And when Bobby did enter the Presidential race, it was for him the final straw. The thing he had feared from the first day of his Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in memory of his brother, and the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets. It was unbearable to him.
And so he followed an impulse he had wrestled with all of his life: He quit.
He’d almost done it in ’48, locked in a vicious Senate primary battle with Governor Coke Stevenson, hospitalized by kidney stones, unwilling to acknowledge his condition to the press and the voters. He’d thought hard in ’60 about just walking away from his public life, starting over in a new place, maybe with a new woman. In ’64, he’d told some of those closest to him that he would go to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, a convention ready to shower him with love, and tell them, no, he’d thought about it, but maybe the party and the country needed a different man at the top. And the answer came back from his staff and his political allies and his wife: No, no, you can’t do that, Mr. President, you’ve led America back after Dallas, there’s no one else who could do the job, you’re the leader we need.
He knew that some of those around him thought that was what the threats to quit were all about, and maybe that was true in part, but this time it was different; the anger was too white-hot, the divisions too wide, and there was a question of personal survival as well—could his heart, weakened from his near-fatal heart attack in ’55, take the pressure, or would another of his nightmares come true, would he end up like Woodrow Wilson, immobilized by a stroke, while those around him struggled for the power he could no longer exercise?
So he’d gone before the TV cameras on March 31 to announce a new move for peace in Vietnam, a partial halt to the bombing of the North, an invitation to negotiate an end to the war. And at the end, in a section held back from the advance text, he said, “I shall not seek—and will not accept—the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” (It was almost worth it to watch the faces of the know-it-all TV commentators, gasping for a few coherent words, looking like a bunch of fish that had just been pulled out of the water.)
Bobby had come to see him a week or so after, and they’d exchanged a few patently insincere words—Bobby saying maybe the breach was his fault, telling the President, “you are a brave and dedicated man,” the words coming out so quietly he’d made Bobby say them again. When Bobby had asked him of his intentions in the campaign, he’d waved Kennedy off, saying that wasn’t what he was focused on right now. And in the three months since, he’d surprised his advisors by staying out of the battle between Kennedy and his Vice President. (He did not share with these advisors that his real choice for President was a Republican: New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. He’d urged him to run during a White House dinner in April, pushed the Indiana industrialist J. Irwin Miller to start a “draft Rocky” committee.) He seemed detached, indifferent to the outcome of the Democratic primary, waving off polling data from Indiana and Nebraska, almost resigned to a Kennedy restoration, even asking one of his aides rhetorically, “Well, what’s wrong with Bobby?” You could almost believe that he was no longer obsessed with Bobby . . . unless you picked up the Washington Post on May 24, and read Drew Pearson’s column charging that Bobby Kennedy—the great tribune of black America—had ordered wiretaps on Martin Luther King, Jr., back in 1963 . . . and unless you knew that the Oregon primary was just four days away, a state with a long, rich tradition of supporting civil liberties (a state where back in ’48, Tom Dewey had defeated Harold Stassen in the Republican Presidential primary by arguing that the Communist Party should not be outlawed) . . . and unless you knew that a Johnson aide had asked J. Edgar Hoover’s top aide for information about the wiretaps on May 17, a day before Drew Pearson met with the President.
The story had hurt Bobby in Oregon, no doubt about that; he’d lost to McCarthy by six points, but Kennedy’s hold on black America was too strong. Civil rights leaders bought the idea that Kennedy had been trying to protect King from Hoover’s charge that he was surrounded by Communists, and in California, a huge turnout in Watts and East Los Angeles had been the key to his victory. When he survived the assassination attempt, he had become politically invulnerable as far as Negroes were concerned. In fact, that near-death experience had changed the game in ways no one could really measure. The nomination that had been about to fall into Humphrey’s lap might now just be up for grabs.
Well, the President thought as he watched Kennedy rally his supporters, there’s a lot more where that King story came from. A lot more. And if there was anyone who despised Bobby Kennedy more than me, it’s Edgar Hoover. Let’s see the little runt squirm his way out of what’s coming next.
