Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  The response to this news was as powerful as it was simplistic: “Robert Kennedy was almost killed because he spoke out for Israel!” In the less affluent, less liberal Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens, local Democrats could almost feel the surge of sentiment for the almost-martyred Kennedy. That surge turned into a flood tide a few days later, when Kennedy gave a long-scheduled commencement address at New York’s Yeshiva University, where he was introduced by former Supreme Court Justice and UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, who had endorsed Kennedy two days earlier. When he walked onstage at the Lewisohn Auditorium, the audience gave him a five-minute standing ovation, chanting, “L’chaim! L’chaim!” (“To life! To life!”) In his speech, Kennedy reaffirmed his support for Israel, but also spoke of the need for reconciliation, so that “the children of Abraham, Jew and Christian and Arab alike, may at long last live out their lives free of terror and privation.” Two weeks earlier, any hint of sympathy for Palestinians might have subjected Kennedy to criticism. Now, there were only cheers.

  For the Presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy, the reports of Sirhan Sirhan’s motivation could not have come at a worse time. On Friday, June 7, as Kennedy was flying to Niagara Falls to launch his New York primary campaign, a dozen senior staff members of McCarthy’s campaign, including youth organizer Sam Brown, announced that they were endorsing Kennedy as “the only peace candidate with a credible chance to win the Presidency and stop the war in Vietnam. We will never lose our admiration and respect for the courageous battle Senator McCarthy waged,” they said, “but we cannot permit that admiration and respect to let us ignore the clear political reality: Robert Kennedy is the only candidate for President who stands a chance of ending this disastrous war.” It was hardly a unanimous sentiment within the McCarthy campaign, where resentment against Bobby Kennedy still ran high—“If we have to have an opportunistic Red-baiter as President,” one said, “let’s elect Richard Nixon and get the real thing!”—but it was a hit the campaign could ill afford.

  What happened next, however, was one of the odder events in contemporary American political history: a combination of a self-inflicted wound and an exercise in political subterfuge that would be replicated again and again in years to come. Its roots lay in one of those offhand arsenic-tipped observations for which Eugene McCarthy was famous—or notorious. His admirers had long enjoyed exchanging some of his cracks. Walking by two of the least popular members of the Senate in angry argument, he’d muttered: “Trouble in the leper colony.” His bile was especially aroused by the Kennedys, whom he saw as less Catholic, less politically committed, and less intelligent than he. He often seemed to be suggesting that voting for Kennedy was a sign of lesser intelligence.

  “[In Indiana] they kept talking about the poet out there. I asked if they were talking about Shakespeare . . . But it was James Whitcomb Riley. You could hardly expect to win under those conditions.” Sometimes he skipped the subtlety, as when he pointedly noted that he was winning the support of the more intelligent, better-educated voters.

  It was one other observation, made a few nights before his victory in the Oregon primary to a handful of reporters, that proved so consequential. Talking about the efforts of the Kennedy campaign to find a compelling argument in a state with little of his natural constituency, McCarthy quipped: “I’m sure in a few days they’ll be leaking a story that somebody took a shot at him.”

  In an era when images were captured only by bulky film or videotape, when the concept of universal access to data via mobile computers was something out of Star Trek, there was every reason to believe that McCarthy’s wisecrack would live on only in the memories of the handful that heard it, or at best as a piece of gossip shared over late-night drinks in a hotel bar. One of the reporters, however, was carrying a Norelco Carry-Corder 150, and discovered that evening that she had recorded McCarthy’s quip: a tape she played a few nights later for a young operative for the Kennedy campaign with whom she’d shared three beers, a few tokes of Maui Wowie, and a bed. When the operative heard Kennedy press secretary Frank Mankiewicz angrily relate a reporter’s account of McCarthy’s crack, he said casually, “Yeah, I heard the tape.” Mankiewicz had more or less forgotten the comment . . . until the morning after the attempted assassination, when he stopped in the middle of a telephone conversation with a Washington columnist, sat bolt upright, and said: “Holy . . .”

