So it was understandable that anyone looking at the logistical and political terrain of Chicago in the weeks before the convention would see not just a war zone, but the likely possibility of something like a war breaking out in the streets of the second biggest city in America. Indeed, had Steve Smith not slammed Sirhan Sirhan to the floor of the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel back in June, had Democrats prepared to convene with the certainty of a Hubert Humphrey nomination, that possibility would have become a near certainty.
But now Robert Kennedy was very much alive, very much a candidate.
And Mayor Richard Daley was backing Kennedy; Daley was throwing all of his considerable weight behind a candidate who was against the war, who was promising to end the war, who was pounding away at conditions in the ghetto, who was taking on the leaders of his own party. This held no weight with the radicals at the Mobilization; to them, Kennedy was another agent of the corporate state, another coat-and-tie liberal working for the system. (“The worst thing to happen to the movement in years,” radical lawyer William Kunstler told an interviewer, “was that Sirhan missed. If he’d been luckier, we would have been spared one more false prophet standing between America and a revolution.”) But for the foot soldiers who had left their studies behind to campaign for Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire and Wisconsin, for the veterans of the sit-ins, teach-ins, marches on Washington, voter registration campaigns in the South, petition drives for anti-war candidates, Mayor Daley had suddenly become, if not a hero, then an ally. The idea of disrupting a city whose leader was on their side seemed . . . ludicrous, a point that prominent youth organizers like Sam Brown had begun to press almost from the day Daley had stood in downtown Chicago with Bobby.
“If you want to help end the war,” Brown and several dozen anti-war figures declared in a joint statement, “if you want to help turn America around, organize your neighbors, your town, your city; let the Democratic Party hear from the grass roots.”
By the weekend before the convention began, fewer than 3,000 protesters had come to Chicago. The small number, in turn, had given Robert Kennedy’s campaign the ammunition with which to persuade a very reluctant Mayor Daley to ease the draconian edicts he had imposed earlier. It had taken days of increasingly urgent conversations between Steve Smith and Daley’s lieutenants, followed by a face-to-face conversation between the Mayor and Robert Kennedy, with Bobby urging Daley to think about how much better Chicago would look to the nation if it did not resemble a police state, and repeating to Daley much the same points he had made to the Ohio delegates back in May: I’m a Democrat, I believe in the organization, I have no intention of damaging what you’ve built here. (Later—much later—these reassurances would come back to cause Kennedy no end of grief.) Reluctantly, Daley agreed to grant the Mobilization a permit to rally in downtown Grant Park, agreed to scale back police presence in and around the convention site, even agreed to take down the seven-foot-high chain-link fence. There was a clear message these decisions were designed to convey to the country: Do not identify the Democrats as the party of disruption and chaos.
That was a message every Democrat could embrace—except, as it happened, the most powerful Democrat of all, who was about to disrupt the convention to its core.
THE THOUGHT HAD OBSESSED him for weeks: Maybe it wasn’t too late, after all. Maybe there was a way back, a way to reclaim the prize he had so publicly, shockingly abandoned four months ago. Now, on this Sunday in late August, Lyndon Johnson was hours away from launching the most audacious gamble of his life, one that would take him ten thousand miles in forty-eight hours and end, he hoped, with his renomination for President of the United States.
He’d told everyone he was done with politics, that he’d stepped aside to devote his last months in office to ending the war in Vietnam. And it was true enough . . . for a while. But the more he watched Hubert Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy fight for the nomination, the more frustrated he became, the more he felt that in the deepest part of him there was a missing piece to this story, and that the missing piece was . . . him.
The very possibility of Robert Kennedy winning the nomination was loathsome. It wasn’t just that he and Bobby had despised each other almost at first sight. It was that Kennedy’s nomination would mean that the Democratic Party, the party he’d given his life to for thirty years, had repudiated all he had worked for, denounced the war, disdained the Great Society he had promised and done so much to make real. It was Bobby who would be hailed as a savior by the Negroes whose emancipation he, Lyndon Johnson, had made possible. It was Bobby’s picture that would hang in the homes of the poor, the poor who owed their health care, their food, to his beneficence. It would also be a personal affront—for God’s sakes, the whole reason for a convention set so late in August was so he could accept renomination on his birthday. So for Bobby to stand there in Chicago, cheered by thousands, while he, the President, was effectively banished from the hall? No, that was not going to happen if he had anything to say about it.
