Then Everything Changed

by Jeff Greenfield

  Given the toxic enmity between Hoover and Kennedy, it seemed inexplicable when one of Robert Kennedy’s closest colleagues appeared just before noon on a late summer day at Harvey’s Restaurant on Connecticut Avenue and handed a sealed envelope to the maître d’ with instructions to deliver the note to Hoover’s table. Even if Walter Sheridan had not been one of Robert Kennedy’s most dogged investigators at the Senate Rackets Committee and at the Justice Department, he would have had no trouble locating the FBI Director: Every day of the week, Hoover and his deputy Clyde Tolson would lunch at Harvey’s, at a table blocked off from the rest of the dining room by a serving trolley. In fact, Hoover and Tolson spent most of their lives together, on and off the job. They traveled together, vacationed together, went to ball games and horse races together, were so bound to each other that FBI agents had a nickname for the two: “J. Edna and Mother Tolson.” Time magazine had pointedly noted some years back that “Hoover is seldom seen without a male companion, most frequently solemn-faced Clyde Tolson”—words that brought a full-field FBI investigation down on the writer. Time might have been even more pointed had it known that Tolson was Hoover’s sole heir, and that the Director and his top associate had made plans to be buried next to each other.

  No one ever learned what was in that 9-by-12 manila envelope Sheridan delivered to Hoover’s table. No one ever knew why Hoover and Tolson canceled their traditional Labor Day trip to Los Angeles, where they would relax by the beach and bet the horses at the Del Mar racetrack. It is likely that fewer than half a dozen people ever learned of Walter Sheridan’s Labor Day visit to Hoover’s home on 30th Place a few blocks from Rock Creek Park. The words that passed between them—and the cardboard boxes that were exchanged—were whispered about for years, but they were no more than rumors. And in 1968, the mass media of the era were genuine “gatekeepers.” There simply was no accessible means for injecting rumors directly into millions of homes. So the rumors remained nothing more than a low-grade hum. President Johnson’s repeated calls to Hoover were met by silence, evasions, and on one occasion a not-so-subtle warning from the Director that “every President needs and deserves insulation from salacious rumors . . .” Much, much later, after a dinner with several bottles of wine and a glass or two of cognac, an old journalist friend asked Sheridan about what had happened.

  “It was fortunate,” Sheridan replied, “that Hoover and Bobby both learned enough Latin to understand the meaning of ‘quid pro quo.’ ”

  If the fear of scandal no longer hung over Robert Kennedy’s campaign, a very different kind of fear did. Months ago, when the pressure for him to challenge Johnson for the nomination was growing, he would push back again and again with one core argument: The President has enormous power to direct the flow of events, he’d say. He could change Vietnam policy on a dime, stop the bombing, or escalate the war to try and rally the country behind him. Had Kennedy known of a private White House conversation in mid-September, he would have had good reason for that fear . . . very good reason.

  THE REVEREND BILLY GRAHAM was one of the most admired men in America. At forty-nine, the jut-jawed, strikingly handsome evangelist with the richly timbered voice was the embodiment of “muscular Christianity,” a man who had turned a small radio ministry in the mid-1940s into a sprawling empire of television appearances and “Crusades for Christ” rallies that drew tens, even hundreds, of thousands. His rise to prominence was fueled by media titans like William Randolph Hearst (“Push Graham,” he instructed his editors in 1949) and Henry Luce, whose Time magazine put Graham on the cover in 1954. He was so magnetic a figure that NBC offered him a five-year, $5 million contract to appear opposite the most popular personality in broadcasting, Arthur Godfrey.

  When it came to matters of race, Billy Graham was squarely in the liberal camp. He refused to preach before segregated audiences, bailed out Martin Luther King, Jr., when the preacher was thrown in jail for demonstrating, and openly supported Lyndon Johnson’s landmark civil rights laws.

  He was also an ardent anti-Communist, who came to admire Richard Nixon for his dogged efforts to expose the treasonous work of Alger Hiss. He grew so devoted to the former Vice President that he began ingratiating himself to Nixon by echoing some of his darker impulses. When Nixon would rant about the left-wing Jews in the media and business, Graham would note that he would often meet with leaders in the Jewish community, adding, “They don’t know how I feel about what they’re doing to this country . . . their stranglehold has to be broken or this country’s going down the drain.”

  By 1968, Graham was wholly committed to a Nixon Presidency, which is why he came to the White House on September 15 to meet with Lyndon Johnson. It was more than a courtesy call, more than a social chat with a friend. Billy Graham had come as a courier, bringing a very specific message to the President from Nixon.

  Nixon wants you to know, Graham said, that he will keep his criticisms of you strictly on policy grounds; he intends to treat you and the office with respect. When a settlement to end the war is reached, he intends to give you a major share of the credit; he will ask you to take on major foreign assignments, so that your unique talents can be put to good use, and will do everything to make you a place in history.