  It took the better part of the morning for Mankiewicz to track the young man down; the California campaign had been so disorganized, so chaotic, so riven by internal feuds, that the idea of a master list of staffers was laughable. It took a series of conversations to convince the young man to reach out to his very temporary playmate. (“It was just . . . you know . . . a thing . . . not like . . . you know . . . we’re dating.”) It took about three minutes to convince the reporter that if she made a copy of the tape, she’d be fully credited when the story broke, propelling her into work far above her current employment as a stringer for a local Salem, Oregon, radio station. By Sunday evening, after passing through a series of cutouts insulating the campaign from the recording, the tape was in the hands of a reporter for the New York Post. The New York Times was never seriously considered; it was a paper firmly in McCarthy’s corner, a paper so instinctively resistant to the Kennedy appeal that Bobby was inclined to chalk it up to snobbish anti-Catholicism. The Post, by contrast, was the longtime voice of New York liberalism, owned by heiress Dorothy Schiff and edited by James Wechsler, a Kennedy admirer. The Post had endorsed McCarthy early in his campaign, which made the venue for the story even more compelling. Mrs. Schiff had an occasionally mercurial temperament when it came to political judgment; back in 1958, she ordered a last-minute retraction of the Post’s endorsement of New York Governor Averell Harriman because of an offhand remark. Now, viewing McCarthy’s wisecrack through the prism of a genuine assassination attempt, she was horrified.

  “McCarthy Mocked RFK Danger,” a front-page Post headline proclaimed on Monday morning. That same day, both all-news radio stations in New York had somehow gotten copies of the tape, which they played throughout the day and into the evening rush hour, where hundreds of thousands of commuters heard it on their car radios. Among McCarthy’s campaign insiders, the remarks spurred a lengthy, increasingly acrimonious debate between political veterans, who urged McCarthy to express regrets, and his inner court of friends and hangers-on—dubbed “the Astrologers” by campaign veterans—who thought the whole controversy a contrivance fed by Kennedy operatives and a cynical press core. The Senator himself did not help matters when, braced by a scrum of reporters and cameramen as he entered his Manhattan hotel lobby, he recycled one of his betterknown quips.

  “I used to think of the press as blackbirds,” he said with a small smile. “One flies on the telephone wire, they all fly on; one flies away, they all fly away. It seems I may have been ornithologically imprecise. ‘Vultures’ might perhaps be more accurate.”

  In fact, McCarthy’s earlier assessment of the press proved all too accurate; the tape had created an appetite for “McCarthy in Trouble” stories. Newsday, the dominant Long Island newspaper now published by onetime Johnson press secretary and Kennedy admirer Bill Moyers, ran a series of stories about the alliance between McCarthy and Humphrey supporters that had formed in the days just before the California primary, about the appointment of Tom Finney, a former CIA official, as McCarthy campaign director. Because Newsday was read by almost every resident of Nassau County, the reports of a Humphrey-McCarthy alliance to stop Kennedy had a major impact among one of McCarthy’s key affluent suburban supporters. When the New York Post recycled those stories, and switched its endorsement to Robert Kennedy, it cost McCarthy heavily in New York City. (The New York Times, for its part, reaffirmed its backing of McCarthy, chastising him for “unfortunate and regrettable remarks,” chastising the press for its “overwrought reaction,” and raising the possibility that “the Kennedy forces had used their money and influence to publici
ze a remark clearly intended as a private remark. A remark,” they added, “of a piece with McCarthy’s admirable reliance on the intellectual quip, the witty aside, the reflective understatement—and poetry.”)

  On the night of June 18, Kennedy won at least 150 of the 175 New York convention delegates. (The numbers were inexact, since in this first-ever New York Presidential primary, only the names of delegates were on the ballot.) Eugene McCarthy gave a terse concession speech, celebrating the victories in the snows of New Hampshire and the Oregon spring, noting that “those who retreated from the first battles, only to come down from the hills and shoot the wounded, would have to answer to their consciences, and to history.” He did not congratulate Robert Kennedy or answer questions about the future of his campaign—perhaps because it was clear that there was no future.

