There, he rode in a convertible seated between Mayor Richard Hatcher, the city’s first African American leader, and Gary’s most famous citizen, the prizefighter Tony Zale. Known as the “Man of Steel” for the mills where he’d once worked and always had lived near, Zale was a two-time middleweight champion. Bobby would end the day with his own hands bloody, cuff links and even shoes missing, so frenzied were his reaching fans. “That being touched all the time,” he told a reporter. “I don’t like it. But people can hear everything about a candidate; and it’s the touching him they never forget.”
“The people here were fair to me,” he said late on election eve. “They gave me a chance. They listened to me. If they don’t like you they let you know; if they do like you they let you know that, too.”
In the end, Bobby Kennedy won the Indiana Democratic primary, receiving 42 percent of the vote. The popular governor, Roger Branigin, running as a favorite son, won 31 percent, Senator McCarthy 28.
Richard Goodwin, who’d left the McCarthy campaign and returned to the Kennedy fold, believed Bobby had found his message. “His inner urge toward defiance—of unjust privilege, indifferent power, concentrated wealth, which provide so much hatred among some—was also the source of his greatest strength, arousing the hopes and expectations of millions who felt themselves victimized.”
As Bobby himself saw it: “I’ve proved I can really be a leader of a broad spectrum. I can be a bridge between blacks and whites without stepping back from my positions.”
Bobby and Ethel celebrate victory in the California primary, June 5, 1968.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
SACRIFICE
“Blest are those whose blood and judgment are so well commingled.”
—HAMLET
The week after Indiana, Bobby trounced the competition in a second primary, this time in Nebraska. It was a convincing margin: 52 percent to Gene McCarthy’s 31. This victory gave hope that he could well be on a streak with McCarthy gradually fading with each contest.
Missing from the headlines, though, was the attention that could have been paid to the Minnesotan’s shrewd retreat. McCarthy had touched down in Nebraska for a single day, merely to show his flag, then headed off to Oregon where the political landscape looked more welcoming.
Bobby’s optimism after Indiana and Nebraska, if not exactly wishful thinking, ignored a basic truth. “At every stage of the campaign,” Bill vanden Heuvel recalled, “Kennedy was to underestimate McCarthy’s strength. He did not perceive . . . how the mystique of the New Hampshire triumph had transformed McCarthy from the political gadfly of January to a fresh, attractive figure with a powerful hold on the imagination of the electorate.”
He also hadn’t yet grasped how McCarthy appeared to those meeting him at home on their TV screens. Dry and a tad disappointing in person, he came across on television—despite his liberal voting record and still-unpopular call for a negotiated end to the Vietnam War—as, essentially, a Midwestern moderate of the we-should-listen-to-him sort. No matter how close to radical was his position, his professorial mien suggested peaceful compromise, not disagreeable rabble-rousing.
To many, Robert Kennedy gave the opposite impression, a man whose intention was to shake things up. On the last weekend before the May 28 balloting in Oregon, for example, he visited Roseburg, a county seat in the southern part of the state. There, despite the local sheriff’s warning about hostile demonstrators, Bobby took up the issue of gun control. Standing before a crowd that included a good many hunters in this lumber industry town, he made his case with angry indignation. A fellow “on death row” in Kansas, he told his listeners, a murderer who’d killed a half dozen people, sent away to Chicago for a mail-order rifle and had it arrive.
“Does that make any sense?” he demanded to know. “That you should put rifles and guns in the hands of people who have long criminal records, of people who are insane, of people who are mentally incompetent or people who are so young they don’t know how to handle rifles and guns?” Yet even this drew boos from his listeners. “They’ll get them anyway!” one fellow shouted.
Yet even riding for forty minutes in an open convertible in the rain didn’t dampen his spirits: “Name something you’ve done that was more fun than this!” he challenged Jim Whittaker, his mountain-climbing pal who’d come along to help.
