AMBASSADOR HOTEL, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
JUNE 4, 1968, 11:45 P.M.
He was restless, energized, moving from the living room to the two bedrooms, down the narrow hallway of the Royal Suite on the hotel’s fifth floor, now and again summoning an aide or a friend into a bathroom—the only space that afforded quiet and privacy in the steadily increasing tumult of this Tuesday night.
He had hoped not to be here at all, hoped to avoid the crowds and the ceaseless demands for his attention. As the California primary ended, he’d made it to the tape on fumes; last night in San Diego he’d faltered in mid-sentence, sat on the stage in near collapse, then been escorted to the bathroom, where he’d thrown up. He’d spent this Primary Day at the beachfront home of director John Frankenheimer, who, with Dick Goodwin, had made those effective TV spots, filmed glimpses of him on the campaign trail, answering questions, talking without a script (he was death on prepared scripts, couldn’t make them look anything but stiff, phony). He’d recharged, hitting the ocean with his kids—he’d had to pull David to safety when the fifteen-year-old had gotten caught in the undertow—then crashing for hours, looking so drained that when Goodwin saw him slumped across two poolside chairs, motionless, he froze in fear. (“I suppose none of us will ever get over John Kennedy,” Goodwin thought.) He’d wanted to watch the returns at Frankenheimer’s home, make his victory statement from there—or, in the event he lost, his withdrawal from the Presidential race. But the networks said no, they’d set up camp at the Ambassador, that’s where their cameras and correspondents were, so he’d come to the Ambassador in the early evening, driven by Frankenheimer in his Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, the director so keyed up that he’d missed the freeway exit.
“Take it easy, John,” he had said. “Life is short.”
So now he worked the rooms in the Ambassador’s Royal Suite, mingling with old pros like California Assembly Speaker Jess Unruh, one of the few pols who’d urged him to run, back last fall, and with old Kennedy hands Salinger, Sorenson, O’Brien, all of whom had counseled him not to challenge Johnson months earlier, all of whom were now working for him. He chatted with New York columnists he’d gotten close to: Jimmy Breslin of the News, Jack Newfield of the Voice, Pete Hamill of the Post, whose anguished letter to him earlier in the year (“if you won, the country might be saved”) helped propel him into the race. There were other journalists there: Teddy White, of The Making of the President chronicles; Stan Tretick, the Look magazine photographer. There were allies from the streets, César Chávez and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers, John Lewis from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who’d almost been killed on one of the Freedom Rides back in ’61. There was Budd Schulberg, the screenwriter who’d written On the Waterfront, about a corrupt labor union; by coincidence, most Americans had first learned about Robert Kennedy a decade before this primary, as the intense thirty-one-year-old staring across a Senate hearing room at Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.
“Well, of course, you know who won this election for you,” Schulberg said.
“You’re going to give me that speech about the 85 percent or 90 percent black vote, and the Chicanos practically 100 percent.”
“Bob, you’re the only white man in the country they trust,” said Schulberg.
Schulberg was right—but the picture was more complicated. The huge, historically unprecedented turnout in black and Latino districts had clearly given him the victory, overcoming the strong support for Senator Eugene McCarthy in middle- and upper-income suburban districts. (There was an independent slate of delegates, more or less understood to be for Vice President Humphrey, but many of his supporters had voted for McCarthy, knowing that a loss in California would end Robert Kennedy’s campaign.)
But something else had happened in California, as it had happened earlier in Indiana and Nebraska, as it had happened this same day halfway across the country in South Dakota. He had won votes in small towns, in farm communities, in blue-collar neighborhoods, where voters had chosen him despite his views about the war in Vietnam and race. These were voters who’d felt, in some almost indefinable way, that the country was slipping out of control, that the war and the riots in the streets and on the college campuses needed someone tough enough to deal with it. Maybe it was Alabama Governor George Wallace; maybe it was the tough little Mick. If he could somehow wrest the nomination away from Humphrey, if he could somehow hold the fraying coalition of blacks and blue-collar whites together in the fall, there was a chance to win this thing, and then a chance to hold the country together . . .
