And then Robert Kennedy gave what Theodore H. White called “the most unusual acceptance speech in American political history.”
He talked about ending the war in Vietnam, not “to simply withdraw, to raise the white flag of surrender . . . but to end it in a peace for brave men . . .”
He talked about crime, an issue Richard Nixon was raising for the first time in any Presidential campaign, an issue that was rending the Democratic coalition of big-city whites and blacks. He talked about it as he had all through the primary campaign, to the uneasiness of some in his own camp.
“The real threat of crime,” he said, “is what it does to ourselves and our communities. No nation hiding behind locked doors is free, for it is imprisoned by its own fear. No nation whose citizens fear to walk their own streets is healthy, for in isolation lies the poisoning of public participation.”
He talked about welfare: “The answer to the welfare crisis is work, jobs, self-sufficiency, and family integrity; not a massive new extension of welfare, not a great new outpouring of guidance counselors to give the poor more advice. We need jobs, dignified employment that lets a man say to his community, to his family, to his country, and most important, to himself: ‘I am a participant in its great public ventures. I am a man . . .’ ”
And he ended with words he had given before, words that had sparked something of an argument among his speechwriters and aides. The press will say you’re recycling old stuff, they argued. Well, came the response, there are sixty million Americans who’ve never heard it. In the end, it was Kennedy who decided to include it: I think this is at the heart of our problem—mine and the Democratic Party’s problems. They think I’m too radical, and they think we don’t feel what they’re feeling.
So he ended his speech by talking about “another great task before us: to confront the poverty of satisfaction—a lack of purpose and dignity—that inflicts us all. It is folly to believe that we can find such purpose and dignity in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product is over eight hundred billion dollars. But the gross national product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising. It counts ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for our police who fight riots in our streets, and television programs that glorify violence to sell toys to our children.
“And for all that it measures, it does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public officials or the intelligence of our public debate. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud to be Americans.”
There was in 1968 a template for acceptance speeches: They were designed to rally the party, to elicit loud, long applause at frequent intervals; indeed, news reports tallied the number of interruptions as a gauge of a speech’s power. Robert Kennedy’s acceptance speech was interrupted just nine times. For long stretches, there was not just a silence but a stillness. Only later did one or two reporters recognize what was happening: These delegates, these fired-up partisans, had listened.
And from Bebe Rebozo’s home in Key Biscayne, Florida, Richard Nixon was listening, too.
THE CENTRAL PREMISE OF Richard Nixon’s campaign was gone, knocked into a cocked hat by Robert Kennedy’s nomination. He’d begun his improbable comeback on the obvious assumption that he would be running against President Johnson. Never forget, he’d written his staff in one of his memos, that “we are the OUTs, and they are the INs.” When Johnson withdrew, and Humphrey began piling up delegates from the non-primary states, he’d focused on pinning the Vice President to his unpopular President.
“Let’s get ready to ask Humphrey to name any policy, any program, where he disagrees with what Johnson did,” he’d written in one of his “RN” stream-of-consciousness memos. And arching over every speech, every TV ad, was the meta-theme: “If after all these years and all these billions, we’re enmeshed in a quagmire of war abroad, and violence and disorder at home, I say it is time for new leadership.”
Well, that argument was useless now. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a different, maybe even more powerful one, an argument that had been plastered over all those billboards months ago: Feel Safer with Nixon. Maybe it wasn’t the most eloquent theme in American history, but it was a perfect fit with the national mood—What the hell is happening to my country?—and with the right strategy, it would define Richard Nixon’s opponents as the symptom of all that was unsettling the voters. George Wallace had tapped into the resentment of the folks who were just getting by, not poor enough for government aid, not affluent enough for material comfort or security. He’d gone beyond pure race-baiting—though, God knows, there was still plenty of that—to an attack on the Ivy League foundation executives, spending tax-free money on radical blacks, to pointy-headed bureaucrats forcing your children to travel miles from home to attend dangerous schools. Teddy White had told him of Wallace’s visit to a big newspaper, where he’d said, “Your reporters will be for Bobby. Your publisher and board of directors will be with Nixon. But your pressmen and truck drivers will be for me.” But Wallace was too hot, too crude, too mean to be credible. (Presidents just do not threaten to run over protesters.)
