It would be a form of sharing their mutual effort to unseat LBJ, and it meant each agreeing to step aside in states where the other had the best chance. In that way, the antiwar vote’s strength might be maximized and, together, they might bring down Johnson.
By the time he reached Green Bay, however, Senator McCarthy had already gone to bed. Awakened, he and his wife, Abigail, listened to Ted, rejecting his proposal out of hand. Gene McCarthy was determined to keep the electoral edge he’d gained in New Hampshire.
He told his late-night visitor to let his brother know that if he was joining the fight, he’d have to take his chances—and not just with Lyndon Johnson. McCarthy, the man who’d gone first, was adamant. He wasn’t going to move over simply because a Kennedy wanted in.
Returning east by chartered plane, Ted made it to Bobby’s house before dawn Saturday with the disappointing news. “What do you think I should do?” Bobby asked Arthur Schlesinger, who had joined them for the announcement.
“Why not come out for McCarthy?” he answered, saying that all of the Minnesotan’s delegates were potential Kennedy ones. “He can’t possibly win, so you’ll be the certain inheritor of his support.”
“I can’t do that,” Bobby shot back. “It would be too humiliating. Kennedys don’t act that way.”
The group surrounding him that Saturday morning at Hickory Hill—the two Teds, Bill vanden Heuvel, as well as Schlesinger—was wary. They sensed the resentment his entry would trigger, especially among the antiwar liberals. If Bobby entered now, as far as they were concerned he’d be jumping McCarthy’s claim. Worse still, he’d be blamed for splitting the anti-Johnson forces, thus allowing the president to win the nomination after all.
“Look, fellows,” Bobby told them. “I can’t do it. I can’t come out for McCarthy. Let’s not talk about it anymore. I’m going ahead, and there’s no point in talking about anything else.” Still, he, too, was able to see what was happening, grasping the real possibility that his goal—stopping the Vietnam War—might be defeated by the very act of becoming a candidate.
But it didn’t deter him. In his mind, the die was cast. Eager to get on with it, he now started work on the speech he soon would deliver. He wrote of his desire to heal the country’s wounds, and of the need to close the gaps between black and white, rich and poor, even between generations. Yet, aware of the tremors ahead, he couldn’t help but joke grimly that he’d be creating a gap of his own “by splitting the Democratic party in three pieces.”
• • •
Certainly, after playing Hamlet for so many months, Bobby now was facing his own “sea of troubles.” He had to beat Lyndon Johnson with one hand, brush back McCarthy with the other. He needed to win the primaries—preferably, as his brother had done, taking all of them. Simultaneously, he needed to woo that bulk of the country where party leaders, not primaries, selected their states’ delegates.
This meant splitting his time between battling primaries, one at a time, and getting his poll numbers up nationwide. He’d not be able to let up, not before the critically important California primary in early June. Still, it wouldn’t really slow down after that. Up until the end of August, when delegates began arriving in Chicago for the convention, he had to be trawling for them whenever and wherever he was able. To most political onlookers, the task facing him—to lock up the Democratic nomination for president—verged close to impossible.
There was, as well, a challenge he saw as particularly his own. He was looking to maximize his popularity among minorities, exciting them enough to turn out at the polls in large numbers. Yet it would be a balancing act. He’d need to accomplish that feat while at the same time not scaring off the white working-class voters who’d formed the base of Kennedy support since his brother first ran for office in 1946.
Plus, there was the hard truth that he was starting out so very late. His brother Jack had believed that starting early—seriously early, long before any opponents—was the only way to launch a political campaign. By deciding to enter the presidential contest on March 16, with the primary season already in progress, Bobby had lost the opportunity to obey the rule.
Coming in now as he was, he was asking those who’d already endorsed Johnson or who supported Gene McCarthy to switch sides. Such timing, too, made it difficult for governors, senators, and party chairmen to join him. Yet these were the very party stalwarts he’d need to win over, even if he won the major primaries lying ahead. Democratic leaders across the country were about to be put on notice: they had to decide for or against him.
Most Democrats were already committed to Lyndon Johnson. He, after all, was the incumbent. Kennedy’s one hope, given Johnson’s wily strength and McCarthy’s idealistic challenging of it, was to make use of a special power he and he alone possessed. He could excite people with the undeniably romantic notion of another Kennedy era, a New-er Frontier.