ON JUNE 19, the morning after the New York primary, Richard J. Daley reached for the telephone at his desk on the fifth floor of Chicago’s City Hall. He paused for a moment, looked out of the floor-to-ceiling windows to the cars and pedestrians on LaSalle Street, then placed a telephone call to Robert Kennedy.
Daley was in the thirteenth year as the city’s mayor, his fourteenth as Chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party Central Committee. At sixty-six, he had spent more than two-thirds of his life serving the people of Chicago, and the Democratic Party, not necessarily in that order, although in his mind, the two were inseparable. He had worked his way up the greasy pole not with personal charisma or blazing intellect—he was portly, jowly, with a shaky command of language, and his outward affect reflected the plodding nature of his mind—but no one worked harder, no one better mastered the intricacies of budgets or voter habits, no one more thoroughly committed himself to making the arcane, mind-numbing work of government function smoothly, efficiently to ensure that a grateful electorate would keep the party in power.
He had lived all his life within boundaries physical, cultural, and political; he lived in a bungalow in the working-class Bridgeport neighborhood just blocks from where he was born. He sent his children to the same parochial schools, stayed faithfully married to Eleanor, a girl from the neighborhood. His roots were planted firmly in the Eleventh Ward, where he still served as its committeeman. His climb began there, when he signed on as secretary to a famously indolent alderman, Big Jim McDonough, followed him to the city treasurer’s office, went to Springfield as a state senator and director of state revenue, came back to Chicago as deputy controller, the county clerk, then used his power as party chairman to unseat Mayor Kennelly in 1955. He was a man who believed in the structures he had been born into: you got a job because you knew the right people, and you paid for it by turning out the votes on Election Day; you lived in the neighborhood where your kind felt welcome, Irish here, Poles there, blacks and whites kept separate by choice, by design, and by public policy; it was no accident that the fourteen-lane Dan Ryan Expressway cleaved the city by color. And when Martin Luther King, Jr., had come to Chicago in 1966, he’d met with him, signed an agreement to push integrated housing that had all the force of a raindrop on the Chicago River, and watched as King folded his tent and left.
So the tumult and upheaval of the late 1960s troubled him, offended him, threatened his sense of order. When black neighborhoods exploded after King’s murder in April, he ordered his chief of police to “shoot to kill” an arsonist, anyone with a Molotov cocktail, and “shoot to maim any looter.” He shared the contempt of his working-class contemporaries for the anti-war protests of the radical, arrogant young; it was treasonous behavior, never mind their dress and their language. When a huge anti-war demonstration in May turned chaotic, when the police used clubs on some of the demonstrators, he had leapt to the defense of authority. Now, with the Democratic National Convention two months away, he was mobilizing police and calling for the National Guard to protect Chicago against the radicals’ threats to immobilize the city. Maybe they weren’t really planning to put LSD in the Chicago drinking water, but you couldn’t be too careful.
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Such a man would seem to have little in common with the anti-war, civil rights passions of Robert Kennedy, a figure who had committed the ultimate heresy of challenging the sitting President of his own party. The reality was different. First, there were family ties that went back a generation. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., had built the Merchandise Mart, the retail behemoth on the far side of the river that was the city’s largest private employer, one of its biggest property taxpayers, and one of the party’s biggest (if private) benefactors. There were also ties of blood. Daley was forever proud of what he did to help put the first Irish-Catholic in the White House, backing Jack at the 1960 convention over Illinois’s own Adlai Stevenson, then on Election Night helping to ensure that the state’s twenty-six electoral votes would wind up in Kennedy’s corner. When he heard the news from Dallas on that November 22, he’d been inconsolable for days.