Yet the more Johnson watched Hubert Humphrey, the more convinced he was that Hubert just wasn’t up to it. All through the summer, he’d been venting his dissatisfaction to anyone who’d listen.
“He cries too much,” he’d told a visiting journalist. “That’s it—he just cries too much.” To his close aide Marvin Watson, he put it more bluntly. “Hubert squats when he pees.”
He’d grabbed Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, a close Humphrey ally and fellow Minnesotan, to vent: He’s all over the place, he talks too much, doesn’t he know that Connally and the other Southern governors are just about to throw Hubert over the side if he breaks with them on the credentials and rules fights? Doesn’t he understand that he can’t play footsie with Bobby on a Vietnam peace plank in the platform? I’ve told him a hundred times, the Communists will only come to the table if they’re convinced America will stand tall! It was the same argument he’d made to Hubert right to his face at a recent Cabinet meeting, reaming him out right in front of Rusk and Clifford and the others.
But there was one thing he hadn’t said to Hubert.
A few hours from now, on this Sunday evening, he’d be on Air Force One, flying all night to Kiev in the Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. On Monday morning, he would be sitting down with Soviet Premier Kosygin for a follow-up to their summit meeting the year before in Glassboro, New Jersey. For weeks, a small group of diplomats from the two nations had been shaping a far-reaching agreement that covered some real steps toward disarmament, and strict controls over the spread of nuclear weapons. On Monday evening, he would stand with Kosygin and Soviet Communist Party chief Brezhnev to announce the breakthrough . . . then board Air Force One for an all-night flight to Chicago, where he would take the podium to receive the cheers of his party, and a “Happy Birthday” salute as well. Mayor Daley might have thrown in his lot with Bobby, but Johnson was firmly in control of the convention. He had personally picked the chairman of every key committee—rules, credentials, platform—and the executive director of the convention, John Criswell, had been reporting back to him on a regular basis using the code name “Bert.” Marvin Watson, now Postmaster General, who had served as the White House aide stoking the President’s most paranoid fantasies about his enemies, headed a cadre that had been in Chicago for days, quietly encouraging Johnson’s old allies to keep the President in mind as a possible candidate for a draft.
The President’s surprise appearance would freeze all of the convention’s business: the credentials fights, the rules fights, the dispute over the platform. He, the President, the leader of his party, would be standing before them, delivering tangible, undeniable evidence that firmness in the face of aggression was in fact the surest, no, the only way to ensure peace. And who knew what the convention dynamic might lead to? These gatherings had a life of their own. As a young congressman in 1944, he’d seen the Democrats force even as powerful a figure as President Franklin Roosevelt to dump his Vice President in favor of the mor
e acceptable Harry Truman. In’52, he’d watched the Republican convention in the firm grip of conservative backers of Senator Robert Taft forced by a wave of public opinion to nominate the more moderate Dwight Eisenhower. If these delegates—or more accurately, the men who controlled those delegates—thought Bobby too hotheaded, too threatening, and thought Hubert too weak, too soft to beat Richard Nixon, well, maybe they’d turn to the one who’d actually led America for almost five years, who’d delivered for the very folks Bobby and Hubert were always yelling about.