To help with the process of rounding up delegates, Dave Hackett signed on to put together an operation like he’d carried through for Jack in 1960. His loyalty hadn’t faltered. Knowing Bobby so well for so long and now watching him mature, he believed his old friend had evolved from the misfit he’d known at Milton to a potential unifier on the national stage.
After announcing, Bobby headed west to start his roving campaign—the plan was sixteen states in two weeks—at Kansas State University. Frank Mankiewicz, who walked into the giant field house with Kennedy, was stunned by the reaction he received. “Roars rolled out one after another as he entered. I’d never seen anything like it.” The tumult felt like being on the “inside of Niagara Falls”—as another seasoned political observer, Jack Newfield, described it.
Standing there before a fifteen-thousand-strong crowd, Kennedy admitted to having once been a cheerleader for the country’s commitment in Vietnam. “But past error is no excuse for its own perpetuation. All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong and repairs the evil.”
He went on to offer a stunning philosophical question: “If it becomes necessary to destroy all of South Vietnam to save it, will we do that, too? And if we care so little about South Vietnam that we are willing to see its land destroyed, and its people dead, then why are we there in the first place?”
Later that day, at the University of Kansas, he introduced what was to be his campaign’s overarching theme, the idea he placed at “the root of all of it.” Driving him, he declared, was the quest to find again “the national soul of the United States.”
What he saw in the country gravely worried him. “Our young people—the best educated and the best comforted in our history, turn from the Peace Corps and the public commitment of a few years ago to lives of disengagement and despair—many of them turned on with drugs and turned off on America.” Personal excellence and community values, he observed, were being sacrificed to “the accumulation of material things.”
He spoke, too, of those whom he, in sorrow, called the country’s “unknowns”—the children of the Mississippi Delta with their distended stomachs and “destroyed minds”; the Indians living on reservations where the most common cause of death is suicide; of the impoverished whites in Appalachia and the families in the black ghettos of the big cities. In each case, he pronounced the conditions there “unacceptable.”
But it was when he vehemently opposed the Vietnam War that the crowd’s response was the strongest. It was as if he could “feel the fabric ripping,” he told one of the reporters covering him as they flew back to New York. “If we don’t get out of this war, I don’t know what these young people are going to do. There’s going to be no way to talk to them. It’s very dangerous.”
Yet there were journalists who now saw Bobby himself as the danger. The Washington Post’s Richard Harwood, a former marine, referred to him as a “demagogue” for blaming Lyndon Johnson for all the country’s ills—ranging from youthful drug addiction to draft resistance to urban rioting. In his view, Robert Kennedy was trying to win the nomination by “r
evolution.”
Later that week, Kennedy addressed 8,500 students at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, scene of the tense confrontation with Governor Wallace five years earlier. “When a man leaves his home to risk death 12,000 miles away, while we live and study in comfort, I want him to find the door of opportunity open when he returns.” This attempt to identify civil rights with basic patriotism was greeted with considered applause.
When he was asked if he’d ever consider accepting second place on a Lyndon Johnson ticket, his reply was swift, and sharp. “You don’t understand. I said I was for a coalition government in Saigon, not here.”
Returning to New York, an airport bystander gave him the startling news. On prime-time television earlier that evening, Lyndon Johnson had announced he wouldn’t seek renomination. He said he was unwilling to allow “partisan personal causes” to distract him from his presidential duties. It’s likely, however, that a quite different and very specific motive lay behind that bombshell: he’d had twenty-four hours to think over the news that late-breaking polls showed that Eugene McCarthy, the man he’d failed to manipulate back in Atlantic City, was about to beat him—two-to-one—in the April 2 Wisconsin primary.
What Johnson did not announce that dramatic night was his decision to throw his support to Hubert Humphrey. That would come later as, backed by LBJ’s influence, his vice president picked up loyal state delegations across the country. Fearful of entering primaries, where antiwar sentiment would run strong, Humphrey intended to win the nomination entirely in the back rooms.
It wasn’t McCarthy LBJ cared about. “The thing I feared from the first day of my presidency,” he’d recall years later, “was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of his name, were dancing in the streets.”
Speaking at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, on April 4—that state’s primary was still a month away—Robert Kennedy held fast to his course of being antiwar while at the same time supporting the cause of a fair draft policy. There he told an audience of five thousand that student deferments discriminated against those who were eligible but couldn’t afford college. The next stop that day was Ball State University in Muncie, where a crowd of nine thousand awaited him. “For all the advantages that we have, don’t we have a major responsibility to those that don’t have those advantages?” he questioned.
