“Ah, ruthless Steve Smith, always going for the limelight,” Kennedy cracked.
“Somebody has to keep you away from your adoring public,” Smith said. “Now give your speech and let’s get the hell out of here.”
THE EMBASSY BALLROOM was packed, hot, feverish with energy; the crowd had been gathering for hours, and as midnight came, there were conga lines dancing through the hall, random shouts and cheers. He spoke for fifteen minutes. He congratulated Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale, who had broken a major league record for the most consecutive scoreless innings. He thanked everyone from his dog Freckles to his wife (“not necessarily in that order”) to his brother-in-law Steve Smith: “ruthless, but effective.” He said America could heal its racial and generational divisions, and then said, “Now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there!” (God, he thought an instant later, I forgot to mention the New York primary!)
The stage was too crowded, as all stages are when a candidate claims victory. There was Ethel, Jess Unruh, Dolores Huerta—he’d wanted César Chávez with him, but he could not be found—Paul Schrade of the United Auto Workers. Bill Barry, the former FBI agent serving as his only security, waited to guide him through the crowd; so did former Olympic athlete Rafer Johnson and LA Rams lineman Roosevelt Grier, who were volunteer bodyguards during the California campaign. (The campaign had refused the protection of the Los Angeles police, in part because Kennedy and Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty cordially despised each other, Kennedy viewing Yorty as a racist demagogue, Yorty viewing Kennedy as a spoiled rich kid turned subversive.)
Kennedy instinctively recoiled against security measures, insisting on an open car when he campaigned through some of the most dangerous streets in America, upbraiding his staff when they picked up threats and tried to move him in and out of venues through underground garages. That morning, at Frankenheimer’s house, he had said flatly, “If someone with a rifle wants to kill me, there’s really not that much that can be done about it.” Weeks earlier, after Martin Luther King’s murder, he’d told a civil rights veteran, “There are guns between me and the White House.” From French novelist Romain Gary to Jacqueline Kennedy to Newsweek columnist John J. Lindsay came flat predictions that he would not live through the campaign.
So far, at least, the principal danger to Robert Kennedy had come not from his enemies but from his most ardent supporters. They tore at him as he motorcaded through streets, grabbing for his cuff links, his PT-109 tie clasp, his shoes. They left his hands and forearms red and bleeding, pulled at him so enthusiastically that at one point he was yanked from his car, chipping his teeth. To ride with Robert Kennedy was to see something more than the adulation of a celebrity, something more than enthusiasm for a politician; it was to see, to feel, an energy, a desperation so intense as to pose a danger to the very object of their passion.
And that may be why Fred Dutton, the old Kennedy hand who’d become the de facto campaign manager, who’d inherited unbidden power over campaign themes, scheduling, and logistics, who was often seen in the convertible holding Kennedy’s legs as he rode through the streets, made a snap decision not to bring Kennedy through the ballroom crowds, not to subject him to another victory speech before the overflow crowd assembled one floor below in the Ambassador Ballroom, but to send him through the kitchen to a freight elevator that would take him to a press conference in the hotel’s Colonial Room. Bill Barry, who’d begun to clear a path through the crowd, scrambled to regain his place near the candidate as Kennedy stepped down from the platform and was guided through the gold curtains to a back exit by the hotel’s assistant maître d’hotel Karl Uecker, into the long, narrow pantry that would lead to the freight elevator. Kennedy was engaged in an on-the-run interview with Andrew West, a reporter for the Mutual Radio Network, who was asking how he was going to wrest the delegates away from Vice President Humphrey.
“It just goes back to the struggle for it . . .”
And Steve Smith, standing behind Kennedy, strode in front of them, looking to clear the way, which is why he glimpsed the fury in the eyes of a short, dark-haired young man who suddenly jumped down from a low-rise tray stacker and rushed toward the Senator, screaming, “You son of a bitch!” Smith, who’d played in so many of those rough-and-tumble touch football games on the Cape, threw himself at the attacker, who was knocked to the floor just as he fired one shot from his revolver. The bullet grazed Smith’s shoulder. By then, Roosevelt Grier and Rafer Johnson had pinned the attacker against the wall, immobilizing his shooting hand, while half a dozen people surrounded Robert Kennedy, pulling him and Ethel to safety.