  That night, as he had two weeks earlier, Robert Kennedy was restless, energized, moving through the Presidential Suite at New York’s Sheraton Hotel in midtown Manhattan. (This time, the Presidential Suite, the Knickerbocker Ballroom, the elevators, and every other venue where Kennedy might visit were under Secret Service protection.) The mood of the campaign did not reflect the outsized New York victory; they’d known it was coming for days. What the campaign knew, what the Humphrey campaign knew, what the press knew, was that one number mattered, and it wasn’t how many delegates Kennedy had won that night, or how many primary votes Kennedy and McCarthy had won.

  The number was 1,312.

  That’s how many delegates it took to win the Democratic Presidential nomination. That’s the number all the networks were featuring on their tote boards. And while there was no way to tabulate precisely how many delegates the candidates now had, the networks were pretty much in agreement that Humphrey had well over 1,000. But in sharp contrast to the analysis that had dominated the coverage two weeks earlier in California, the coverage this night reflected the uncertainty that the foiled assassination attempt had created.

  “With the primaries over,” ABC’s Bill Lawrence was saying, “everything we know about Presidential politics tells us that the winner was the candidate who did not compete in any of them: Vice President Humphrey. With the backing of President Johnson, whose dislike of Senator Kennedy is as intense as Kennedy’s of him; with the support of elected Democratic officials in many if not most of the big industrial states, as well as in the South; with the strong backing of AFL-CIO President Meany, Mr. Humphrey should be on his way to an early ballot nomination, perhaps on the first ballot. The question is: Has Senator Kennedy’s escape from that attempt on his life changed the equation? If not, do these Kennedy wins in the two biggest states provide him with a lever—or a club—with which to move Democrats? There was evidence in New York that the attempt on the Senator’s life had an impact among voters. The problem for Mr. Kennedy is that there are no more voters—or to be more precise, no more contests where voters can speak.”

  It was that dilemma that Kennedy spoke to when he claimed victory that night: “The primaries are over, but the campaign is not. In every state where Democrats have had the chance to speak, they have voted overwhelmingly for a change of course, for new policies, for an end to the war, for reconciliation at home. I intend to give Democrats in every state the chance to choose between the course we are now on, and a new direction. I fully intend to abide by that choice, but to deny Democrats the right to choose is to deny our heritage, and to ensure our defeat in November.”

  Millions heard Robert Kennedy that night. But no one was listening more intently, no one was more determined to respond to that challenge, than one Democrat in particular . . .

  HE PACED back and forth, watching the three color television screens in the Oval Office, flicking the remote to change the audio from one set to the next. Every few minutes he would wander over to the Associated Press and United Press teletypes, ripping the paper out of the machine, scanning the latest updates as if hoping to find different numbers, a better story.

  Two weeks ago, he had been awakened by Walt Rostow, his national security chief, to be told of the attempt on the life of Robert Kennedy. He had immediately ordered Secret Service protection for all Presidential candidates, called Kennedy in California to offer some words of thanks that he had not been harmed. Whatever else he had been feeling—his longtime aide Harry McPherson observed much later that “he must have been filled with a hundred conflicting emotions”—he had kept strictly to himself. Tonight, watching Kennedy bask in the adulation of his supporters, there was no ambiguity about what he was feeling: This is my worst nightmare.

  It was the literal truth. All his life he had been haunted by dreams of helplessness, abandonment, impotence in the face of threats. Over the last three years, those nightmares had turned into a real, living hell. He had wished all his life for the power to do good, to bring material balm to his people, especially to the poor. For a time, after his landslide victory in 1964, after the second emancipation of black Americans, after the launch of the War on Poverty, he believed, along with much of the country, that he would preside over a nation where the blessings of liberty and prosperity touched everyone . . . and where he would become the most beloved leader since Franklin Roosevelt.