But the impulse that drew Daley to Robert Kennedy ran deeper than affection for the family. There was the war. For Daley, it was a visceral wound. Every week, the coffins were coming back: to the Irish in Bridgeport, to the Poles on Milwaukee Avenue, to Greektown, to the towering housing projects where the coloreds lived on the South Side, coffins carrying all that remained of the kids too poor, or too patriotic, or too removed from the safety of college deferments to shield them from combat. One of those coffins held the mortal remains of Joseph McKean, a golden boy of the Bridgeport streets, one of the few graduates of De La Salle to make it to Harvard. McKean had enlisted in the Marines, gone to Vietnam—and three weeks later he was dead.
The war was a political matter, too: He could see the faith of voters in their government ebb as the war dragged on, as the light at the end of the tunnel seemed more and more like the headlight of an oncoming train, as the war’s purpose and outcome became more and more remote.
That’s why he asked a colleague: “And for what? For real estate?”
That’s why he’d told Johnson’s people at the White House back in ’66 that the war was going to be a disaster for the Democratic Party, why he’d said bluntly: “When you’ve got a losing hand, you throw in your cards and get up from the table.” And when they’d asked, what about prestige, he’d said, “You put your prestige in your back pocket, get up from the table, and walk away.”
He knew that the country wanted the war to end, and they’d likely vote for the candidate who seemed most likely to end it. Richard Nixon, who seemed on a glide path to the Republican nomination, was promising “a new policy . . . an honorable end to the war in Vietnam,” and while that was all smoke and mirrors, it might sound better than anything coming from Hubert Humphrey, who appeared paralyzed by the thought of what Lyndon Johnson might do if his Vice President sought to distance himself from the war. Bobby, on the other hand . . . there was no doubt that Bobby meant to end the war.
And about the blacks . . . yes, Bobby seemed at times too sympathetic to the troublemakers and the rabble-rousers, too eager to berate his white audiences about all the terrible things happening to the coloreds, as if it was the white man’s fault that they kept having babies without being married, as if it was his fault that they couldn’t keep their neighborhoods clean, or keep their kids out of gangs, couldn’t get off welfare and find a job like everyone in his family and his neighborhood had done. After King had been shot, they’d gone nuts; he’d had to call out 2,000 National Guardsmen, and by the time it was over eleven were dead and a twenty-eightblock-long stretch along Madison Street had been charred or burned. It was anarchy, sedition, pure and simple.
But there was also this: blacks were now 30 percent of the city’s population—they’d only been 14 percent back in ’50—making them as powerful a voting bloc as any; and Bobby had their ear, their hearts, their trust. If he went with Bobby, that would make a big difference when he ran for mayor again. And Bobby was talking in a way that whites could understand, talking about how destructive the welfare system was, about how big government was not the answer, about how private enterprise had to be encouraged to come into black neighborhoods, so jobs would be there, so those neighborhoods would prosper. (He’d almost laughed out loud when he watched the California debate and saw Bobby telling Gene McCarthy that it wouldn’t work to move 10,000 Negroes into Orange County.)
Then there was politics, pure and simple. The top of the ticket mattered to Daley, and to his organization, because that’s what helped pull in your slate, that’s what kept your legislators and councilmen in power, that’s what won you the State’s Attorney office, the job that came with subpoena power, to put every municipal contract, every patronage job under the withering light of a grand jury. A good party leader would do almost anything to make sure the top of the ticket was a sail, not an anchor. Back in ’48, Daley had watched as Jake Arvey, the city’s Democratic leader, grappled with a string of corruption charges and growing public anger. That year, Arvey slated University of Chicago economist Paul Douglas for U.S. senator, and downstate patrician diplomat Adlai Stevenson for governor—two of the most impeccably corruption-free public figures in the state. Both men had won, and the Cook County organization retained its power.
Now, twenty years later, Daley could see, no, he could feel, the new threat: the cracking of the Democratic Party coalition born in FDR’s New Deal. Crime was infecting the white ethnic neighborhoods, turning them to the law-and-order campaign of Nixon, and to the harsher message of Alabama Governor George Wallace. (He’d seen a “Wallace for President” yard sign around the corner from his own home!) Big Labor was banging the drums for another escalation in Vietnam, while the reformers and intellectuals had turned solidly against it. And could Humphrey really hold this coalition together? He liked Hubert—hell, everybody liked Hubert—but where was the strength, where were the balls to make a voter feel that this was the leader who could hold it together, who could talk to black anger and white fear, maybe find some common ground between the races and the generations?