And it wasn’t just his summit-to-Chicago masterstroke he was counting on to put him within reach of renomination. No, he’d had a very productive conversation with J. Edgar Hoover a few days ago, and Edgar was preparing to put some fascinating material into the hands of columnist Drew Pearson, the same columnist who had exposed Bobby’s wiretapping of Martin Luther King back in May. When the delegates and power brokers at the convention opened their morning papers on Wednesday—the day the convention was scheduled to pick its nominee—they’d find undeniable accounts about Bobby’s efforts as Attorney General to cover up brother Jack’s behavior with women, including Ellie Rometsch, a suspected East German spy, and Judith Exner, mistress of Sam Giancana, one of Chicago’s most prominent gangsters. That story would share space with accounts of the President’s summit triumph, and his surprise convention appearance, but this was one time when Johnson didn’t mind giving Bobby Kennedy a ton of publicity. Bobby would be choking on his breakfast while the delegates were recalling Johnson’s convention speech the night before: a classic Democratic speech, one that McPherson and Califano had been working on for weeks, extolling the Five Enduring Rights: health care, education, a good job, security, and justice, and pledging “that so long as I have breath in my body, I shall use it to encourage my country in its journey toward a freer, braver, more responsible and united America.”
On this Sunday afternoon, Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy was preparing to send a secret diplomatic note to all the allies around the world, informing them of the surprise summit. Press Secretary George Christian was minutes away from summoning the White House pool to Andrews Air Force Base, for an unannounced trip to an undisclosed location. The President was on the phone to Marvin Watson, obsessively reviewing every detail of his convention arrival: how to make sure the sergeants-at-arms would pen Bobby’s New York and California delegations back in the far reaches of the amphitheater when the President arrived to speak, when to let Mayor Daley know he would be expected to meet the President’s helicopter at Meigs Field for the short drive to the amphitheater. Yes, Daley was backing Bobby, but the Mayor was a respecter of tradition and office; there was no way Daley would disrespect the President of the United States, and when he walked onstage with the President, wouldn’t that throw the fear of God into the Kennedy campaign.
And then Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin called, asking for an urgent meeting. He told the President that the Soviet Union had received a request from Prague, asking for “fraternal assistance against forces of aggression”—Kremlin-speak for a full-fledged invasion of Czechoslovakia. Hundreds of tanks, and two hundred thousand soldiers from the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, were pouring across the Czech borders, shooting a dozen young protesters in Wenceslas Square, placing Prime Minister Dubček under house arrest.
How in God’s name is this possible? Johnson thundered at National Security Advisor Walt Rostow, who stammered that no one could know for sure, that it was more than likely that the Soviet military had put the screws to Kosygin, maybe with Brezhnev’s support; they’d likely argued that Prague’s rapid drift away from Moscow, the promise of free speech and a multiparty election posed an intolerable threat to the Soviet Union’s dominance over its Eastern European interests.
Well, there was no way Lyndon Johnson was going to any summit with Kosygin and Brezhnev while Czech blood was running in the streets of Prague, no way he was going to have any landmark peace agreement with Moscow to celebrate in front of thousands of Democrats at the convention. Maybe he could still go anyway, to mark his sixtieth birthday, perhaps spawn enough goodwill and fond memories of past triumphs to spark a genuine draft. He’d sleep on that, but one thing was clear: those stories about the Kennedy brothers and the women would have to be held for now. Without the cover of a summit and an arms deal, his appearance in Chicago just before Drew Pearson published those stories would be too much of a coincidence for anyone to accept. Maybe those stories would have to wait for the fall. If Bobby lost in Chicago, they wouldn’t be needed. If he became the nominee . . . well, there were worse things than the thought of Richard Nixon as President—and the thought of President Bobby Kennedy was definitely one of them.
FOR ALL THE MILLIONS of dollars spent, the tens of thousands of miles traveled, the countless man-hours spent on the phone, in rented cars, in hotel rooms and union halls and coffee shops, for all the appeals to patriotism, justice, the national interest, and self-interest, it was an unplanned encounter, an accident of fate, that determined the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee.
