Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  It had begun back in Indiana, the first primary test Kennedy would face. One of his old friends, Indiana-born writer John Barlow Martin, suggested that Bobby campaign by train, retracing the route of the famed Wabash Cannonball. If you’re going to win this primary, Martin had argued, you’ll have to win over small-town Indiana, and this is the best way to do it; besides, it’ll make for great television.

  But it turned out to be more, a lot more than a campaign stunt or a catchy visual. For one thing, it connected Kennedy, a symbol to many of unsettling change and frenzy, to an older, slower, more comfortable time. For the men and women of Kokomo and Marion and Bedford, the railroad depot had been at the center of life and commerce before the interstates and the malls had passed them by, hollowed out their towns, left the storefronts around the town squares vacant. There was also something flattering in the notion that a serious contender for the Presidency, a Kennedy, no less, a man who had not lived a moment of his life in a small, Midwestern town would come to them, the people the TV cameras and celebrities never visited, and ask for their votes. More than his presence, though, was a connection that Kennedy had begun to feel with the weathered faces of farmers and laborers; the same sense of “outsiderness” that he sensed almost viscerally in the faces of Negro children in urban ghettoes, Hispanics who worked the fields in California’s Imperial Valley. Speaking without a text, often unpolished, sometimes groping for words, he had communicated the kind of unvarnished, no-frills presence that struck a chord with these classic Hoosiers. On Primary Day, May 7, Kennedy won every rural county through which the Wabash Cannonball had traveled. So he’d repeated the whistle-stop in Nebraska, and it was one of the campaign’s best days. He was increasingly at ease in his speeches, and began mocking the pandering of conventional campaigners.

  “I’m doing more for the farmer than any of them,” he said of his rivals, “and if you don’t believe me, just look down at my breakfast table. We are consuming more milk and bread, more eggs, doing more for farm consumption than the family of any other candidate!” He would mockingly “instruct” his listeners on proper politically useful behavior.

  “Break out in spontaneous applause whenever I make a point.” And when the clapping broke out, he demanded, “Did anyone over twenty-one clap?” At Ogallala, he asked, if other candidates had appeared. “No!” the crowd shouted, and he said, “Remember who was here first . . . In fact, when I was asked why I wanted to campaign in Nebraska, I said, ‘Because I want to go to Ogallala.’ ” And on May 14, Kennedy won by huge margins all along the route of his train, from Kimball to North Platte to Lexington. By the time he campaigned by train through California’s San Joaquin Valley, he had ratcheted up his humor, explaining to a crowd in Fresno that he had decided to enter the primary so that he’d have an excuse to visit the Fresno Mall.

  “Because after you’ve seen the Pyramids of Egypt and the Taj Mahal, what is left but to visit the Fresno Mall?” What might have sounded like an insult became a shared joke—candidate and audience mocking the platitudes.

  Now, with the primaries over, a new factor had entered the equation. In many of the big states, the old-line politicians supporting Humphrey were based in the big cities, heirs to the once-invincible, still-significant machines that had installed Democrats in power decades earlier. Small-town Democrats often felt like red-haired stepchildren when it came to the spoils of office, yet by the rules of most state parties, they had votes in county and statewide gatherings out of all proportion to their share of the population. To the strategists around Kennedy, desperately looking for ways to pry delegates away from Humphrey, a show of strength in rural and small-town America could mean as much as huge rallies in the streets of the big cities. In fact, it could mean more, because Kennedy would be surrounded by people and images that reassured rather than unsettled the TV audience.

  The decision to campaign through small-town America was yielding other political benefits as well: Governor John Docking of Kansas, Governor Harold Hughes of Iowa, and Senator Quentin Burdick of North Dakota, watching Bobby connect with their kinds of voters, were signaling that they just might be lining up behind Bobby.

  “I’d like to claim credit for our brilliant insight,” one top aide later said, “but the truth is, we were looking at the footage from those states and it hit us that we’d somehow signed up Norman Rockwell as our scenic designer.” Another aide put it more pungently.