And Bobby? Bobby scared an awful lot of voters. Those TV pictures of him driving through ghettoes, while black hands reached out to grab him, black faces with mouths wide open in screams of joy, the frenzy of long-haired college kids leaping and hollering; they were the kinds of pictures Nixon’s people would pay the networks to put on their newscasts. Back in June, around the time Bobby had almost been shot, polls showed that more people thought him a divider than a uniter. And it wasn’t just those pictures that scared people. He seemed at times to identify with the very forces that rattled the hardworking, taxpaying, law-abiding forgotten Americans Nixon had been talking about from his first days in politics. He’d gone to Berkeley and proudly proclaimed, “We dissent!” He’d talked at times as if he could understand why young black men robbed from their neighbors and set fire to their neighborhoods. He’d said a while ago there was nothing wrong with donating blood to the Vietcong, the people who were killing Americans in South Vietnam (the Chicago Tribune had called him “Ho Chi Kennedy” for that one). He’d talked about understanding that all Communists weren’t the same, about the terrible American government driving Indians to suicide, and making migrant workers suffer, and letting Vietnam go Red because the government we were backing wasn’t perfect.
The key to November, then, was to persuade enough voters that Bobby Kennedy was, at root, the candidate of “surrender”—surrender to the forces of Communism abroad, surrender to the forces of lawlessness and violence and upheaval here at home. If his campaign played it right, Richard Nixon would be the candidate of safety, order, and restoration—not of a family, but of a better time, when you could walk a street, or send your kid to school, or go to your job, with a sense of security, a sense that things would be the way they were supposed to be. For whites who had made it—just—into the middle class, Richard Nixon would be their champion, protecting them from the criminals who threatened their safety, from the judges who wanted their children forced into dangerous schools, from feckless policymakers who lacked the tensile strength to stand up against freedom’s enemies.
And there was one other piece to this strategy: making sure that the President of the United States had no reason to work against a Richard Nixon Presidency. In fact, he was already taking some significant steps toward that end. He’d met with the President just after he’d won the nomination, a nice bipartisan photo op, but as they sat across from each other at a long table, he thought he’d seen something in the President’s face as he sat, propping his chin in his hands. It was as if he was
reexamining his longtime adversary, weighing the possibility that Nixon just might be a better guardian of Johnson’s legacy than either Humphrey or Kennedy. And now that Bobby was in fact the Democratic nominee, he was going to test that possibility, by sending to the White House an emissary whose cover no one would think to question.
HE STOOD ON a platform in the middle of Cadillac Square in downtown Detroit, looking out at the crowd of 40,000 who had gathered on this Labor Day noon to begin the formal opening of the fall campaign. Democratic candidates had been coming here for decades; John Kennedy had stood here exactly eight years ago. Now, as Robert Kennedy prepared to speak, he could calculate the barriers between himself and the White House by what had happened in those eight years—here in Detroit and across the country.
—In 1960, the specter of race riots was a fading memory from World War II; Negro protesters wore coats and ties and did their homework at lunch counters as white thugs beat them. Now the sight of cities in flames was commonplace; just five miles from here, a year ago, a police raid on an after-hours drinking spot exploded into a five-day riot that left forty-three people dead. It had happened in dozens of cities—indeed, John Lindsay was the Republican Vice Presidential candidate because it hadn’t happened in New York—and beyond the violence, battles over political power, schools, and jobs had stretched the New Deal- New Frontier coalition of blacks and working-class whites to the breaking point. Yes, Detroit Mayor Jerry Cavanaugh and Senator Phil Hart and Coleman Young, a talented, ambitious black state senator, might all be standing together behind him, but the tensions between black and white Democrats were going to be fertile ground for the appeals of Wallace and Nixon.