HAD SIRHAN BISHARA SIRHAN stayed home that night, or had the candidate left the stage through the crowds in the ballroom, it is highly possible—make that probable—that the California primary would have marked the high point of Robert Kennedy’s Presidential campaign. Fred Dutton was right when he reflected much later, “We had been losing altitude.” Back on March 31, when President Johnson had suddenly, shockingly, withdrawn from the race, some around Kennedy thought, That’s it, he’s the nominee. But when he and his aides began calling Democratic officeholders and kingmakers, they found widespread hesitancy about throwing their support to the young upstart who’d challenged a sitting President in the middle of a war.
Some of it was due to grievances old and new; the Kennedy campaign had played very rough back in ’60, and nobody played rougher than Bobby. His clumsy entry into this Presidential race, hours after Eugene McCarthy’s near victory in New Hampshire, had added potent fuel to Bobby’s “ruthless” image. Some of it was about the deep divides that were already beginning to fracture the New Deal coalition. Big-city white ethnics and Southerners were more and more resentful and fearful of black demands and Robert Kennedy had become the tribune of black frustration and anger. For many Southern Democrats, for whom segregation was the defining cause of their political lives, Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General had been the embodiment of Northern aggression. Throughout the country, culturally conservative Democrats were more and more repelled by young protesters with filthy words on their placards and drugs in their pockets; World War II veterans who believed in the lessons of Munich, saw appeasement if not surrender in the opposition to the Vietnam War. And Bobby Kennedy had criticized the war, even questioned its morality, standing with the longhairs and the draft card burners. Some of it was about affection for Hubert Humphrey’s work as a champion of liberal causes from labor to civil rights. Some of it was about fear; what would a vengeful Lyndon Johnson, who still held the reins of the Presidency, do to those who dared support his nemesis?
In the two months since Johnson’s withdrawal, Humphrey’s lead had lengthened even as he avoided every state where a primary might test his voter appeal. Instead, he relied on his allies in big-city Democratic machines and in organized labor to line up delegates in states where there were no real primaries at all. Kennedy’s campaign had miscalculated here, a costly consequence of the hasty, last-minute disorganized plunge into the race. They’d decided to stay out of Pennsylvania, with its 130 delegates, and what happened? Philadelphia Mayor Tate and Pittsburgh Mayor Barr had organized an unscheduled delegate meeting in mid-May and locked up just about every convention vote for Humphrey. They’d kept Kennedy out of New Jersey, and Governor Richard Hughes had committed his favorite-son delegates to the Vice President. All across the South and Southwest, delegations were lining up for Humphrey, a powerful bloc of votes that numbered more than 600. Even if Mayor Daley threw his support and the 118 delegates he controlled to Kennedy, would that be enough to persuade, or cajole, or threaten the party’s Old Bulls to reconsider?
But when Steve Smith knocked Sirhan Sirhan to the floor of the pantry in the Ambassador, when the country learned that Robert Kennedy had escaped from an attempt on his life, a wholly new dynamic emerged. And it began in the first moments after the Los Angeles police burst into the kitchen hallway to handcuff Sirhan and speed him away to police headquarters in downtown LA.
> “Is anybody hurt, is everybody all right?” Kennedy asked the men around him once he’d disentangled himself from their grasp. Yes, they assured him, Steve Smith had been grazed, he was being taken to Central Receiving Hospital on West Sixth Street, but it was nothing serious. We need to get you back upstairs until we know there’s no one else . . .
Kennedy motioned them for quiet. “We’re going to the hospital to check on Steve. I want to do a statement for the press; I have a feeling they’ll be there. Then we’ll do a full-fledged press conference tomorrow morning.”
“Senator, you do understand there was just a direct attempt on your life,” Bill Barry said, still shaken by the last-minute change of plans that had left him powerless to protect Kennedy. “That man was firing a loaded weapon at you. For all we know, there are others, maybe outside the hotel, maybe—”
“So the sooner we leave for the hospital, the better,” Kennedy said. “There’s no way anyone could be waiting there.”
