY

  Ted Kennedy was the one person close to Bobby who’d remained firmly opposed to a run for president in 1968. The reason he gave whether at meetings or alone with his brother had to do with the pure politics of the matter. He believed an attempt in 1968 would fall short, with Johnson handily securing the nomination. And if that were to happen, then the solid chance his brother might otherwise have for the 1972 nomination and the presidency would be in ashes. His was the seasoned pol’s conviction that timing is everything.

  Deep within Bobby was the dream of restoring the banner of the New Frontier to the American presidency. Beneath Teddy’s earned political savvy, however, was the concern he’d brought into all those sessions debating a second Kennedy run for the White House. What he had was a real worry he’d never shared with Bobby, whom he’d feared for so long wouldn’t survive the loss of Jack. It was a specter he’d admit to only years later: “We weren’t that far away from ’63, and that still was very much of a factor.”

  Ted knew their father would have advised against running, just as he’d counseled against Jack’s trying for the vice presidential nomination back in 1956. Then, too, the timing had been off. The early 1968 dynamic, though, was complicated. Ted figured that Jack, were he now in Bobby’s circle of advisers, might have looked at the current moment and cautioned him against jumping in. Yet Ted also was willing to bet that if it were now Jack himself faced with the dilemma, he’d not have hesitated.

  What finally pushed Ted to relent and soften his opposition was his grasp of the way Bobby’s conscience and compassion were now driving him. “It was not just the war,” he would explain. “It was . . . how the war was propelling the direction of America, especially the young people, the underprivileged, the underserved, those struggling for their civil rights. It was the inflaming of the cities and the failure to deal with the root causes of the flames.”

  Ted believed his brother—growing more and more aware of the equality and fairness missing from so many American lives—at the same time was feeling greater pressure to find remedies. “When people came to Bobby—as they did, s
aying, ‘You can change this. You can do it’—he felt an obligation to do something.”

  Even so, Bobby continued to hesitate. At a New York dinner in early January, he told his companions he couldn’t help but fear the traps Johnson might be setting for him if he declared. Sitting with Schlesinger, actor Sidney Poitier, astronaut John Glenn, and others, he told them he believed there were politicians urging him on whose agendas were their own, not his. He worried, too, that the wily occupant of the Oval Office might immediately shift his Vietnam policies the moment he declared his candidacy.

  “Suppose, in the middle of the California primary, when I’m attacking him on the war, he should suddenly stop the bombing and go off to Geneva to hold talks with the North Vietnamese? What do I do then? Either I call his action phony, in which case I am lining up with Ho Chi Minh, or else, I have to say that all Americans should support the president in this search for peace. In either case, I’m likely to lose.”

  At a dinner later that month, he remained fixed on the idea of Johnson’s possible vindictiveness. How could he stand against a president “prepared to escalate or de-escalate, to bomb or stop bombing”—anything to turn the tables and make Bobby the villain?

  At a meeting with reporters on January 30, Bobby put his decision on the record. “I have told friends and supporters who are urging me to run that I would not oppose Lyndon Johnson under any conceivable circumstances.”

  But almost immediately after he’d spoken, Mankiewicz stopped the departing reporters to ask them to change one word his boss had just used—from “conceivable” to “foreseeable.” The reason for the sudden edit, approved by Kennedy, could be found in the information on a slip of wire service copy he’d just passed to the senator. It contained early reports from Vietnam of a devastating Communist incursion into the South.

  Later that day, The Washington Evening Star, the capital’s afternoon daily, featured Bobby’s decision not to run on the front page. But the far more prominent story was captured in the headline, “Reds Launch Mightiest Offense.” The Tet Offensive, as the driving onslaught came to be known, consisted of vicious attacks made across the country by eighty thousand North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops. In one city, Hue, alone, thousands of civilians were executed. It was the largest military operation by either side up until then, and its lethal scope stunned an American public that until that moment had been convinced such areas, including Saigon, were safe from attack.

  Whatever actually had been occurring on the ground in Vietnam, it bore little resemblance to the carefully tailored propaganda fed by U.S. officials there to the U.S. press corps based in Saigon. Though they had little choice but to transmit the official version of the grim reality, the increasingly skeptical newsmen dubbed those daily briefings among themselves “the Five O’Clock Follies.” Tet had proven those skeptics right.

  With more than 535,000 troops in his command, General Westmoreland followed Tet by requesting 206,000 more. Meanwhile, back in Chapel Hill, common sense told me, a grad student in economics, that if we weren’t able to win with more than a half million soldiers, it was unlikely additional troops would make the difference. The same common sense said we weren’t winning—and that we weren’t going to win.

  As the people around him realized, each day it was becoming harder for Bobby to sit on the sidelines. Yet however powerful his instinctive need to respond, he held himself back. During an appearance on The Tonight Show, he expressed to guest host Harry Belafonte his view that a successful challenge to President Johnson would be “very difficult” politically.

  “The views that I represent,” he told him, “I don’t think they’re supported by anything other than a minority in the United States.” Looking around, however, one could see that this reality was daily changing.