—In 1960, there was a clear national consensus on foreign policy. International Communism and its containment was the focus; Democrats in Congress backed Eisenhower, and Republicans in Congress backed John Kennedy. The noxious poison of McCarthyism had died years before the Wisconsin demagogue had; except for the fever swamps of the John Birch Society, you challenged the wisdom of your opponents, not their loyalty. When 6,000 students staged a protest against nuclear weapons at the White House in February of 1962, they’d worn coats and ties, and the White House had sent out coffee. Now, with the Vietnam War in its fourth year of a full-scale combat, the increasing militancy of the anti-war movement had spawned an increasingly militant counterweight, and partisans exchanged epithets: “Baby killer!” “Traitor!” Among some of the young, the dress, hair, and language seemed designed to provoke from their elders not simply opposition, but revulsion.
—Finally, the Kennedy who’d stood at Cadillac Square in 1960 was a very different figure from the Kennedy who stood there in 1968. John Kennedy was at root a cautious politician, coolly measuring the dangers of overreaching. He stirred excitement on the stump, but never frenzy; in his appearances on the increasingly powerful medium of television, he was contained in speech and gesture.
Robert Kennedy’s personality, and the seismic shift in the political ground, made him very different. His detractors—and indeed, some of his most devoted supporters—agreed with the signs that sprouted up at many of his appearances: “Bobby Ain’t Jack.” He was half a foot shorter, a bundle of barely contained passion. He was often awkward in public, uncomfortable with the emotions he stirred. His motorcades through black and brown neighborhoods had helped drive up votes in key primaries, but they did not play well in suburban neighborhoods. His rhetoric could at times be hot, disturbing; he’d asked on national TV whether America had the right to bomb Vietnam, killing civilians, so that Communism would stay 11,000 miles away from the United States instead of 10,000 miles. He’d once described the violence of young blacks in the ghetto as “a cry for love.” And those who disagreed with Kennedy—on Vietnam, on spending, on race, on changing migrant labor laws—didn’t just disagree with him, they feared him because implicit in his words and deeds was the unspoken footnote, And I mean it. That poll showing more people regarded him as a divider than a uniter said it all: If he could not overcome that sense that he was a divisive, polarizing figure, he could not win.
The speech he gave in Cadillac Square was aimed squarely at his central political dilemma. The argument Kennedy had made to hostile college kids—Why should a boy who wants to open a filling station instead of going to college have to change his plans while you get protected on campus?—hit a chord with the crowd of working-class blacks and whites with a high school education. It was a way of playing on their resentment while appealing to fairness, not repression. So did a theme he’d struck in his primary campaign: the tax laws that let multimillionaires pay less than 1 percent on their earnings, while workers on an assembly line paid a third of their income. So did his notions of trading medical school scholarships in return for a commitment to work in the poor urban and rural communities, or paying retired construction workers to teach a trade to young men.
“We must grasp the web whole,” Kennedy said at Cadillac Square, the same phrase he’d used for the last few years, and it was central to his hopes for the Presidency. He had to persuade the country that his ideas connected—that he was not simply pandering to the blacks, or promising money to the poor, or turning to the right, or running on the memory of his brother, or pursuing a ruthless quest for power. And he had to do it in a time when the essential optimism of 1960, the belief that government did more or less the right thing most of the time, had withered in the face of war and division.
He ended this first speech of the fall campaign with the words he had used all through the primary, the words from George Bernard Shaw that cued the press that it was time to pack up and head for the buses, words that struck an optimistic chord: “Some men see things as they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not? ”
And as he was speaking, one of his most trusted aides was meeting with one of his most zealous enemies. It was a meeting that would have convinced any witness that, when it came to political self-preservation, the idea of a “ruthless” Kennedy machine was a lot more than a myth.
BY 1968, J. Edgar Hoover had held more power for more years than anyone else, by some measures more than the seven Presidents he had served under—or over. Yes, Presidents had the armed forces to command, but their will could be frustrated by Congress, and the duration of their power was limited by voters, and now by the two-term limit imposed by Constitutional amendment. Hoover, by contrast, was virtually immune from the checks and balances that constrained courts, the Congress, and the President. A compliant press had spent decades glamorizing and glorifying the work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a worshipful Congress that did not hesitate to subject Cabinet officers to withering scrutiny treated Hoover’s visits to Capitol Hill as something between a royal appearance and a papal blessing. Even those inclined toward a more skeptical assessment of the Director stayed mute, knowing that the FBI’s appetite for intelligence, or gossip, or rumor, or scandal ensured that reams of such information on virtually every public person (and his family) were secreted away somewhere in the Department of Justice. No one failed to bow the head and bend the knee for J. Edgar Hoover.