“All right,” Barry said. “But”—he pointed to a phalanx of Los Angeles police officers, whose helmets, leather belts, and boots gave them the appearance of a paramilitary guard in a Latin American police state—“those guys are escorting us. Either that, Senator, or you find yourself a new chief of security.”
Kennedy paused, then nodded once, and the group moved out. If Kennedy noticed that he was completely surrounded by campaign aides, police, and the reporters who had rushed into the kitchen when news of the attack filtered into the Colonial Room, he said nothing. Indeed, the press and the public heard nothing until 1:45 a.m., when Kennedy climbed on top of a police car to speak to the hundreds of reporters and supporters who had found their way to the emergency room entrance of Central Receiving.
“I just want to say that Steve Smith is in very good shape. He suffered only a minor wound to his shoulder. Thankfully, no one else was injured. I will be meeting with the press at eight a.m. tomorrow at the Ambassador Hotel, where I will try to answer your questions. Right now, I have only one announcement: If I’m elected President, I intend to propose a Constitutional amendment to impose severe criminal penalties on anyone telling brother-in-law jokes.”
That quip did not make the morning papers on the East Coast. But it led all the morning wake-up shows on TV, and all the hourly news updates on the radio. And at 11:00 a.m. eastern time, it was the tape all three networks used to begin the live news conference, along with the breaking news that President Johnson had ordered Secret Service protection for all Presidential candidates. The light-hearted remark, the grace under pressure, made a powerful impression.
(“If you can laugh in the face of a threat to your life, I don’t care if you’re Jane Fonda or Ronald Reagan, people are gonna like you,” one reporter said.)
Kennedy’s press conference was dominated by the same handful of questions, asked a dozen different ways, answered with all the patience the candidate could muster. No, there was no inkling of what motivated the attack. No, he did not think the attempt on his life was a result of the frenzied nature of his campaign. Yes, he’d heard from all the other candidates, and from President Johnson, and was grateful for their good wishes. Yes, he understood that under the President’s order, he was compelled to accept Secret Service protection, but hoped his campaign and the Agency could come to an agreement that would permit him to campaign as close to the voters as possible.
“Let me just note,” he added, “that I’ve appeared in public from one end of the country to the other, from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Gary and Hammond in Indiana to Oakland and Watts and East Los Angeles here in California. This . . . happened in the middle of a luxury hotel. So perhaps the lesson here is for me to spend more time in the streets of poor and working-class neighborhoods, where I seem to be perfectly safe. And yes, I will be flying to St. Louis tomorrow to meet with convention delegates from Missouri, and then to Niagara Falls to begin my efforts in New York.”
There was no scientific, quantifiable way to measure the effect of Robert Kennedy’s appearance on the national stage just hours after the attempt on his life. There is no way to know how many Americans, indifferent to Presidential politics, saw the lithe, composed young man on their television screens and thought: We almost lost him. There is no way to measure the sense of relief, even exultation, felt by citizens whose most indelible memories of any public event were shaped by November of 1963, when reports of “shots fired at President in Dallas” were quickly followed by news of John Kennedy’s death. Indeed, just eight weeks earlier, the first bulletins about an attack on Martin Luther King’s life were replaced by confirmation that he had died. Those events had triggered anguished silent pain, overwhelming grief, violent rage. This time, it wasn’t just that the intended victim had been spared: They had been spared. This time, fate had dealt salvation.
The response was nowhere more passionate than in the black community. Despite the strong support for Robert Kennedy, there were memories of his earlier temporizing on civil rights, and affection for Hubert Humphrey’s long embrace of the cause. Just a few weeks ago, columnist Drew Pearson had broken the story—with information eagerly supplied by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon Johnson—that Robert Kennedy had authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King’s phone (it was a potentially devastating rumor, made more dangerous because it was true; Kennedy was looking for evidence that one of King’s close associates was a member of the Communist Party).