  Then it all started to come apart.

  The Negroes in city after city began to destroy their own neighborhoods, looting, shooting, killing, dying, stirring anger and resentment among white working- and middle-class Americans. How could they do this after all I have done for them? he wondered, because he knew to a certainty that it was aimed at him. The college kids, whose daddies could send them off to school with new clothes and new cars, were disrupting classes, parading across campuses with filthy clothes and filthy words. Didn’t they know millions and millions of Americans would have given their right arm for the chance to send their kids to college? And then there was the war, that goddamn war. He’d known from the beginning it would be a disaster, known it in the marrow of his bones. He’d spent hours on the phone with Dick Russell, the biggest hawk in the U.S. Senate, who was as sure as he was that it was the worst damn mess anyone could imagine, a war there was no way to win, but a war he couldn’t end. He’d been there in the Senate when China fell to the Communists in ’49, when Korea turned into a stalemate; he’d watched Harry Truman and Dean Acheson, stalwart anti-Communists, branded as appeasers, cowards. If he’d pulled up stakes in Vietnam, it would all start again.

  “And this time,” he told a confidant, “there would be Robert Kennedy out in front leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to Vietnam. That I had let a democracy fall into the hands of the Communists. That I was a coward. An unmanly man, a man without a spine. Oh, I could see it coming, all right. Every night when I fell asleep, I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance, I could hear the voice of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me: ‘Coward! Traitor! Weakling!’ . . . Moscow and Peking would move in a flash to exploit our weakness . . . and so would begin World War III . . .”

  So he’d widened the war, not as much as his generals and admirals had wanted, but splitting the difference, sitting up late into the night, picking the targets, reading over the casualty lists, watching as his popularity shrank and the protests mounted, and even loyal political allies like Dick Daley in Chicago told him the war was a disaster, that it would rip apart the Democratic Party.

  And always, always, there was the specter of Robert Kennedy, distancing himself from the war his brother had set in motion, calling his efforts for the poor inadequate, looking for the chance to reclaim the throne. From the very beginning in the summer of’60, when Bobby had shown up in his hotel suite in Los Angeles, trying to force him off the ticket, the little runt had tried to undermine him, contemptuously attacking his work as Vice President on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, cutting him out of White House meetings. In November of’63, as Senate Republicans began to zero in on his longtime Senate protégé Bobby Baker, Kenn
edy began leaking damaging information to Senate Republicans, hoping, Johnson was certain, to force him off the ticket in ’64. One of the key inquiries was set to begin on the afternoon of November 22 . . .

  Those first days after Jack’s death had poisoned things between them irrevocably. Bobby seemed to hold him responsible for the murder of his brother; he’d look across the table at Cabinet meetings and see a usurper, an impostor. He’d tried to force himself on the ticket as Vice President in ’64, hoping to stampede the convention with an emotional tribute film about Jack (Johnson made damn sure that movie was shown after the nominations were done). And in the years since, Bobby had relied on the immense network of Kennedy loyalists in the government to feed him information, rumors, anything to undercut the President. (When he and Bobby got into a shouting match over stories that Kennedy had brought back a Vietnam “peace feeler” from Europe, Kennedy had said, “It was your State Department that leaked the story.” “It’s not my State Department,” Johnson had replied, “it’s your State Department!”) It was of a piece with his conviction that there was no end to the power and reach of the Kennedys, that whatever plagued his administration was inevitably, certainly, linked to his enemy. In 1967, he’d said to Supreme Court Justice Fortas, his longtime private lawyer who continued as part of Johnson’s inner circle after he joined the Court, “I believe that Bobby is having his governors jump on me, and he’s having his mayors jump on me, and he’s having his nigras and he’s having his Catholics. And he’s having them just systematically, one after the other, each day, go after me.”