As Whittaker described his experiences accompanying Bobby: “He threw himself into the crowds and tried to reach as many people as possible. They responded with frightening enthusiasm.” Nonetheless, Gene McCarthy took Oregon with 45 percent of the vote, Kennedy getting only 38. It was the first time he’d lost an election, either as Jack’s campaign manager or now as a candidate himself. “He was devastated by that loss,” Goodwin recalled.
Bobby refused to pass the blame. “If I’d won it, it would have been my victory, and I’ve lost it and it’s my defeat. I sometimes wonder if I’ve correctly sensed the mood of America. I think I have. But maybe I’m all wrong. Maybe the people don’t want things changed.”
Pat Buchanan, then a Nixon campaign researcher and speechwriter, found himself impressed by the way that Kennedy absorbed the shock of losing. “His graciousness in conceding defeat and congratulating Gene McCarthy was impressive. This is the first time I’d seen Bobby in person. He could not have shown himself better in victory than he did in defeat that night.”
In the hours following the Oregon results, Bobby now showed himself willing to rethink his tactics. This included taking a more respectful attitude to his rival. The people had spoken, and Eugene McCarthy had earned the right to be taken seriously. Having resisted his rival’s call for a debate, he relented. “I’m not in much of a position now to say he’s not a serious candidate. Hell, if he’s not a serious candidate after tonight, then I’m not a candidate at all.”
So now it was on to California, where the primary was scheduled for the next Tuesday, June 4. On the morning after he lost Oregon, Bobby arrived in Los Angeles. Once again he stood in an open convertible as it drove slowly through streets of black and Mexican American neighborhoods en route from the airport to Beverly Hills. Once more, his cuff links were grabbed away, his shirt torn, and his clothing soaked with sweat. “I will work with all of you,” he promised. “Give me your help.”
John Lewis watched, amazed. “People treated him like he was some rock star. It was young people. It was blacks, white, Hispanic, just pulling for him.” As historian Ronald Steel viewed it, Kennedy was using “hysteria as an electoral device, plunging into the crowds his advance men organized . . . presenting his body to the crowds as virtually a sacrificial offering.”
But the increasingly wild excitement of those crowds greeting Bobby came at a price. For one thing, it didn’t play well in living rooms when glimpsed on the evening newscasts. Seen in thirty-second bites, it scared white voters. For political chronicler Theodore White, the impression conveyed by the sight of Robert Kennedy welcomed by an excited crowd was “almost demoniac, frightening.”
Though Bobby’s desire was to bring together citizens from all communities, the fear born of the urban riots following the death of Martin Luther King was pulling Americans in a very different direction. Across the country, from Watts to Washington, it seemed as if a different, closer-to-home war was erupting in America’s backyards.
Bobby had worries on another front—the campus. McCarthy’s candidacy had done what Bobby’s hadn’t. By starting early, he had worked a magnetic effect on college students, pulling them to his cause. I remember seeing on television CBS’s Roger Mudd confronting Kennedy with that fact as the two sat together in an airport waiting area. How much did this hurt? Mudd wanted to know. The expression on Bobby’s face, after hearing the question, showed the answer.
How could he ever forget his visit to the University of San Francisco, where a student had spat in his face or when he’d heard another yelling “Fascist pig!” only to realize the epithet was directed at him? Somehow, in the perversity of competitive politics, this rebellious spi
rit, this born misfit, had allowed himself to be positioned as a defender of the status quo.
In mid-May, Jim Whittaker reported receiving a phone call from Ethel. “He’s getting more and more death threats,” she told him, “and I’m worried.”
But Bobby, who’d refused to worry about his personal safety, now revealed a fatalism about his electoral chances. “I can accept the fact I may not be nominated now,” he told Jack Newfield. “If that happens, I’ll just go back to the Senate and say what I believe, and not try again in ’72. Somebody has to speak up for the Negroes, the Indians and the Mexicans, and poor whites. Maybe that’s what I do best. Maybe my personality just isn’t built for this. The issues are more important than me now.”