The suite was buzzing now, electric. The network projections were saying he’d get 49 or 50 percent of the vote, but Jess Unruh had cautioned him, no, our vote’s just about all in, the later numbers will shrink your margin, the networks will call it “inconclusive.” Still it was a victory that would bring him all 174 California delegates to the convention in August. Coming a week after he’d lost the Oregon primary—the only loss ever suffered by a Kennedy in any contested election—it would keep him in contention, perhaps convince Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley that he was more electable than Humphrey.
“Daley’s the ball game,” he had said when his campaign had begun, suddenly, improvisationally, in a spasm of energy after months of indecision, months when Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, an indolent dilettante of a candidate in Bobby’s mind, had taken the anti-war banner and ridden it to 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, driving President Lyndon Johnson out of the fight for the party’s nomination. Now, with Humphrey steadily accumulating support from party leaders in delegate-rich states without primaries, Daley was his best, no, his only hope of keeping the contest open. Once the New York primary was over—two weeks away in his adoptive state, where McCarthy sentiment was high among the educated liberal elites—there would be no more primaries, no more battlegrounds where the crowds, the passion, the family money, could win delegates and show those who controlled the nomination that he was all that stood between Richard Nixon and the White House. New York was going to be tough—“a bloodbath,” he’d predicted earlier—but he could not afford to be pinned down in New York for the next two weeks; he had to begin trying to shake loose some of those states where Humphrey’s allies had been locking up enough delegates to bring the Vice President tantalizingly close to the nomination.
That was the theme of the network coverage blaring from the half-dozen TV sets scattered throughout the room. All of the analysts were noting that the big winner of the primaries was the candidate who hadn’t campaigned in a single one of them; Humphrey, they said, was within reach of a first ballot victory. CBS’s Roger Mudd kept returning to this theme when he sat down for a brief interview with Kennedy.
“Are the delegates ‘squeezable’?” he asked.
“Roger!” Kennedy said in mock outrage. “Your language!”
In fact, Mudd was exactly right. Somehow, he had to continue the fight even if there was no formal arena for the fight.
“I’m going to make him debate me,” he said to Look magazine’s Warren Rogers. “I’m going to chase his ass all over the country.”
The first step, he knew, was to get McCarthy out of the race, or at the least, persuade his supporters to move. On every TV interview this night, he’d made the same point over and over:
“I can only win,” he said, “if I have the help and assistance of Senator McCarthy and/or those who support him.” Otherwise, he said, Humphrey will be the nominee—“and the policies about the war and the cities will not change.”
The night before, journalist Jack Newfield and one of Kennedy’s young speechwriters had gone to McCarthy’s hotel to talk about unity after the primary. They found strong resistance—the bitterness over Kennedy’s leap into the race just after New Hampshire was still deep—but one of the most significant of their number, Sam Brown, the Harvard Divinity student who’d organized the New Hampshire youth brigades, was clearly signaling yes, it was time to join forces. There’
d been other hints of unity; in Colorado, Kennedy and McCarthy forces had combined to win two-thirds of the delegates. But McCarthy himself was likely to be a different matter; he was already telling the press that he thought Oregon was a far more significant test than California, an observation sufficiently detached from reality to suggest that his imminent withdrawal was not likely.
As for the future . . . well, there was some good news on the Daley front. True, when Kennedy’d announced, Daley had proclaimed his support for President Johnson, had used the term “Judas” to label the challenger. But Daley had also reached out to an old Kennedy loyalist, University of Chicago Professor Richard Wade, who’d been serving on the city’s planning board. “Let’s meet after every primary,” the Mayor had said, adding meaningfully, “the primaries count . . . the primaries count . . . the primaries count.” After Kennedy had lost in Oregon, Daley had summoned Wade to another meeting, where he’d waved off the loss, saying, “the primaries cut everything; if he’s all right in California, he’s going to be all right.” On this primary night, Bobby had talked to longtime ally Kenny O’Donnell, who was watching the returns in Washington with Illinois Congressman Danny Rostenkowski. “I do what Daley says,” Rostenkowski had told O’Donnell. “You win California and he’s with you, we’ll all fall into line.”