  The power of the war opponents was about to get a boost. CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, just returned from a reporting assignment in South Vietnam, said this on the evening broadcast of February 27:

  We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. Any negotiations must be that—negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.

  Not long after this, the trusted Cronkite startled Mankiewicz by requesting to meet privately with Bobby. When the press secretary had arranged this, the newsman—ignoring the ground rules of journalistic neutrality that in ordinary times he’d have observed—spoke frankly and forcefully to the senator. “You must run for president against LBJ. It’s the only way to stop this awful war.”

  And still Bobby felt unsure of the road forward. And while he waited and watched, unable to commit, excitement over the McCarthy campaign continued to mount. Across New Hampshire, its citizens found eager students—polite and persuasive—at their front doors. If they were young men, they had shaved off their beards, and cut their long hair, to get “Clean for Gene.” It was accepted that resembling the raucous protesters seen on the nightly news would never be the way to convince Granite State voters to back their man.

  Heading to the UNC Student Union each evening to watch the news with the other regulars, I savored hearing Cronkite and his colleague Eric Sevareid recount the latest progress of the McCarthy volunteers up there tromping determinedly through “the snows of New Hampshire.” Ever since Dallas, the spirit of American politics had seemed to me to be dead and buried. Now, it felt like it was being reborn.

  As the March 12 primary drew closer, the strategic advantage enjoyed by the McCarthy camp was arithmetical. It was about the odds. With state polls showing him hardly in double digits, he was nonetheless in a win-win situation. All he had to do, he said, was “beat the spread.” He even liked to joke that his name could turn out to have an added-bonus effect: conservative Republicans might write him in thinking he was that other McCarthy.

  On primary night, as it turned out, he exceeded expectations, winning over 42 percent to Johnson’s 49.5 percent. Throwing in the Republican write-ins for each of them, he’d lost to the president by a bare 230 votes.

  In New York that night, Robert Kennedy admitted he was feeling boxed in. McCarthy certainly wouldn’t quit the race now. Bobby understood. “I don’t blame him at all,” he said. “Of course he feels that he gave me my chance to make the try, that I didn’t and that he has earned the right to go ahead. I can’t blame him.”

  He could see, also, the implicit advantage for him in McCarthy’s strong showing. “He has done a great job in opening the situation up.” The political landscape now looked different. He, Bobby, could no longer be tagged as the outlier dividing the Democratic Party. It was divided already.

  Near midnight he reached Richard Goodwin, who’d been writing speeches for McCarthy and who now felt certain President Johnson was down for the count. “What do I do now?” Bobby asked him.

  As they talked, Bobby went on to try, though without success, to reenlist Goodwin to his own team. “He failed to realize,” Goodwin wrote later, “that the triumph in New Hampshire had transformed McCarthy into a national figure—fresh, attractive, with a powerful hold on the imagination of the electorate—a shining knight from Minnesota assaulting the battlements of established power.”

  But Bobby was moving away from indecision and toward commitment. “I’m reassessing the possibility of whether I will run against President Johnson,” he told reporters when he returned to Washington the next morning.

  Ted Sorensen now brought forth a proposal to Bobby that made sense, one that addressed the Vietnam War directly. His idea was to ask Lyndon Johnson to assemble a high-level commission to review all aspects of America’s Vietnam policy. It would amount, the thinking went, to an implicit admission that current U.S. strategy wasn’t working. This would permit Johnson, and presumably his successor, to move toward a negotiated settlement.

  President Johnson, approach
ed privately by Sorensen, had indicated interest. “If it could be done without looking to the Communists as though we’re throwing in our hand,” the man Jack Kennedy had once likened to a riverboat gambler said, “it might be useful.”

  On Thursday morning, two days after New Hampshire, Sorensen and Bobby went together to the Pentagon to present the idea of the commission, meeting secretly with the new secretary of defense, Clark Clifford. His predecessor, Robert McNamara, had resigned, owing to his own increasing dissatisfaction with President Johnson’s policies.

  A cornerstone of the presentation made to Clifford that morning was Bobby’s insistence that the commission be set up as a sincere and valid effort and not merely a “public relations gimmick.” His clear conviction was, from the start, that the appointed members would need to demonstrate their “clear-cut willingness” to seek a peaceful settlement on Vietnam. However, it didn’t take long for Clifford to return to Bobby with his new boss’s thumbs-down. Acknowledging anything even resembling failure held no interest for Lyndon Johnson.

  That initiative and its dead-end result ended the months of hanging back. At eleven o’clock Friday morning, Robert Kennedy instructed Frank Mankiewicz, “Better reserve the Senate Caucus Room for tomorrow.”

  “Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight.” Bobby Kennedy, Indianapolis, April 4, 1968.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  DEFIANCE

  “To take arms against a sea of troubles.”

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

  Once he’d decided to declare—on Saturday, March 16—Bobby hoped to avoid a fight that would divide the antiwar forces. Seeking to solve the problem before it became one, he dispatched brother Ted to Wisconsin the day before to try to persuade McCarthy to split the upcoming primary races between them.