  “Look at them!” he shouted as he watched the news coverage from Nebraska. “They’re so old! They’re so clean! They’re so fucking white!”

  So on the morning of July 3, Kennedy spoke to a crowd of some 5,000 outside Kansas City’s Union Station, the fifty-four-year-old Beaux Arts masterpiece. Then he boarded “the Arden,” the Union Pacific’s best private railroad car owned by the family of the line’s founder, E. R. Harriman. (It had taken a transatlantic phone call to Averell Harriman, negotiating a Vietnam War settlement in Paris, to get the car for Kennedy’s use in Nebraska.) With its wood paneling, private dining room, and an open rear platform surrounded by a polished grille, it was the perfect accommodation for a whistle-stopping candidate; local politicians, contributors, influential journalists, and traveling companions could be courted between speeches, and the campaign was spared the trauma of Ethel Kennedy’s fear of flying (an understandable fear, since she had lost her parents in a plane crash).

  All that day, the “Show-Me” Special rolled across Missouri, through Warrensburg, Sedalia, Jefferson City, Hermann, through towns that had not seen a Presidential candidate since Truman, or Coolidge, or Grover Cleveland. The high school bands were there, the drum majorettes in thigh-high skirts, the gold-tasseled uniforms and brass instruments gleaming in the sun, the mascots—Eagles, Lions, Vikings, Wildcats—on hand to greet the candidate. He spoke from the rear platform of the Arden, or he’d motorcade a short distance to the town square, ringed with American flags and bunting. He joked with them, teased them (“How many of you have read my book?” “We have! We have!” “You lie!”). And he quoted Missouri’s most illustrious son as he challenged the Democratic Party not to choose a nominee who had ducked the primaries:

  “Harry Truman once said, ‘It’s not the hand that signs the laws that holds the destiny of America, it’s the hand that casts the ballot.’ The millions of Americans who have cast their ballots this year, have voted overwhelmingly for a new course; now it is time for those of you who do not have a chance to cast ballots to make your voices heard.”

  (Some in the press did not fail to note the irony of Robert Kennedy quoting a man who had fought hard to keep his brother out of the White House, who despised primaries as a threat to party discipline, who regarded a challenge to a sitting President’s renomination as treason, and who had said of Bobby, “I just don’t like that boy and I never will.”)

  By eight p.m.—just about two hours late—the “Show-Me” Special pulled into Union Station in St. Louis, once the busiest station in the world, whose gold-leaf Romanesque arches dominated the Great Hall, now dingy from years of neglect. A clutch of Missouri politicians traveled with Kennedy on the last leg of his journey, a significant sign given that the state’s Democratic governor, Warren Hearnes, was solidly behind Humphrey. One of those most valued by the Kennedy campaign was the thirty-nine-year-old Lieutenant Governor Tom Eagleton, who was mounting a spirited primary challenge to Senator Edward Long, a Teamsters’ mouthpiece who had frequently attacked Robert Kennedy for overzealously prosecuting the union.

  By nine p.m., Kennedy had mounted the platform under the arch, and was speaking to the crowd that had been entertained during its long wait by the singers, comedians, and other celebrities.

  The crowd was juiced, ready to scream its enthusiasm. What they heard was a Fourth of July speech that struck a note Kennedy had been sounding since his first days in the Senate, but which was a frontal challenge to Hubert Humphrey and to the orthodoxies of the Democratic Party.

  “We celebrate today our independence from a
powerful empire that had ceased to honor the rights of the individual. At the center of this campaign—and that of my colleague, Senator Eugene McCarthy—is the belief in the power of the individual to shape his own destiny, to be part of a renewed citizen participation in our civic life. But if we are to genuinely honor those who built this great nation, if we are to be true to its spirit, then we must reassert some fundamental truths that we have at times forgotten, as a party and as a nation . . . one of the elements of the ‘new politics’ is to halt and reverse the growing accumulation of power and authority in the central government in Washington, and to return that power of decision to the American people in their own local communities . . . the answer to our problems is not just another federal program, another department or administration, another layer of bureaucracy in Washington. The real answer is in the full involvement of the private enterprise system—in the creation of jobs, the building of housing, in training and education and health care.