So there was a chance, but with the primaries ending, he had to change the dynamic of the campaign. For that matter, there had to be a campaign shakeup fast; he’d jumped into the race so quickly that there’d been no time to build a structure. There was tension between the old John Kennedy hands, and his own Senate staff: Walinsky, Edelman, Mankiewicz, Dolan. There were fights about message: He had to stress his crimefighting credentials as Attorney General, crime was a growing issue for middle America, but his younger aides were hearing that as a pander. The older hands in turn wanted the firebrands from his Senate staff off the road; they wanted him away from the frenzied crowds that unsettled older and suburban middle-class voters. My problem, he said, is that I don’t have anyone to do for me what I did for Jack. More and more, he thought that Steve Smith, his brother-in-law, had to be given the reins of the campaign. Speaking of which, he thought, he should be out front and center, doing press interviews, he should come with me down to the ballroom for the speech. Where is he?
IN A FIFTH-FLOOR ROOM across from the Royal Suite, Steve Smith worked a quartet of telephones, jotting down numbers from precincts across the state. Several times during the evening, he’d resisted the pleas of Dutton, Mankiewicz, and others who were urging the candidate to head down to the Embassy Ballroom for a victory speech. We’re losing every voter on the East Coast, they said. He doesn’t need to talk to California; the voting’s over. Smith kept pushing back: We need to wait for Orange County, he said. We don’t want any premature victory statements. Remember “Dewey Defeats Truman”? Now they’d lost the East Coast, and the Midwest as well, for that matter. It was almost midnight in California, but he knew now that the numbers would hold, that Kennedy had won, but without that magic 50 percent. It was going to be a forced march through the summer, and a costly one as well. When Bobby threw himself into the Presidential race, his brother Ted had said, Bobby’s therapy is going to cost the family five million dollars. That was a conservative estimate; but then, Smith thought, The family never does anything easily.
Smith had married into the family twelve years ago, after meeting Jean Kennedy at Georgetown. He had good looks, an athletic, wiry body, and family money; his grandfather, who’d worked the ships along the Erie Canal, had founded Cleary Brothers, whose tugboats and barges plied the Hudson River. He’d quickly earned the trust of the insular family—Jack Kennedy had dubbed him “cool”—and was now guiding the investment strategy of the family’s $300 million fortune, working out of the 200 Park Avenue address that housed Joseph Kennedy Enterprises. More important, Smith had been at the epicenter of the family’s political rise. He’d run Jack’s 1958 Senate reelection campaign, then moved to New York’s Esso Building, where he’d become the logistical overseer of Kennedy’s 1960 Presidential effort. Everything from the list of some 40,000 contacts to the scheduling of Caroline, the family-owned Convair twin-engine plane, fell under Smith’s control. There was something about Smith’s quiet confidence, his willingness, even eagerness, to remain out of the spotlight that kept him on the receiving end of more responsibility.
He’d been dispatched to set up Ted’s 1962 Senate race, and Bobby’s New York Senate run two years later, and now, he’d learned this Primary Day, he was being tapped to bring order out of Bobby’s chaotic insurgent Presidential run after the primary season had ended. This is going to be a real walk in the park, he thought. O’Brien and O’Donnell are feuding, they both think Sorenson is empire-building, the Senate staffers don’t trust any of Jack’s guys, who think the Senate guys are bomb-throwers, and I figure we have about seventy-two hours before Humphrey wraps this up.
Well, tomorrow the senior campaign team would gather in Smith’s bungalow on the grounds of the Ambassador. On Thursday, Bobby would fly back East, stopping in Missouri for a meeting with convention delegates, and then Friday he’d be in Niagara Falls, to launch the battle for New York. After that . . .?
