Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  “Senator,” Hackett said, “I hope you’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking . . .”

  What happened next might have seemed inexplicable behavior by a serious candidate for President; it was, however, consistent with one of the most powerful strains in Robert Kennedy’s character: He loved risk, embraced it, sought it all his life, and especially after the death of his brother.

  Maybe it was because he was the runt of the litter, a five-foot nine-inch scrawny kid in a family of three six-foot-plus brothers, a boy closer to his mother than to his bluff, take-no-prisoners father. He’d gone out for the football team at school, felt bitter disappointment that he had been too young for combat in World War II. He dove into freezing waters of Cape Cod, into dangerous white-water rapids in Colorado, into piranha-infested waters on a trip to Latin America. He admired physical courage and daring. It was why he was drawn to astronaut John Glenn, bullfighter El Cordobes, boxer Jose Torres; why he once had such enthusiasm for counter-insurgency in Vietnam and guerrilla tactics aimed at deposing Fidel Castro. And central to his embrace of risk was his willingness, eagerness, to face his critics, even his fiercest opponents, face-to-face. He and Teamster Union boss Jimmy Hoffa had exchanged angry words and poisonous glances across a Senate committee hearing room in the 1950s. He’d stood in packed halls and argued with student radicals at Waseda University in Japan in 1962, and in 1965, at Chile’s Concepción University, he’d waded into a mob of Communist students, one of whom had spat in his face. All through this primary campaign, he’d gone right for the provocative encounters. He’d spent a long night in a coffee shop in Indiana with young supporters of Gene McCarthy, praising them for their involvement, regretting that his late entry into the race had lost him their backing. He told college students in every primary state that he opposed student draft deferments (“What about a boy who just wants to open a filling station after high school; why should he have to give up his plans and go off?”). When well-heeled medical students at Indiana University asked who would pay for his health-care plans, he answered: “You will!—You!—You!”

  So it was hardly out of character when Kennedy motioned to the writers and said, Come on, I’d like you to introduce me to your fine, patriotic friends. Dave, don’t worry. Between the Secret Service and these three brave men, I’m sure everything will be fine. Besides, if I know Daley, about half of the people in that park are undercover Chicago cops.

  It took less than ten minutes for Kennedy, the three writers, and three extremely agitated Secret Service agents to leave the Blackstone through the parking garage, hop into a van, and wend their way up Michigan Avenue, across Congress Parkway, and over to the Buckingham Fountain at Grant Park. It took two minutes before Kennedy and his party found themselves surrounded by a dozen, then several dozen, then a few hundred of the crowd of protesters . . . and just about that long for the gathering to turn confrontational.

  “Why did you work for Joe McCarthy?” “Why did you and your brother get us into Vietnam?” “You’re in bed with Daley, whose pigs beat us up two months ago!” “Why won’t you stand with the Black Panthers who want justice for their brothers and sisters!”

  For a few moments, Kennedy tried to answer the questions. Then he held up his hands.

  Well, you tell me something now, he said. How many of you have spent one minute this summer working in a black ghetto, or in Eastern Kentucky, or on an Indian reservation? Just a ten-minute ride from here, he said, pointing south, there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of children who go to crumbling schools, whose homes are overrun with rats. How many of you have spent five minutes doing something to make their lives better?

  They were shouting at him now, some of them, but he spoke over them.

  You call police “pigs.” Why can’t you see that they put their lives on the line every day, in neighborhoods where they’re seen as occupiers. We need more black men, men from the neighborhoods in our police forces and we can’t accept police brutality, but who do you think crime hurts the most? You think there’s something “heroic” about a gang that hits an eighty-year-old Negro woman and steals her rent money? He called them out on the Vietcong flags they were carrying, asking if they could name a Communist country where their counterparts would be permitted to march in protests in the streets of those cities, asking if they’d bothered to see the news from Prague. He talked about a young man named John Lewis, a man who almost died during a Freedom Ride, who had put his life on the line to change the country because he wanted to love it, not hate it. And we are not far from the time when a man like John Lewis will sit in the Congress of the United States, and in your lifetime, if not mine, in the Oval Office as well. (They howled with derision at that one.)