  The President nodded, said nothing, and turned the conversation to lighter matters: When are you and Ruth going to come visit Bird and me at the ranch? The words that Graham had spoken, however, stayed with the President once the reverend had taken his leave. More than ever, he was convinced that his legacy would be determined by Vietnam. If the choice was between a Republican President who would honor his work and a Democratic President who would scorn it . . . well, that wasn’t much of a choice at all.

  “GODDAMNIT!” Richard Nixon shouted as he threw the New York Times halfway across the dining room of his Fifth Avenue apartment. “What is it about my running mates and the Negroes?”

  Eight years ago, Henry Cabot Lodge had thrown a hand grenade into the campaign by pledging that Nixon would appoint a Negro to the Cabinet. It had taken days for Nixon to put out the fires among many of his Southern supporters. Now, New York Mayor John Lindsay was presiding over a meltdown that had just shut down the largest public-school system in the country, and had thrown a white, mostly Jewish teachers’ union into a pitched battle with the black residents of an impoverished, dysfunctional Brooklyn ghetto. It had begun more than a year ago, when the Ford Foundation decided to fund an experiment to put more control over schools in the hands of local communities.

  “And you know who runs the Ford Foundation?” Nixon asked his inner circle who had gathered around the table. “McGeorge Bundy. First, he screws up Vietnam. Now he decides to put a bunch of . . . thugs in charge of the schools!”

  One of the three districts chosen for a decentralization test was Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville, an impoverished ruin of a neighborhood with three-fourths of the population on welfare, the highest drug-addiction rate in the nation, with abandoned homes and stores that had the look and feel of postwar Berlin. A group of militant black organizers with a distinctly racialist outlook had gained control of the district’s schools, and had summarily dismissed eighteen white teachers and administrators. When the heavily Jewish teachers’ union challenged the dismissals, the dispute took on an ugly cast, with anti-Semitic language and threats of violence. A citywide strike had shut the city’s schools down for two days, and now, in mid-September, a second strike was underway. Lindsay had canceled all campaign appearances, and was locked in a series of round-robin negotiations with the local school board, the city’s Board of Education, and the teachers’ union.

  Nixon’s instructions to his campaign team were blunt: We need to push Lindsay to settle this strike fast; he needs to get those teachers back in those schools. It took two days of pleas, arguments, and threats, but Lindsay gave in, and the city’s schools reopened; a three-day siege of the schools in Ocean Hill-Brownsville by black militants ended when 2,000 police drove them out. That’s the kind of TV
we need, a partially mollified Nixon said. Shows our ticket means what it says about law and order.

  “But maybe I should have gone with Agnew,” he mused later. “Just once, I’d like a running mate who was an asset, not a liability.”

  ALL THROUGH THE AUTUMN, Robert Kennedy’s campaign grappled with the essential contradiction of their candidate’s message: He was the candidate of change, the candidate who promised “a new America,” who could trigger frenzy in the streets of dozens of American cities; but he was also the candidate of restoration, the man who could tamp the fires of disorder, and the broader sense that America had lost its moorings. He could not win unless the disaffected—the blacks, the Hispanics, the seven million young people on college campuses—were engaged enough to come to the polls in November, or to work on his behalf if they were too young to vote. (“Can we lower the voting age to eighteen?” Kennedy asked jokingly at a rally in Ann Arbor. “How about twelve?”)

  And he could not win unless the far bigger voting bloc—“the un-poor, the un-black, the un-young” as Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg called them—believed he was moved by their grievances, as their children were bused to dangerous schools, as their devotion to cultural traditions and decent behavior was being undermined on college campuses and on their television sets. This was the Robert Kennedy of the campaign’s fall television campaign: Five-minute and half-hour broadcasts put Kennedy into suburban living rooms, clad in a dark suit from Lewis and Thomas Saltz, the high-priced Washington men’s store, white handkerchief in his breast pocket, hair carefully trimmed above his ears, as he chatted over tea with a dozen women wearing their garden-party best. He stood on a stage in a small meeting room in front of a hundred women wearing flowered hats, smiling shyly as his mother Rose told of his mischievous boyhood, how she would discipline him with a ruler. He sat in a classroom, talking earnestly with a class full of fifth-graders about saving the redwoods. At halftime of National Football League broadcasts, football fans in front of their televisions saw Kennedy standing at the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Ford’s River Rouge auto plant outside of Detroit, talking with the men who built the ships and the cars, sometimes disagreeing with them, sometimes prodding them when they expressed admiration for the tough talk of George Wallace (“Do you really think people shouldn’t be allowed to vote because of the color of their skin? Do you really want a President who promises to kill someone because they’re demonstrating against him? Isn’t that what used to happen to men who went out on strike?”).

  The Kennedy image that director John Frankenheimer and onetime speechwriter Dick Goodwin were presenting came in sharp contrast to the Robert Kennedy painted by Richard Nixon’s campaign. Nixon himself was never seen directly attacking Kennedy; when he appeared on camera, it was at one of the many “town halls” he conducted, answering unscreened questions from friendly audiences. The format was the brainchild of twenty-seven-year-old talk-show producer Roger Ailes, who convinced Nixon that the town halls were the best way to escape the screen of a flagrantly biased press.