No one but Bobby Kennedy.
Hoover might have expected something very different. He and Joe Kennedy had been something of a mutual admiration society during Joe’s days at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the two exchanged notes of high regard when Joe was Ambassador to Great Britain. When Jack was elected in 1960, his first announcement on the day after he won, was that he was reappointing Hoover to head the FBI.
But Bobby? Everything about the young man appalled him: the informality of his office, the way he dressed, rolled-up shirtsleeves and no jacket; the dogs and children that had free rein. He had also insisted that Hoover report to him, the Attorney General, instead of reporting directly to the President. Whatever the Justice Department chain of command said, Hoover had never been blocked from direct access to the President. Much more than Bobby’s style, though, was his obviously low regard for
the work of the Bureau. The FBI prided itself on its clearance record, and on its relentless pursuit of domestic Communism (Masters of Deceit was the title of Hoover’s best-selling book on the Red Menace). But Bobby disdained these achievements, demanding again and again to know what the Bureau was doing about organized crime, even though Hoover had proclaimed repeatedly that there was no such thing as the Mafia. For heaven’s sake, Bobby’s own father had told him to lay off the organized crime crusade, and the kid just wouldn’t listen. To make matters worse, Kennedy was pounding at the Bureau to hire more Negroes, something that Hoover found personally repellent. Every year, at an elaborate ceremony, he’d shake the hand of every new agent, and . . .
Given Bobby’s feelings, and the fact that he was more or less Jack’s Assistant President, Hoover might have reason to fear for his job. Not so; for among the millions about whom the FBI had gathered intelligence was one John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And it was the kind of guaranteed employment insurance the Queen of England might envy. John Kennedy’s sexual recklessness, his flagrantly adulterous conduct even as President, had offended Hoover profoundly. On more than one occasion, however, his dalliances had posed direct threats to the national security; and Hoover was diligent, even meticulous, in letting the Attorney General know what his minions had learned: that Kennedy was involved with a woman who was the girlfriend of Sam Giancana, a prominent Chicago gangster, or that he had been involved with Ellie Rometsch, a suspected East German spy. (No hard evidence was unearthed about her spying, but Bobby had been so unnerved he’d had the woman summarily deported.)
So Hoover and Bobby endured each other until November 22, 1963. It was Hoover who called Bobby at his home that noon, emotionlessly telling him his brother had been shot. Before President Kennedy had been buried, the direct line between Kennedy’s office and Hoover’s had been disconnected; Hoover was dealing directly with Johnson. As for the Director’s view of a potential President Robert Kennedy? On the day Kennedy announced, Hoover’s top assistant and closest companion, Clyde Tolson, said flatly, “I hope someone shoots the son of a bitch.” Nor was there any doubt of Hoover’s willingness, eagerness, to help Lyndon Johnson block Bobby’s path to the White House. The story that Robert Kennedy had authorized wiretaps on Martin Luther King, Jr., had gone directly from Hoover to the Oval Office to columnist Drew Pearson. That revelation, though, was small change compared to the treasure trove Hoover had gathered about the conduct of John and Robert Kennedy: not just sexual misbehavior (though Hoover regarded President Kennedy as a “moral degenerate”), but the use of gangsters and violence in Bobby’s zealous effort to topple Fidel Castro. For many of Robert Kennedy’s most devoted followers, Hoover’s potential for blackmail, especially in concert with Lyndon Johnson, was a political sword of Damocles; it was, for them, one persuasive explanation for Robert Kennedy’s reluctance to challenge Johnson for the Presidency. (Much later, his longtime personal assistant, Angie Novello, acknowledged, “I wanted Bob in the White House so badly, but I didn’t want him to run in ’68 because I was afraid of what certain people in high places would do, I was afraid they would do something mean and unheard of . . .”)
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