  A few minutes later, when an orange went whizzing by Kennedy’s head, one of the Secret Service detail took him by the shoulders, turned him around, and said, “Senator, it’s time to leave now.”

  Under other circumstances, it was a clash that would have stirred some conversation a day later when the New York writers devoted their newspaper columns to it. Conventions, however, were not ordinary events. For the television networks in 1968, they were the most crucial of all news events, a World Series, heavyweight championship match and royal coronation, where success or failure pretty much determined which network would claim news supremacy for the next four years. (Twelve years earlier, NBC had paired a stolid, no-frills anchor named Chet Huntley with a young, witty thirty-six-year-old David Brinkley, and their convention coverage had made NBC the dominant news network for a decade.) The networks each spent millions of dollars, dispatched whole brigades of correspondents, reporters, producers, and camera crews to record every event (NBC and CBS each booked 750 rooms in Chicago hotels for their armies). Conventions were covered gavel to gavel and beyond; a news conference, a rally, a rules committee dispute, was more than likely to interrupt daytime programming. With demonstrations promising to provide drama and conflict, if not actual bloodshed, it was no surprise that NBC and CBS had posted camera crews at Grant Park. Both networks captured the confrontation between Kennedy and the protesters.

  Under other circumstances, the networks might well have cut live to the event, with the tape played back directly from the scene with Ampex Quadruplex machines, then microwaved back to the control room at the amphitheater. Chicago, however, was in the middle of a series of strikes by telephone and electrical workers. Only a fervent mix of pleas and threats by Mayor Daley had persuaded the strikers to let the networks set up any equipment at all so that the convention could be televised. There was, however, no give when it came to remote locations. If the networks wanted to show any event that took place beyond the convention site, they would have to wait for the tape to be driven to the amphitheater. Between the massive gridlock that gripped downtown Chicago, the snarled roads and highways that the bus and taxi strike had produced, and the endless lines of press people waiting to get their credentials checked, by the time the CBS and NBC crews got their tapes in the hands of the control room, it was almost time for the network evening newscasts to air.

  “Good evening,” Walter Cronkite intoned at 6:00 p.m. central daylight time, “an extraordinary confrontation between Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy and a mob of radical protesters took place today on the very day that the Democratic National Convention was about to begin. CBS’s John Laurence was there.” The twenty-seven-year-old Laurence, brought back from Vietnam for the convention, described the clash as “one of the most unguarded moments a major political figure is ever likely to have.”

  The piece ran for almost six minutes; an eternity by the standards of thirty-minute network news broadcasts. It was Cronkite himself who insisted on the length. Beneath the surface image of solid “Uncle Walter” objectivity, Cronkite was an ardent liberal. He had turned hard against the Vietnam War—his lengthy broadcast earlier in the year calling the war a stalemate was hugely influential. When he saw it, President Johnson supposedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I�
��ve lost middle America.” He was also a personal friend of Robert Kennedy. Most important, he knew dynamite footage when he saw it. So, for that matter, did the top producers at NBC News, who also featured the footage as the lead of their newscasts. When Shad Northshield, the famously profane head of NBC’s Nightly News, saw the tape, he yelled: “It’s a goddamn fuck-in!”

  In 1968, the network evening newscasts were something of a national ritual. With cable television little more than a string of community antennas in rural America, with all-news radio in its birth pangs and with computers the province of a few giant corporations and the military, the evening news was the only source of information available between the afternoon papers and the morning papers that hit America’s doorsteps the next day. More than nine out of ten TV homes watched one of the evening newscasts; and more than sixteen million homes kept their televisions on to watch the conventions—gatherings which in those times actually decided who the nominees would be. And that night, as the convention began with a mind-numbing series of welcoming speeches, the networks repeatedly cut away for the far more riveting footage of Robert Kennedy confronting the radicals, running the tape three, four, five times during Monday’s coverage. In an effort at balance, the networks also showed Hubert Humphrey—welcoming into his suite at the Conrad Hilton a stream of middle-aged and older overweight men in suits.