On Saturday, June 1, came the debate with McCarthy, broadcast nationwide on ABC’s Issues and Answers. This “first official confrontation” took place in the network’s San Francisco studios and lasted an hour. It was a question-and-answer format, with the two politicians seated at a round table with three newsmen. When Bobby was asked the question he’d most been dreading—if, as attorney general, he’d authorized a wiretap on Martin Luther King—he sidestepped. The civil rights leader was a “great and loyal American,” he said, and left it at that. McCarthy did not follow up. By the end, it was clear the two men were more in agreement than not.
Though the press, by and large, pronounced it a draw, what mattered in the end was the public’s reaction, captured afterward. McCarthy’s supporters, who’d imagined their man’s smoothly polished verbal skills would prevail, were hoping for a decisive win. Instead, they were presented with the opposite result: 60 percent scored it for Kennedy.
Reporters assigned to the Democratic primary race were starting to look more closely at this Kennedy who’d spent years growing beyond being Joseph Kennedy’s son and John Kennedy’s brother. What many wound up with was a deepening respect for the authenticity they now saw in him. Richard Harwood, who’d asked his Washington Post editor to be assigned to a different candidate, told him: “I’m falling in love with this guy.” Explaining his request later, he said, “I think we were getting partisan. We hadn’t quite become cheerleaders, but we were in danger of it.”
An exhausted Bobby spent primary day, June 4, with his wife and family at a friend’s beach house in Santa Monica. When his son David was caught in the surf, his father swam out and brought him back.
By evening, with projections showing Robert Kennedy the winner—the New York primary looming two weeks later—Bobby told Richard Goodwin, already at work on a victory speech, that he wanted to mend fences with McCarthy. His rival’s Oregon win, along with the strong challenge he’d presented in California, demanded open respect. Dave Hackett had just showed him his tally of the up-to-date delegate count; it indicated that Bobby wouldn’t be able to catch Hubert Humphrey’s backroom campaign as long as he was in open combat with McCarthy.
Praising the McCarthy movement to Goodwin, he added, “I’d like to say something nice about him personally.” He was ready to offer a deal. “I think we should tell him if he withdraws now and supports me, I’ll make him secretary of state.” His brother had proposed this, though without success, back in 1960 to encourage Adlai Stevenson to leave the fight.
Reaching Ken O’Donnell back east at Washington headquarters, he summed up how the moment seemed to him. “You know, I feel now for the first time that I’ve shaken off the shadow of my brother. I feel I made it on my own.”
With an hour to go before addressing the crowd late that night at the Ambassador Hotel, Bobby dropped into a conversation with reporters a telling phrase. It was one he’d picked up from John Buchan, the author of Pilgrim’s Way, Jack’s favorite book. Buchan, Bobby said, had called politics an “honorable adventure.” What struck him about the phrase, I think, was how it summed up what he’d come to believe: it was all worth it if the journey had a purpose.
“I have an association with those who are less well off, where perhaps we can accomplish something,” he told an interviewer that night, “bringing the country back together—and that we can start to put into effect, all of us working together—some programs that will have some meaning. If the division continues, we’re going to have nothing but chaos and havoc here in the United States.”
Later, addressing the excited crowd there in the hotel with Ethel standing beside him, he said, “I think we can end the divisions within the United States, whether it’s between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent or between age groups or on the war in Vietnam. We can start to work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country. I intend to make that my basis for running.”
He had found a good in politics, its purpose, his purpose. He had found his mission in life. He wanted to go on, wanted dearly to go on.
Robert Kennedy campaigns before a poster of Jack.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SALUTE
“Is everybody else all right?”