So, while Robert Kennedy had won the overwhelming majority of black votes in Indiana, California, and the District of Columbia, Vice President Humphrey could claim the support of Cleveland Mayor Carl Stokes, and other black elected officials. Civil rights leaders like the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins and the Urban League’s Whitney Young, who had long worried that the anti-Vietnam War sentiment would divide liberals and weaken support for a liberal domestic agenda, had stayed studiously neutral throughout the primaries. Now, however, Robert Kennedy’s brush with death triggered a firestorm in black America. He was fighting for us, and he almost got killed. In black churches the following Sunday, countless ministers preached about the “divine intervention” that had saved Robert Kennedy. (“If John Kennedy is the twentieth century’s Abraham Lincoln, cut down in his prime,” said Martin Luther King, Sr., “then Robert Kennedy may be the twentieth century’s Franklin Roosevelt, who escaped an assassin’s bullet to become the greatest President of our time!”)
Those black officials who had thrown their support to Humphrey found themselves confronted with angry constituencies. Within seventy-two hours, Mayor Stokes had announced that he was “reassessing” his support for the Vice President. It was left to Dr. Kenneth Clark, the Columbia University social scientist whose work on the effects of segregation had helped shape the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision, to explain the political impact of Kennedy’s escape.
“The only way to appreciate what is happening,” Clark wrote, “is with a mind game: imagine, decades into the future, that a black candidate for President is competing against a white candidate with a strong civil rights record. If that black candidate were to become a genuine contender, those blacks who had backed the white candidate would find themselves under enormous pressure. In effect, however much his campaign would have it otherwise, Robert Kennedy is the black candidate—at least, in the black community.”
The impact of the near miss, however, went beyond black America. It had a significant impact on the American Jewish community as well, one which was to have a major impact on the shape of the battle for the Democratic nomination.
The skepticism about Robert Kennedy among many American Jews stretched back a generation. His father, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., had been a leading voice of appeasement when he served as Ambassador to Great Britain in the years leading up to World War II, declaring at one point in 1940 that democracy in Britain was “finished.” He vocally opposed American efforts to aid in resisting Hitler’s advance across Europe, and his anti-Semitism—casually referring to “kikes” and “shee
neys” in conversation—was a matter of record.
Robert Kennedy’s early work for Senator Joseph McCarthy had stirred strong suspicions within the overwhelmingly liberal American Jewish community. More broadly, the zealousness with which he went after his targets in labor unions, and the humorless intensity of his work for Jack in 1960, had left lingering uneasiness, especially among well-educated professional Jews who were instinctively drawn to more cerebral political figures like Adlai Stevenson and now Eugene McCarthy.
Then there was the matter of his religion. Unlike Jack, who seemed to wear his Catholicism lightly, Bobby was by every reasonable measure a true believer—his ten children testified to his embrace of the Church’s teachings on birth control. (“Remember,” one of his own Jewish speechwriters said, “there’s something to the old adage that ‘anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.’ Besides, Bobby always reminded me of the parochial school kids in my neighborhood who used to chase me home from school, demanding to know why I had killed their Lord.”)
For his part, Kennedy could sometimes express exasperation with the repeated demands of American Jewry for expressions of support for Israel. It was, in fact, this pressure that had sent Kennedy to the Nevev Shalom Synagogue in Los Angeles for a speech that Sirhan Sirhan had watched with increasing rage. A few weeks earlier, after receiving one too many disparaging comments about the depth of his commitment, Kennedy had turned to a claque of aides—Walinsky, Edelman, Mankiewicz, Greenfield— and said, “when I’m President, I’m going to sign a separate peace treaty with Egypt and Jordan—and I’m going to make you all be witnesses!”
But when Los Angeles police searched Sirhan Sirhan’s bedroom in his family’s modest frame cottage on East Howard Street, began questioning those who knew him, and then found his diary, the news of what had propelled the young Arab immigrant to murder Kennedy became the only topic of conversation among politically engaged American Jews—which is to say, every American Jew over the age of four. Sirhan was a passionate believer in the Arab cause, a zealous, obsessive anti-Zionist and anti-Semite. He railed that Jews “sucked the lifeblood out of America,” believed they controlled every American politician with their money and their control over the media. He had written of his urge to kill UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, but transferred his fury to Kennedy when he’d seen him wearing a yarmulke, celebrating Israeli Independence Day, offering full-throated support for the Jewish state against “any attempt to destroy Israel, from whatever the source . . .”
Then Everything Changed Page 16