  “Maybe one day we’ll have a network that will be fair and balanced,” Ailes said. “Until then, we have to let the voter see you as you are.”

  The one-minute Nixon spots were very different. Created by longtime J. Walter Thompson ad executive Harry Treleavan, and directed by Gene Jones, they were premised on a central theme Treleavan described this way: “There’s an uneasiness in the land. A feeling that things aren’t right. That we’re moving in the wrong direction. That none of the solutions to our problems are working.” Had Johnson or Humphrey been the Democratic nominee, a simple call for “new leadership” would have been enough. With Robert Kennedy as the nominee, Nixon’s ads had to link Bobby with that uneasiness. So they featured a quick montage of dramatic, unsettling still images of burning cities, Vietnam combat, street clashes between demonstrators and police, intercut with shots of a fist-clenching, long-haired Robert Kennedy and some of his more provocative words.

  “We dissent! We dissent! We dissent!” ran the clip from one ad, edited from a 1966 Kennedy speech at Berkeley. Then the voice of Richard Nixon was heard, solemnly intoning that “we must never confuse dissent with disruption and destruction.” Another ad replayed a Kennedy speech where he said that for many Negroes “the law has been an instrument of oppression.”

  “May the day never come,” Nixon said, “when an American President calls the law an instrument of oppression. The law is every American’s protection—black, brown, or white. The first civil right is the right to be safe in our homes, our streets, our neighborhoods.”

  That theme, of course, was one of the prime messages of the campaign’s wild card: George Wallace. And as the campaign entered its last two weeks, it became increasingly clear that the former Alabama governor was turning into one of Robert Kennedy’s best, if wholly unintentional, assets.

  The first sign of this came from Wallace’s choice of running mate: retired Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, chosen to shore up Wallace’s nonexistent national security credentials. LeMay had been one of the heroic figures of World War II, directing the low-altitude incendiary bombing of Japan that had killed some half a million civilians; an invasion of Japan, he and others argued, would have killed twice as many. Besides, he said at the time, in war, “There are no innocent civilians.” As Air Force Chief of Staff, he had been a formidable advocate of overwhelming nuclear force, clashing with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara over strategy and resources. His biggest, most consequential battle, however, was with John and Robert Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when he all but demanded the bombing of missile sites. “Appeasement,” he called the blockade. He joined the Wallace campaign not out of sympathy for the governor’s views on race, but because he thought Richard Nixon was insufficiently committed to victory in Vietnam—and because he welcomed the chance to indict Robert Kennedy for his “near-treasonous” views on Vietnam.

  Unfortunately for Wallace, LeMay’s way with words was as blunt as his persona: the bulldog face, the cigar perpetually jammed in his teeth, the forceful, often blustering tone. When he talked of the need for Americans to overcome their fear of nuclear weapons, when he threatened to “bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age,” voters heard the voice of General Buck Turgidson, the character played by George C. Scott in the movie Dr. Strangelove. And when he assailed Robert Kennedy for “caving in to Moscow and Havana” during the Cuban Missile Crisis, voters remembered how close the world had come to nuclear war. Robert Kennedy’s book on the crisis, Thirteen Days, had just been published, and while Kennedy mentioned no names of those who had advocated other courses, he had no compunction about responding to LeMay at a press conference.

  “The great advantage of General LeMay’s advice,” Kennedy said, “was that if we’d taken it, none of us would have been around to prove how wrong it was.”

  Wallace’s second great, unintended gift to Robert Kennedy was the support of a united labor union movement. Kennedy’s nomination was a grievous disappointment to AFL-CIO President George Meany. Kennedy’s views on Vietnam were anathema to Meany, who had been fighting Communism since his earliest days as a union organizer. In the days after Robert Kennedy won in Chicago, Meany seriously pondered the possibility of staying neutral in the fall campaign. Yes, Nixon’s no friend of labor, he argued with his Executive Council members, but Bobby means surrender in Vietnam.

  It was Wallace’s appeal to the blue-collar vote that proved decisive. The labor movement had first glimpsed the danger four years ago, in 1964. In a time of widespread prosperity and low unemployment, before the explosion of racial conflict, Wallace had entered the Democratic Presidential primaries in Maryland, Indiana, and Wisconsin, and had won more than a third of the vote in each state. Now in 1968, as a third-party candidate, Wallace was drawing alarming numbers among union members. And for organized labor, Wallace was a mortal enemy. He came from a state that was a home for runaway businesses fleeing the unionized North, a state where the “open sho
p” was law, where the whole principle of collective bargaining was under permanent legal siege, where wages were low and working conditions dreadful. Even if working-class whites came to Wallace’s side out of fear of crime or black militancy or radical protesters, it would mean they were listening to a voice that could in time lure them away from loyalty to the union movement. And that was a possibility the movement could not survive.