—BOBBY KENNEDY JUNE 4, 1968
In early June of 1968, a fellow grad student of mine was headed up to Montreal to check out a job. He was thinking about moving there to avoid the Vietnam draft and invited me to join him for the weekend. The city was beautiful, sparkling and sunny, alive with excitement about Canada’s youthful and progressive new prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The new political atmosphere put all of the city’s French charm and commercial bustle on radiant display.
For me, an important personal moment that long weekend came as I sat on a park bench several blocks up from Saint Catherine Street studying a list of notes to myself. These were my options on what to do now that my student deferment was turning into a pumpkin. The one that jumped out at me—promising adventure, patriotism, and good values—was the Peace Corps. My preference: Africa.
I was still in Montreal when Bobby was shot. Turning on the radio in the dark that Wednesday morning what I heard sounded like a reprise of Dallas. It took a couple of minutes for me to realize a new horror had come to pass. Later, as I traveled to the airport, the cab driver kept repeating aloud the same idiotic sentence: “The giant has stubbed its toe.” Rather than honor the calamity, he was striking some weirdly small blow for Canadian nationalism. “The giant has stubbed its toe,” he continued to say, with growing pride at his cleverness.
It was still a question of whether Bobby would make it. I’d prayed for his victory in the California primary. For me, he seemed to offer the only real hope of stopping the war. Hubert Humphrey wasn’t going to do it—he was too much in Johnson’s shadow. Now my prayers were different. They were simply for Bobby.
I was back in Chapel Hill when the awful news came. To this day I can still hear the anguish in Frank Mankiewicz’s words in the official announcement that were repeated throughout the day. “Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 this morning . . . June 6, 1968. . . . He was forty-two years old.”
Saturday, a week after his debate with McCarthy, dawned grim and gray. There was none of the pageantry of five years before, none of the brilliant theater that had fit so intuitively to the country’s need for a proud mourning, no sign of Yeats’s “terrible beauty,” no “day of drums,” no riderless horse. As Robert Francis Kennedy was carried in the dark to the gravesite on the sloping hill in Arlington, near his brother, it was just about loss.
It’s what I felt as I watched the news footage of the Penn Central train, carrying him south from his funeral at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral down through New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland to Washington’s Union Station. His presidential campaign had lasted eighty-two days. “The Impossible Dream” was Bobby’s song. He knew the odds against him. Conscience, not glory, was what had called this Kennedy into service. Now his death left a void as large as his promise.
What made Robert Kennedy so unique, Jack Newfield wrote, “was that he felt the same empathy for white workingmen and women that he felt for blacks, Latinos and Native Americans. He thought of cops, waitresses, construction workers and firefig
hters as his people.” And they were all there, perhaps two million of them massed along the tracks on that hot late-spring day, holding American flags and saluting, waiting to see him pass. GOD BLESS YOU, RFK and WE LOVE YOU, BOBBY, their signs read. As the train entered Philadelphia, nearly twenty thousand people, mostly African American, began to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
The Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August was far from politics as usual. It was America at war with itself. It was the clash Bobby had wanted to prevent, between the police and the college kid, between the working guy and the better-off, between father and son.
• • •
For me, that autumn was bittersweet. I was leaving my parents, my brothers, and my friends to head off to southern Africa, to the newly independent Kingdom of Swaziland as a Peace Corps volunteer. I would be there as a trade development adviser, working with rural businessmen.
I was leaving behind a country that had been robbed, again, of a leader.
On the morning after the shooting, Ethel Kennedy had asked her friends John Glenn and his wife, Annie, to take six of her children back across the country to Virginia. With Ethel at the hospital that Wednesday morning, it fell to Glenn to tell them what had happened:
“We flew back across the country in an Air Force jet dispatched by the president,” Glenn would write. “We took the kids out to Hickory Hill and stayed the night with them. I was in Bobby’s study when I saw on his desk a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poems and essays. Leafing through it, I saw he’d marked in the margin a pair of passages he liked.
“ ‘If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one if we but know what to do with it.’
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