  “There is nothing ‘liberal’ about a constant expansion of the federal government, stripping citizens of their public power—the right to share in the government of affairs—that was the founding purpose of this nation. There is nothing conservative about standing idle while millions of fellow citizens lose their lives and hopes, while their frustration turns to fury that tears the fabric of society and freedom.”

  The speech in fact used the same language Kennedy had been using throughout his Senate years. (“When I go into the ghetto,” he told a federal education official at a Senate hearing, “the two things people most hate are the public welfare system and the public education system.”) But for some in the press, hearing it for the first time in the context of a major speech, it was another sign that “Bobby was appealing to the Right.” In Sacramento, Governor Ronald Reagan, in the midst of his own stealth pursuit of the Presidency, joked, “He’s sounding more and more like me.” And in the days to come, Vice President Humphrey would tell audiences at labor union gatherings and party conventions that he, not Kennedy, was the true liberal in the race.

  “I don’t believe Democrats want a nominee who appeals for votes by running down the great works of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson and, yes—John F. Kennedy. Did Social Security ‘strip us of our power’? Did Medicare? The minimum wage? The civil rights laws? We don’t want a candidate who talks like FDR one day, and Barry Goldwater the next!”

  It was an effective message to the more traditional liberals who had long seen Humphrey as their champion, the kind of message that would work to hold those big-state delegations in place as the convention grew closer. It would take an even more powerful argument to shake those delegations loose; as it happened, the argument the Kennedy campaign seized on was rooted in what had become the central fault line of the Democratic Party for the last four decades.

  NECESSITY MAY BE the mother of invention, but it was something more like desperation that gave birth to the trap that snared Vice President Hubert Humphrey. On Saturday, July 6, half a dozen men sat by the pool at Robert Kennedy’s sprawling home off Hickory Hill Road. It was the same pool that was the setting for some of the more boisterous parties during John Kennedy’s Presidency, including one where some of the formally clad guests had wound up leaping, or falling, or pushing one another into the water. There was, however, nothing boisterous about the gathering this Saturday noon, apart from the play of Kennedy’s dogs: Freckles, the cocker spaniel, and Brumus, an enormous black Newfoundland with the habit of depositing saliva on the suit jackets of Kennedy aides and associates. (When one Kennedy aide was mocked by reporters for walking Freckles on a campaign stop, he replied, “To you, it’s dog shit; to me, it’s an ambassadorship.”) These men had guided John Kennedy’s fight for the 1960 Democratic nomination, but back then they had had two years to plan their strategy, and they were not challenging the President of their own party. So they sat this Saturday in lounge chairs, legal pads and papers on their laps, all looking at the same numbers: one hundred delegates, one hundred goddamn delegates. As best as they could measure, if the Democratic convention were balloting today, they would lose to Humphrey by a hundred delegates.

  They had made up ground since the attempt on Kennedy’s life, no doubt about it. Almost all of McCarthy’s delegates had defected to Bobby, and there was even a chance that in Minnesota, Humphrey’s home state, the anti-war passions would bring most of that delegation to his side. There were promising signs in Ohio, and the Kennedy-McCarthy coalition in Colorado had become Bobby’s. In Washington State, Jim Whittaker, the mountain climber who’d led Bobby up to the summit of Mt. Kennedy, had turned out to be a first-rate tactician, and that delegation might yield a pleasant surprise from its 38 delegates. All well and good, but the men gathered around the pool had spent too many years in the infantry work of politics to be capable of self-delusion. Steve Smith, Dave Hackett, O’Donnell and O’Brien, Fred Dutton, Robert Troutman (who’d run the convention operation for JFK in ’60, and who would do the same for Bobby) could see the reality beneath the crowds Bobby was drawing in the big cities and the small towns: they were a hundred goddamn delegates short.