  It was, then, a mass audience that saw Kennedy, shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened, sporting the shorter haircut demanded by his advisors, defending the virtues of his country in front of a long-haired, tie-dyed, bearded cluster carrying the flag of the enemy, wearing the American flag on the seat of their jeans. They saw him defending the police, insisting that criminal behavior and violence were intolerable. To the reporters who had followed Kennedy on the campaign, it was very familiar stuff; but to the millions watching at home, including countless voters who had thought of Robert Kennedy as the champion of militant Negroes and long-haired white radicals, it was a startling sight.

  And they responded.

  Telegrams of support began arriving by the thousands, addressed to the convention, to the Democratic National Committee, to politicians in residence; the volume grew so high, the addresses so vague, that a local Western Union executive had to track down a master list of convention-goers from a harried clerk in the bowels of the amphitheater. Telephone calls overwhelmed the switchboards at the Hilton, the Blackstone, the Ambassador, and dozens of other hotels. It is impossible to know whether these messages reflected the will of rank-and-file Democrats. A Harris poll published the Monday of the convention showed Robert Kennedy leading Hubert Humphrey by a narrow 41-38 margin, with the rest either undecided or favoring someone else. A Gallup poll showed a dead heat. Both polls showed Robert Kennedy running slightly better against Nixon than Humphrey did. What was clearly true was that the flood of messages had a powerful impact among the Democrats gathered in Chicago. Poll numbers are, by definition evanescent. These were yellow rectangles of paper, stacks of pink message slips. Real people, lots of them, had taken the trouble to pay for a telegram or a long-distance phone call. And overwhelmingly, they were lining up behind Robert Kennedy.

  Sixteen years earlier, two outbursts of public reaction had shaped the politics of 1952. Viewers at home, watching the Republican National Convention on TV for the first time, deluged the convention with calls and telegrams protesting the machinations of convention insiders, demanding “fair play” for the Eisenhower forces; his delegates were seated, and Ike won the nomination. Two months later, Richard Nixon saved his place on the ticket—and his career—with his “Checkers” speech, when literally millions of letters, telegrams, and phone calls overwhelmed the Republican National Committee and the Eisenhower campaign.

  Now, in 1968, on this Monday night in late August, something that looked very much like a grass-roots explosion was pounding the Democratic Convention, something that delegates, party leaders, and the campaigns were struggling to understand. Because of the telephone strike, communication between the campaign staffs and their lieutenants inside the hall were chaotic at best. In fact, the delegates and state party chairs inside the hall were themselves operating in a fog of confusion. All through the amphitheater, clusters of delegates grouped around small black-and-white portable TV sets, watching the tape of Robert Kennedy’s confrontation in the park replayed over and over. Others raced for the pay telephones scattered throughout the building, calling home to ask if their families or business partners had any clue about what was happening. Loyal subordinates of top Humphrey backers left those phone calls to report glum news to their bosses back on the floor: My guy says Bobby really put it to those punks! In suite 2525A of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, Vice President Humphrey and his campaign team watched the TVs with growing fury.

  “I hope those folks at the networks realize I’ll be appointing the FCC Chairman when I’m President,” Humphrey snapped. “We’re going to investigate all this next year.”