He checked the numbers one last time. There was no room for doubt, it would be a clear win, not overwhelming enough, not 50 percent, not what they wanted or needed, but it would keep him in play. Soon the candidate would go downstairs to claim victory. In fact, there was a commotion outside the door, the sound of a crowd moving down the corridor to the elevators. I’d like to go down with him, Smith thought. But he was in his stocking feet, and maybe it wasn’t worth the clutching and grabbing. Maybe he’d catch up with him at the victory party tonight . . .
HE STOOD WITH the waiters, busboys, janitors, cooks, and cleaners in the narrow pantry way that led from the Embassy Ballroom to the kitchen. He’d come here on a last-minute impulse, but in another sense, he’d come here driven by a lifetime of rage. He was twenty-four years old, short enough to have dreamt of a career as a jockey, dark-haired, olive-skinned—dark enough to be shunned by his blond, blue-eyed classmates at John Muir High School and Pasadena City College. (When his parents told the twelve-year-old they were leaving their native Jordan for the United States, he’d asked them if that meant he would become a blue-eyed American.) He worked odd jobs—a stable boy at the Santa Anita racetrack, a clerk at a health-food store—but he spent many rootless days watching television, or at the Pasadena Public Library, or practicing his shooting skills at a range near his family home. And always, always, the fate of the Arabs at the hands of the Zionists was his obsession.
They had driven him and his parents from their land, forced them to Jordan, where there was no work, no life for them. The power of the Jews over the financial and political life of the United States had seen to it that Israel was armed with weapons far superior to those of their Arab neighbors. A year ago, in June of 1967, they had seized the Holy City of Jerusalem, and now as the one-year anniversary approached, they were gloating, rubbing the Arabs’ noses in their defeat and humiliation. Earlier this day, in fact, he’d seen a huge billboard announcing a march down Wilshire Boulevard to commemorate the first anniversary of the Six-Day War. He was sure the Zionists, the Jews, were celebrating that they’d beat the hell out of the Arabs. And he knew as he headed for the Ambassador Hotel that he was about to strike a powerful blow for his brothers, a blow that would avenge their shame and suffering.
He had admired Robert Kennedy, liked the way he spoke up for the underdog, the man at the bottom. But then he saw Kennedy at an Israeli Independence Day celebration, and . . . he was wearing a yarmulke! And he heard a radio report of Kennedy at a synagogue, saying “. . . in Israel—unlike so many other places in the world—our commitment is clear and compelling. We are committed to Israel’s survival. We are committed to defying any attempt to destroy Israel, whatever the source. And we cannot and must not let that commitment waver.” He’d run out of the room,
clutching his ears.
And that’s when he wrote in his diary, over and over, “RFK Must Die, RFK must be assassinated, must be assassinated, assassinated.”
Now, a few minutes before midnight, Sirhan Sirhan was standing on a low-rise tray stacker in the pantry way just off the Embassy Ballroom. On his right arm was a rolled-up Kennedy poster. Inside the poster, clutched in his right hand, was a fully loaded .22 caliber Iver Johnson Cadet revolver.
AS HE HEARD the commotion outside his room, Steve Smith hesitated, then quickly slipped into his shoes. He knew how chaotic the victory celebration would be, knew how utterly exhausted his brother-in-law would be. Someone had to provide adult supervision, he thought, and it was a role he had more and more come to assume himself.
“Curiously enough,” he said later, “for some reason I can’t explain, during the course of the campaign, whenever I was with the Senator, I made it a point to place myself in front of him, and sort of move as if I were clearing a way. I think it helped expedite his getting from one place to another.” On this night, Smith knew, it would be crucial to get Kennedy from his speech to his press conference to bed. So he opened the door, squeezed himself inside the crush of people, and rode down next to Kennedy, keeping himself close by until he found himself just behind Bobby on the stage of the Embassy Ballroom.
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