“You’re placing a great deal of faith in white America,” a black student now questioned him. “Is this faith justified?” Bobby, accepting the challenge, noted first that there were “black extremists who do not like white people and . . . are teaching violence and lawlessness and disorder.” At the same time, he acknowledged that there are also “white people who say . . . black people are inferior and therefore don’t want to treat them equally.”
Finally, he offered hope. “I think the vast majority of the American people want to do the decent and the right thing.”
As they were about to leave Muncie, there came sudden word that Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis, Tennessee. The reply he’d just given to the Ball State student—which had offered no assurances but had talked about “the decent and the right thing”—now haunted Bobby. “It grieves me,” he said to a reporter. “I just told that kid this—and then walk out to find that some white man has just shot their spiritual leader.”
In Indianapolis that night, a Kennedy rally was scheduled to take place in the Broadway neighborhood, an inner-city African American community. Civil rights leader John Lewis, who’d joined the Kennedy campaign, had helped organize the event. “There were some people saying that . . . maybe he shouldn’t come, because, maybe there would be violence. But some of us said he must come.” The candidate himself agreed. “Our local campaign leadership, and the city leaders,” Mankiewicz recalled, “urged that the meeting be canceled, because security could not be guaranteed. But Kennedy insisted that was one of the reasons he had to keep the date.”
A situation fraught with risk was now made riskier: the local police who’d been assigned to escort the motorcade to the rally site refused to proceed into the black neighborhood. Instead, the cars bringing in the candidate and his staff had to go it alone. “What am I going to say?” Bobby asked as they drove past thronged sidewalks where no one yet knew the terrible news.
Having climbed atop a flatbed truck, he went to the microphone. “Do they know about Martin Luther King?” you can hear him ask his hosts on the tape. It’s clear that they don’t.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, speaking without notes. “I am only going to talk to you just for a minute or so this evening because I have some very sad news for all of you . . . and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.”
There was a collective gasp. At first, his listeners didn’t believe what they were hearing. There was even scattered applause from those excited at his presence and so ready to cheer that they didn’t make out his words. Bobby then continued:
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.
For those of you who are black—considering the evidence evidently is that there were white people who were responsible—you can be filled with bitterness, and with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization—black people amongst black, and white amongst whites, filled with hatred toward one another.
Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand compassion and love.
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed—but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond or go beyond these rather difficult times.
A favorite poem, my favorite poet—was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
What we need in the United States is not division. What we need in the United States is not hatred. What we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country—whether they be white or they be black.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We’ve had difficult times in the past. We will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence. It is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder. . . .
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people. Thank you very much.
It took this tragic moment in America’s racial history to forge the bond that Robert Kennedy had been seeking. The recognition of shared victimhood played a part. His reference to a “member of my family” was the sole public mention he was ever to make regarding his own relationship to what he would call “the events of November 1963.”
As the evening went on, riots broke out in a hundred American cities, Indianapolis not among them. Dozens were killed, thousands injured. Stunned as many white Americans were by the killing of Martin Luther King, the more powerful electoral effect resulted from
the widespread urban violence. Fueled by a powerful mix of anger, grief, resentment, and a need for revenge that became known as “white backlash,” the term itself became a license for more of the same.
Bobby knew what he believed. That certainty kept him from being swept along in the collective emotion. Though a man of growing compassion, he believed in law and order and didn’t hesitate to employ the phrase. He fought discrimination, despaired over the tragedy in Memphis, but also was unable to tolerate seeing the nation’s capital burning in response.
His daughter Kerry, then eight, remembers watching with him scenes of the rioting on TV. He said he understood their frustration, but described the people they saw as “bad.” A former attorney general, after all, he believed justice impossible without enforcement of the law.
At the City Club in Cleveland, Ohio, on the day after King’s assassination, he addressed the topic of violence in America. “Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily—whether it’s done in the name of the law or in the defense of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence—whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.”
For Bobby, Eugene McCarthy remained the obvious roadblock. In Schlesinger’s opinion, the basic problem was that McCarthy had seized the loyalty of the young and idealistic. The pioneer tends to be the hero. “McCarthy,” he said, “by the single act of prior entry, captured Bobby’s constituency and, with it, a lot of the dynamism of the campaign.”
With the Indiana primary drawing nearer, Bobby’s hope was to carry a substantial white vote that would match his dominant strength among African Americans. He saw it as a positive sign when he experienced appreciative welcomes from both groups in Gary, Indiana, four days before voters would go to the polls.
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