Now Bobby—he’d won the blacks and the blue-collar whites in Indiana, the farmers in Nebraska and South Dakota, the Mexicans in California, and with McCarthy going down the tubes in New York (Daley couldn’t stand that smug, smirking, “I’m so much cleverer than you are” faker), the reformers and the college types who hated the war really didn’t have any other place to go. As for Daley’s standing, going with Bobby might cost him some with the labor guys, but with the construction booming all over Chicago, they’d forgive him quickly, and his Ward committeemen and council members were loyal, they’d follow his lead. Johnson might make trouble for him with poverty money, but, hell, the Mayor was already screaming at the White House about funding those thugs with Community Action money. Besides, backing Bobby would do him a world of good with the blacks, who were starting to raise real noise about being left out of the jobs-and-contracts pie.
And maybe if Daley backed the candidate who was against the war, maybe the demonstrations at the convention wouldn’t be quite so big, quite so nasty. He thought of the pictures from earlier in the spring, the April 27 march by the Chicago Peace Council when 6,000 of them marched from Grant Park to the Civic Center Plaza, with his police wading into the mob, pushing them into the Civic Center fountain, clubbing the protesters with their nightsticks. Bad enough as it was on the front page of the Tribune and the Sun-Times and the Daily News, it would be awful for the city if it happened in the middle of the convention. Christ, the whole world would be watching.
So he picked up the phone, called Bobby, said he’d noticed Kennedy had been in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, thought maybe it was time he came to Chicago, maybe find time for a good old-fashioned Democratic rally in downtown around noon, when the lunchtime crowds would be out on the streets, and maybe if he liked, the Mayor could introduce him with a few words, talk a bit about old times and times to come and how the Democrats could keep Nixon out of the White House. And Bobby said, yes, he thought he could find the time, could move a few things on his schedule, and how would next Monday work, could the Mayor put some
thing together that soon?
And Daley thought about the 35,000 people on the city payroll, the sanitation workers and building inspectors and firefighters and cops, and said, yes, he was pretty sure that would work.
So when Kennedy’s campaign announced on Thursday that the Senator would be going to Chicago for a noon rally on Monday, everybody knew what that meant. You didn’t campaign in the middle of that town in the middle of the day unless Mayor Daley wanted you to, unless he was in your corner. And when Kennedy stood in the middle of North LaSalle Street, with 300,000 spilling into the side streets, with Daley himself introducing Bobby as “the next President of the United States!” everyone knew that the campaign had just turned a very big corner of its own.
JUST AFTER NINE P.M. on Thursday, July 4, Robert Kennedy stood on a bunting-covered platform in the middle of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, a ninety-one-acre park on the west bank of the Mississippi River that marked the start of Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the West. The massive Gateway Arch towered 630 feet above him; surrounding him were some 75,000 spectators, drawn by the candidate, the promise of fireworks, and by the celebrities who had come to entertain them: Sammy Davis, Jr., Andy Williams, the Jefferson Airplane—(“Don’t tell me we can’t put a broad-based coalition together!” one aide cracked)—Bill Cosby, Gregory Peck, and a cluster of famous athletes. “The bad news,” Kennedy began, “is that the great Cardinal pitcher Bob Gibson will not run with me as my Vice President. The good news is, he says I can run with him as his Vice President.” It was the same joke he’d told about Alabama football coach Bear Bryant in Alabama, the same joke he’d use about any famous sports figure in any state. But it always went over well. He was in a buoyant mood that evening, because he’d spent the day traveling across Missouri by train, joining Independence Day celebrations in a dozen small towns, reviving the old political tradition of the whistle-stop, as he had in the primary states. It proved to be one of the most consequential tactics of his campaign, in ways neither he nor his key advisors could have fully imagined.
Then Everything Changed Page 18