It was Monday, August 26, the opening day of the Democratic National Convention. In downtown Chicago, a constant swarm of delegates, alternatives, favor seekers, trinket sellers, and the merely curious had turned the intersection of Michigan and Balboa Avenues into an impassible mass of humanity. The Conrad Hilton Hotel, where Humphrey’s inner circle was bivouacked, and the Blackstone Hotel, where Robert Kennedy’s forces gathered, faced each other across Balboa Avenue as if they were the fortresses of warring tribes. The Humphrey campaign was in feverish negotiations with its Southern supporters and with party leaders in the East and Midwest, trying to strike a balance that would satisfy both sides on the hot-button questions of seating virtually all-white delegations from the South, and on preserving the unit rule. Kennedy’s inner circle was looking for pressure points to push the big pro-Humphrey states like New Jersey and Pennsylvania to their side on the same fights; they’d paid for prominent Negro leaders to come to Chicago for face-to-face confrontations. (“You vote with Eastland and Lester Maddox,” a thirty-year-old Philadelphia activist named Wilson Goode yelled at Mayor Tate, “and you won’t see one damn brother at the polls in November!”)
Eugene McCarthy had come to Chicago as well, arriving with poet Robert Lowell, Life magazine essayist Shana Alexander, and a quartet of European journalists. He paused on his way to his suite in the Hilton to answer a reporter’s question about the invasion of Czechoslovakia—“I hardly consider it a major world crisis”—and to speculate on a possible Humphrey-Kennedy ticket:
“If Hubert wants to be Jack, he’ll need a Bobby to do with Bobby what Bobby did to Lyndon.” The European journalists spent several minutes trying to translate and comprehend the comment.
Robert Kennedy was in the living room of his suite on the fourth floor of the Blackstone, a fifty-eight-year-old Beaux Arts building with roots deeply embedded in Chicago’s political history. It was here in 1920 that Republican leaders had gathered in the notorious “smoke-filled room” to nominate Warren Harding as President. (Kennedy’s campaign had respectfully declined the hotel’s offer to put the Senator in that very suite.) It was here in ’44 where Harry Truman learned he’d been picked as FDR’s Vice President, and where in ’52 Eisenhower learned he’d been nominated for President.
What would make the Blackstone Hotel so significant a player in the politics of 1968 was that the Kennedy suite had a picture-perfect view across Michigan Avenue to Lake Shore Drive, Lake Michigan, and Grant Park, where several hundred protesters were camped out. He was enjoying a rare few minutes of ease, lunching on a cheeseburger and a Heineken, when Frank Mankiewicz called up from the lobby to pass along a wild rumor that Lyndon Johnson might be coming to the convention.
“Well, it came from Jimmy Breslin, so I’m giving it zero credibility,” Mankiewicz cracked, looking over at the New York Daily News columnist, whom he’d run into by chance.
“Is he with you?” Kenne
dy asked.
“Yeah, Hamill and Newfield as well.”
“’em up,” Kennedy said. “I could use a laugh or two.” He enjoyed the byplay with the famously irreverent Breslin. After hearing Kennedy’s impassioned talk about suicide among young Indians, Breslin had said, “I guess the only reason Jim Thorpe won the Olympics was because the rope broke.” For his part, Kennedy once said, “I always thought growing up poor gave you character, Jimmy—then I met you, and now I’m beginning to wonder.”
When the three writers entered the suite, they found Kennedy at the window of the living room, staring out at Grant Park. They could hear faint strains of the music playing over the loudspeakers from the stage that had been set up at the park’s Buckingham Fountain: Country Joe and the Fish’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.”
“We just came from the park,” they told him.
“Who’s over there?” he asked.
“A real mix,” Hamill said. “Some hard-core types—Mao jackets, Vietcong flags. Some of them are looking for another summer of love. There was a dustup over the Czech invasion; Bill Kuntsler was arguing that no one should criticize a ‘socialist’ country, but there were a few signs that said ‘the pig is the same all over the world.’ Jerry Rubin’s telling them to kill their parents. Abbie’s threatening to send ‘an army of studs’ to the convention to seduce the wives of the delegates.”
“They don’t seem to be big fans of yours,” Breslin said, goading him. “A couple of them said if I ran into you, make sure I ask you why you’re afraid to come out and meet them face-to-face.”
Kennedy nodded; then, as he so often did, said nothing, just kept looking out over Michigan Avenue to Grant Park. Dave Hackett, his oldest friend and chief delegate hunter, looked up from the desk he was working at over on the far side of the living room. There was a distinct edge in his voice.
Then Everything Changed Page 22