  Within a few hours, Humphrey’s campaign was facing the distinct prospect of a political meltdown. The mayor, governors, senators, congressmen, state chairs, indeed, every good politician had a powerful, primal ability to sense a threat to his survival. These telegrams, these telephone calls, had aroused their deepest fears. And they voted those fears. By the time the convention’s Monday session adjourned, it was 1:15 on Tuesday morning. The Mississippi and Alabama delegations had been unseated, replaced by “loyalist” slates of roughly equal black and white members. Georgia’s delegation had been cleaved in half, with a “regular” and “loyalist” slate dividing the forty-two votes equally. And when the “unit rule” came up for debate, it was Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, the co-chair of the Humphrey campaign, going to the rostrum to denounce the rule as “an anachronism, a relic whose time has passed.” The signal from the Vice President’s camp could not have been clearer: They had neither the inclination nor the power to prod their big-state liberal backers to stand with the most conservative forces in the party. The unit rule was abolished by a 3-to-1 margin. In itself, these decisions were a powerful tonic to Robert Kennedy’s campaign. More significant was what these votes reflected and fueled: Hubert Humphrey’s patience with Lyndon Johnson had reached the breaking point.

  FOR MORE THAN a decade, they had been mentor and student. When Humphrey, the firebrand liberal, had come to the Senate in 1949, he had become a pariah by frontally challenging the powerful old lions who ran the place. Johnson, a fellow freshman but with years of experience in Washington, became a counselor to Humphrey, later assigning him legislative tasks. Humphrey in turn came to respect Johnson’s skills, and had warded off a liberal challenge to Johnson’s Vice Presidential nomination in 1960.

  That dynamic abruptly shifted to something more like master and servant when President Johnson came to picking his running mate in 1964. He’d demanded a pledge of absolute loyalty, in keeping with his pronouncement that when he chose a running mate, he wanted “his pecker in my pocket.” He’d put Humphrey through an agonizing, humiliating waiting game before announcing that he was in fact, the choice. When Humphrey raised doubts about the escalation in Vietnam in 1965, Johnson had cut him out of all deliberations in Vietnam for more than a year. And after the President had renounced another term, he began to openly scorn Humphrey’s capacity for the job, as well as his manhood. There was no way all those disparaging remarks weren’t going to get back to Hubert, and there was nothing Humphrey could do about them. His Presidential fortunes were tied to Johnson, who controlled the apparatus of the Democratic Party and the convention. Those 600 votes in the South and Southwest, he knew, were prepared to vote for Hubert in large measure because he was the only thing standing between Bobby Kennedy and the nomination.

  Except . . . there were all these hints that Johnson might not really have left the field, that a part of the President’s mind was fixated on the possibility that he might find redemption in Chicago. Humphrey had even called campaign chronicler Teddy White, to ask him if J
ohnson might try for the nomination—stark testimony to Humphrey’s exclusion from any inner circle of information. He’d only been told of Johnson’s intended flash summit meeting just before its intended announcement, before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had blown that idea up on the launching pad. Even now, after the convention opened, there was talk of a surprise Presidential appearance sometime in the next twenty-hour hours. And on this Tuesday morning, Johnson’s people, who controlled every element of the convention machinery, were expressing their boss’s cold fury at what had happened the night before at the convention.

  “The President’s not very happy about this,” Marvin Watson said to Humphrey in the living room of his suite on the Conrad Hilton’s twenty-fifth floor. “Connally told him you’d promised to be with his people on the unit rule.” Watson was Postmaster General now, but for the last three years, he’d been Johnson’s closest White House aide, the one who eagerly fed him the latest information and innuendo about the myriad alleged Bobby Kennedy conspiracies.

  “Well,” said Humphrey, as he nibbled on a slice of cheddar. “You tell the President that if I’d stayed with the unit rule, I’d have lost four hundred delegates. Does he understand that I’m the candidate? Or am I misunderstanding something.”

  Watson ignored the jab.

  “The President wants to know about the Vietnam platform plank,” Watson said. “He wants to make sure you understand that any loss of support for our policy is going to be seen in Hanoi as a sign of weakness; he asked me to call your attention to the statement of General Abrams.”

  In an unprecedented use—or misuse—of the military, Johnson’s National Security Advisor Walt Rostow had solicited a statement by the commanding general in Vietnam that any halt in the bombing of the North would jeopardize American forces in the South. That statement had promptly been sent to House Majority Whip Hale Boggs, chair of the convention platform committee, for immediate public distribution.