  Daley had helped, of course; there was no better barometer of lunch-bucket, no-bullshit Democratic Party thinking than the Chicago mayor, and every councilman, state assemblyman, ward committee chair, and sewer inspector from Newark to Detroit to Denver knew what Daley was saying when he’d backed Kennedy: Hubert can’t win; Bobby can.

  The problem was that for too many other players, old ties to Humphrey, old wounds from the Kennedys, and the power of organized labor counted at least as much as Daley’s signal. Humphrey was a familiar, reliable, pliable Democrat, who had stood up for civil rights and organized labor from his first days in public life, and who was also firmly committed to the orthodoxies of the New Deal and the Great Society. Bobby was playing with the very forces that could threaten their hold on power: angry blacks, zealous young hotheads, “reformers” with no understanding of how politics really worked, no respect for the system that provided jobs and services in return for votes. If Bobby was going to empower people in their own neighborhoods and school districts, then where was the leverage for mayors and governors, where was the ability to trade contracts and jobs for votes?

  Then there was organized labor. For Democrats, unions represented both fuel and machinery. Millions of dollars came into their coffers from the political action committees of unions, money for advertising, direct mail, and logistics. Millions more were spent by unions to tell their members who was on their side and who was not. Labor manned the phone banks that called union households on Election Day, that lined up transportation and babysitters and poll watchers. Take labor out of the equation, and the Democratic Party would be consigned to permanent minority status. And for most of the party, organized labor meant George Meany.

  At seventy-three, the onetime New York City plumber had spent a lifetime in the labor movement. He’d been its top dog since 1955, when he took the American Federation of Labor into the merger with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. He was a crusty, blunt-spoken man whose face wore a constant scowl, whose prominent jowls and ever-present cigar gave him the look of one of those monopoly capitalists caricatured by left-wing artists. And his politics, while liberal, had a conservative streak, especially when it came to foreign policy. He’d spent years kicking Communist-dominated unions out of the Federation, and there was no bigger hawk when it came to facing down the Soviet Union and Communist insurgencies around the world. When his key rival in the union movement, the Auto Workers’ Walter Reuther, turned on the Vietnam War, Meany argued for its escalation. He had, in other words, no use for Robert Kennedy’s Vietnam views, and while he had kicked the Teamsters Union out of the Federation after the Senate hearings Bobby led, Meany had a suspicion that there were plenty of other unions Bobby might like to go after. And when Bobby talked about “jobs” for all those Negroes in the ghettoes, it sure sounded as if Bobby was going to take on the tradition
where men passed on construction jobs to their sons and their nephews, which kept those high-paid jobs in the hands of white union members and their families. So Meany and his loyal allies in the union movement had thrown their clout behind Humphrey’s Presidential bid; even those old-line Democrats inclined to go with Robert Kennedy had to think long and hard about turning on one of their most consequential benefactors.

  One final, immense obstacle separated Robert Kennedy and those hundred goddamn delegates: the South. More than 600 delegates came from Southern and Southwestern states, and even if Bobby could count on support from black Democrats in those states, they’d be of little help, thanks to a venerable parliamentary device. In an effort to maximize their clout, most Southern states had long lived by the “unit rule”: however a majority of a state’s delegation voted, all the votes of that delegation would be cast the same way. Maybe there were four, or ten, or twenty delegates who wanted to vote for Bobby, but under the unit rule, their votes would automatically be counted for Humphrey.

  So the men sat around the pool at Hickory Hill, picked at their tuna sandwiches, sipped their iced tea, debated the wisdom of a visit to foreign capitals, and settled into that uncomfortable silence that spoke volumes about their options, or lack of them, when Robert Kennedy began tapping his prominent front teeth and asked a simple question: