Just as deep were the conflicts within his political impulses. In 1960, he had fused the disparate elements of the Democratic Party into a mechanism that had—barely—elected John Kennedy. Ivy League intellectuals, big-city liberals and blacks, and Southern segregationists had all been part of that coalition. This year, without the support of Richard Daley and the power brokers in a dozen different states, he never would have been nominated, much less elected. And now, as he assumed the Presidency, the sizable Democratic majorities in the House and Senate would be critical to his success. Yet his time in the Senate had kindled his deep impatience with the pace of politics: the endless talk, the kabuki theater of Congressional hearings, and the narrow focus of the players.
And even this tension did not touch the most serious issue posed by the competing impulses of Robert Kennedy. If his core outlook could be summarized in a single sentence, it would be this: “Get your foot off the other guy’s neck.” Oppression could come in the form of a right-wing dictatorship, or a Communist apparatchik. It could come from the overseer of a migrant worker, or the multimillionaire CEO whose company was polluting a river, or from a labor union boss who sold out his workers for a payoff or financed the money-laundering schemes of organized crime. It could come from a feral pack that roamed city streets, terrorizing a neighborhood. It could come not from any individual, but from an entrenched system that looked to sustain and enrich itself rather than those it was supposed to serve, whether it be a sclerotic public school system or a callous legal system. As he said to the students at Berkeley in 1966, paraphrasing Camus, “We know now that the color of the executioner’s robe matters little.”
He would listen to the head of the Office of Education testify about grants to schools, and he would ask, what is happening with the money we’ve spent? Why do the IQs of Negro children drop between the third and sixth grade? He would quote the Philadelphia head of the NAACP who said that welfare “was the worst thing that ever happened to the Negro,” because—as conservatives had argued—it fostered dependency and effectively told the men of the ghetto “we have no useful work for you to do.” When he spoke of the crisis of black unemployment, he would argue that “something more is needed” but would add, “let us make clear what ‘something more’ is not. It is not a massive extension of welfare services or a new profusion of guidance counselors and psychiatrists.” But by 1968, welfare workers, guidance counselors, social workers were all part of a growing cadre of public employees who were becoming an increasingly important part of the Democratic Party’s base.
In fact, for most of those Democrats who held power in Washington, the thinking was very different from his. Men like Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey profoundly believed that government was the tool to better the lives of the have-nots, and when a piece of legislation was passed, the battle was over. If you wanted the poor to live better, you passed a bill to spend money on public housing. If you wanted schools to be better, you provided for federal aid to education. If you wanted to offer a measure of security, you created Social Security, Medicare, food stamps. For more than thirty years, since the first days of the New Deal—indeed, from the birth of the modern Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century—the expansion of federal power had formed the core DNA of liberalism. The expansion of federal power had come to be seen almost as an end in itself. Moreover, there was a reverse side of this coin. In FDR’s Inaugural denunciation of “the money-changers” who had “fled from their high seats at the temple,” in Harry Truman’s 1948 whistle-stop denunciation of “gluttons of privilege” and “Wall Street reactionaries,” to the fights over public power and offshore oil drilling giveaways under Eisenhower, liberals had come to identify private enterprise as an adversary. When Robert Kennedy had first proposed tax incentives to encourage business to bring jobs and housing into the ghetto, a number of liberal senators had objected on principle. We want public housing, a federal jobs program, they said.
Robert Kennedy’s apostasy was often labeled “a move to the right.” Without question, Kennedy understood the political danger if the middle class came to view the Democrats as the party of a growing government whose focus was primarily on the poor. Disaffection with big government, however, was increasingly coming from young thinkers on the left, who had formed Students for a Democratic Society before it plunged into fanaticism; from liberal neighborhoods like New York’s Greenwich Village, and from radical thinkers like Paul Goodman. In the fall of 1966, speaking to a community college audience in Worthington, Minnesota, he’d deplored the “growth of organization, particularly government, so large and powerful that individual effort and importance seem lost . . .” Robert Kennedy, then, was arguing for a government that took the premise of social justice, and the premise of individual power and responsibility, and fused the two together. It was an approach that could reshape the Democratic Party’s coalition; or alienate some of its most loyal foot soldiers—or both.
ON OCTOBER 1, 1969, Robert Kennedy stood on a makeshift stage in Chicago’s Union Park on the city’s Near West Side. A few blocks away stood the Henry Horner Homes, a public housing project of seven sixteen-story high-rises defined by graffiti, garbage, broken elevators, and bullet holes, and where one in fifty women lived with a husband, where children had grown to adolescence without ever seeing a gainfully employed man, where authority was enforced not by police or citizens, but by the Blackstone Rangers. It was a neighborhood where those in power had long since ceased to measure the high school dropout rate, or the jobless rate, and where the emergency room of the nearby University of Illinois-Chicago Medical Center provided primary health care.
The Secret Service pushed back hard at Kennedy’s intention to travel here, but the President had long since decided that it was here where he would present his administration’s answer to the crisis of the city. It had taken months of planning, negotiating, angry words, bare-knuckle bargaining, but for Kennedy, Chicago made sense because of what it represented—and because of who governed it. However odd it may have seemed that Richard Daley, the symbol of the old order, would preside over a near revolution in public policy, it made perfect political sense. If you needed a figure who could persuade, cajole, threaten, push the disparate interest groups to embark on radically different courses, Richard J. Daley was as good as it got.
Besides, Robert Kennedy owed his nomination to Daley; and Kennedy knew that redeeming a marker of this size was the most elemental rule of political success.
So he came to Chicago to show what he meant when he said, “we must grasp the web whole” in confronting the ills of the inner city. Here in Chicago, as in every other major city, crime, race, education, health, and jobs were strands inextricably bound to each other. And here, in front of 15,000 people, a platform filled with wary public officials, a congenitally skeptical press corps, Kennedy laid out his intentions, all of which stemmed from one central premise: Put resources in the hands of the people you are trying to help, and give them the tools so they might earn those resources.
He called it “the Police Corps,” a concept designed by his legislative assistant, Adam Walinsky, with a concept that blended the Peace Corps with the ROTC programs. The federal government would provide full funding for the college education of low-income high school graduates—funding channeled through local police forces. In return, graduates would spend four years working with those local police forces, with their pay—pegged well below the salaries of regular cops—partially subsidized by Washington. They could then choose to make a career out of police work or go on to other fields.
At root, the Police Corps was aimed at a set of interconnected goals:—It would permit tens of thousands of people without resources to go to college, and it would redefine local police authorities as a source not just of armed force, but of opportunity.
—It would swell the ranks of local police forces at a far lower cost than simply hiring more police; and in the long run, it would save even more money, since most of those who ser
ved as Corps participants would leave the force, and not add to the growing burden of long-term health and pension benefits.
—It would diversify the ranks of the police; not just by color, but also by infusing its ranks with the college educated.
—It would, over time, leaven the population of urban neighborhoods with Police Corps veterans, who would have a deeper understanding of law enforcement, and who might lessen the mutual distrust between citizen and police.
For many in the press, Kennedy’s ideas posed a challenge: How were they to be characterized? Putting money into jobs and housing and schools was “liberal”; putting greater police presence in the ghetto was “conservative.” Housing for the poor was “liberal”; tax incentives for private industry was “conservative.”
Confusion in the press, though, was not Kennedy’s biggest problem. From the moment he and his team had begun to sketch out these ideas in the first weeks of Kennedy’s Presidency, the White House had been taking incoming fire from every direction.
Norman Frank of New York’s Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association called the Police Corps idea “the opening wedge of an effort to substitute ill-trained amateurs for the full-time, dedicated career officers who are the citizen’s only real protection against crime.” (Those officers, not so incidentally, would be full-time, dues-paying career members of organizations like the PBA.) Nor were their members thrilled at the prospect of working side by side with college-educated eggheads, or recruits who might well have run with gangs and muggers a few years earlier.
Betty Friedan, president of the newly formed National Organization of Women, told David Susskind’s TV audience that “it’s not surprising that Bobby Kennedy’s ‘boys’ club,’ which has almost no women in decision-making positions, would propose a massive college scholarship program in return for serving in police forces, many of which are either formally or in reality barred to women.”
The educational establishment recoiled at another Kennedy notion: permitting young men and women to leave school for required work to help earn money for their families and to nurture a work ethic in communities where jobs had all but vanished. To them, it was an affront to the bedrock principle of universal education. The National Education Association agreed, not least because they feared that if fewer students spent full-time in school, it might mean that cities would need fewer (dues-paying) teachers.
AFL-CIO President George Meany, whose roots were in the craft union movement, where members had handed jobs from fathers to sons for generations, attacked the student-worker idea as “a barely disguised attempt to employ low-wage, dangerously unskilled ‘scab’ labor in the construction trades. It is shocking that a Democratic President could even suggest so reactionary an idea.”
Black nationalists attacked “Massa Kennedy’s ‘slave labor’ program, where young black men are ordered into dead-end jobs at subsistence wages.”
There was, however, another, very different reaction, from sources that seemed almost incomprehensible to analysts whose frame of reference was the New Deal-Fair Deal-Great Society tradition. Within the black community, twenty-eight-year-old Georgia State Senator Julian Bond and Manchild in the Promised Land author Claude Brown joined more familiar figures like Professor Kenneth Clark in praising Kennedy’s vision. Freshman Congressman Allard Lowenstein, who had forged the McCarthy campaign that had stunned President Johnson in New Hampshire, celebrated “a President who actually understands what the last years of protest were about.” A surprising number of Republicans gave encouragement; many of the liberal Republicans in the Senate whom he’d courted when he put Tom Kuchel on the Court; governors like Michigan’s William Milliken and New Jersey’s Tom Cahill, House members like Connecticut’s Lowell Weicker, Illinois Congressman Donald Rumsfeld (who saluted Kennedy’s willingness to “face the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns of urban policy”), and Houston’s George Herbert Walker Bush.
In Louisiana, a young Tulane University graduate student named Newt Gingrich decided to write his master’s thesis on “Robert Kennedy’s New Paradigm.”
What he desperately needed, Kennedy had concluded, was an arena to put his ideas into action. Months of negotiations, bargaining, and deal sweetening had tempered some of the original objections; but in Chicago, Robert Kennedy had a city whose leader—boss, as Daley was affectionately and not so affectionately called—could pull the teachers, the cops, the construction unions into line at least enough to give the President’s programs a testing ground.
“If you have a taste for irony,” Washington Post reporter David Broder wrote, “consider that Richard Daley’s Chicago, where nineteenth-century political organization still rules, will be Ground Zero for programs that could represent the first real post-New Deal governing philosophy.”
“I ALWAYS FELT,” his closest friend Dave Hackett recalled much later, “that he’d never be reelected, because the things that had to be done to change the course of the country would be very unpopular.”
By the spring of 1970, there was good reason for Robert Kennedy’s admirers to share that pessimism and good reason for his opponents to doubt it.
The Gallup and Harris polls gave the President respectable job-approval ratings, but a majority in both polls agreed that his agenda was too ambitious, too likely to raise taxes on the middle class. For all of the White House’s attempts to focus on white working-class Americans—making pensions more portable, raising more Social Security funds from the most affluent—the country was divided on whether Kennedy’s administration was being too generous to minorities. “Part of that,” said Domestic Policy Council head Peter Edelman, “was that when he saw a hungry black kid, or an Indian with no job prospects, his indignation level just leapt into the red zone, and that’s what Americans saw on the evening news.” The best news for Kennedy was that those who strongly opposed him were outnumbered by those who strongly supported him. That support, however, came disproportionately from the young, the poor, the black, and the brown—precisely those voters least likely to turn out for the impending 1970 midterm elections.
Some of the clouds hovering over the Kennedy Presidency were predictable; indeed, Kennedy himself had cautioned his team about them even before he was sworn in. In South Vietnam, the always-shaky coalition government was increasingly unstable, and Communist insurgents were staging scattered attacks on hamlets and villages, while Hanoi’s government was unleashing ominous propaganda attacks on the Saigon government. Governor Reagan, Senator Goldwater, and other prominent Republicans were firing shots across Kennedy’s bow, warning the President not to “let North Vietnamese Communist aggression be tempted by weakness from Washington.”
At home, there was trouble in the heart of Kennedy’s domestic program. While there were clear signs of progress in a number of cities—a new shopping mall in downtown Detroit, visible rehabilitation projects in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant—there were also headlines that produced migraine headaches in the Oval Office. The Community Development Corporations were premised on local control at every phase—investment, planning, design, execution, administration—and, to the surprise of no one, black officials, community leaders, and small businessmen proved just as willing to bend or break the rules and the law in pursuit of money as their white forebears had been.
A Chicago Sun-Times investigation revealed that the city’s Near West Side Renewal Corporation had been heavily infiltrated by the Blackstone Rangers, the gang that had long effectively ruled Chicago’s ghettoes. Unsurprisingly, to the more knowledgeable students of the ghetto, some of the most skilled administrators had gained that experience in the gang’s farflung enterprises, and the press did not always distinguish between those who had left their past behind, and those who hadn’t. The scrutiny deepened when it was learned that one Corporation spokesman had authored a collection of virulently anti-white, anti-Semitic poems. These revelations frayed the bonds between the White House and Mayor Daley, who regularly called Kennedy aides to assail the flow of money to “a
bunch of crooks and subversives. When Bobby told me he’d always respect the Organization, I didn’t think he was talking about the Mafia and the Kremlin.”
For all of the controversies, the resistance, the setbacks, however, the one that threatened not just his ambitious agenda but his Presidency itself, provided striking proof of one of the oldest adages in politics: I can protect myself from my enemies, but God save me from my friends.
HE SAT AT HIS DESK in his small, dingy office in downtown Washington on this mid-September night, waiting for the phone to ring. He wasn’t waiting for a prospective client to call, because his phone was unlisted. Nor was his name on the frosted-glass door of his office in a building well removed from the Connecticut Avenue palaces that sheltered high-priced law firms and lobbying powerhouses. There were no photos on the wall of him smiling next to powerful politicians or celebrities, no paintings chosen by a decorator with an eye toward impressing visitors about the occupant’s taste or wealth. In fact, there were no photos, no paintings, nothing on the wall at all, and the office featured nothing but a battered metal filing cabinet and a simple metal desk, barren but for the single phone and the ashtray overflowing with the butts of Pall Malls. The man who sat at the desk was five and a half feet tall, permanently pale, and he spoke in a voice that sounded as if he gargled every day with gravel. He wore a cheap charcoal black suit—no one had ever seen him wearing anything else—and his oversized black fedora rested on top of the filing cabinet. Nothing about the man, or his office, or his anonymity, was intended to impress a potential client, because he had only one client: the same client he had had for almost ten years.
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