In October 2002, on the fortieth anniversary of the crisis, a three-day conference in Havana brought together officials and scholars from the U.S., the former Soviet Union, and Cuba. Highlights of that conference were published in November 2002 in Arms Control Today, a publication of the Arms Control Association, and is available online at armscontrol.org/act/2002_11/cuban missile. It features a speech by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, revealing what U.S. officials did and did not know about the presence of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba, and conversations among McNamara, Georgy M. Kornienko, former first deputy foreign minister of the USSR, and Nikolai S. Leonov, who was chief of the KGB’s Department of Cuban Affairs for thirty years. (The question of just how much authority Premier Khrushchev gave to Soviet commanders in Cuba to use those nukes continues to be a matter of debate.)
The words spoken by Tommy Thompson, Curtis LeMay, Maxwell Taylor, and others come from the transcripts of the White House tapes. Dean Acheson’s advice to Kennedy, including his judgments about the likely response from Moscow, can be found in books such as Douglas Brinkley’s Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953-71. Acheson continued to argue that the peaceful resolution of the crisis was a case of “plain dumb luck.”
Lyndon Johnson’s history of suffering physical ailments during moments of crisis is told in the biographies by Dallek and Woods.
For other versions of how the Cuban Missile Crisis might have played out—with John Kennedy in the White House—see the essay by historian Robert L. O’Connell, “The Cuban Missile Crisis—The Second Holocaust,” in which a series of misunderstandings leads to a tactical nuclear strike by Soviet commanders, which triggers a massive retaliation that wipes out the Soviet Union. In Resurrection Day, novelist Brendan DuBois imagines a 1970s United States decimated by a limited nuclear war, for which John Kennedy is blamed.
Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, California, June 4, 1968, 11:45 p.m.
AMBASSADOR HOTEL SUITE: The scene in Robert Kennedy’s hotel suite on the night of June 4, 1968, is described in many books, including Jack Newfield’s Robert Kennedy: A Memoir, Evan Thomas’s Robert Kennedy, and Thurston Clarke’s The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy. I have also relied on my own memories of that night. The exchange between Roger Mudd of CBS and Kennedy took place as chronicled.
Steve Smith’s interview for the RFK Oral History Project describes his work that night culling primary results, working in his stocking feet.
I was the Kennedy aide who went with Jack Newfield to McCarthy’s hotel to talk with McCarthy supporters about joining forces after the primary.
“DALEY’S THE BALL GAME”: Clarke’s book details the meetings between Richard Wade and Daley; Wade says Daley seemed to be sending a signal that if Kennedy won the California primary, he’d win the support of the Chicago mayor.
SIRHAN SIRHAN: The movements of Sirhan on the night of June 4, as well as his childhood, upbringing, and growing anger at Robert Kennedy, are drawn from Robert Sam Anson’s book RFK Must Die!
STEVE SMITH’S MOVEMENTS: In reading Smith’s oral history at the JFK library, I found these words that—as far as I can tell—have never been published before: “If I had been with Senator Kennedy in that ballroom in the Ambassador Hotel, he might not have been shot . . . Curiously enough, for some reason I can’t explain, during the course of the campaign, whenever I was with the Senator, I made it a point to place myself in front of him and sort of move as if I were clearing a way . . . I think it helped expedite his getting from one place to another . . . Had I been part of that group, I probably would have been walking in front of the Senator as he left the stage and went back to the kitchen, [so Sirhan] would have had to come by me to do it.”
KENNEDY IS DIRECTED THROUGH THE KITCHEN: This decision was by all accounts a last-minute, on-the-fly call, to save the exhausted Kennedy from making another appearance in another ballroom before another group of supporters. By exiting the ballroom and walking through the kitchen, Kennedy would have been able to go directly to a press conference. The decision left his security agent, former FBI man Bill Barry, as well as Roosevelt Grier and others in his entourage, at a distance from Kennedy. He was shot as they were moving to catch up with him.
ROBERT KENNEDY’S POLITICAL SITUATION : The belief among most political watchers was that Kennedy was well behind Vice President Humphrey as of June 4. The on-air commentators, including ABC’s William Laurence, all offered variations of the theme that the “winner” of the primaries was the man who hadn’t competed in any of them, Hubert Humphrey, and that with no more primaries after New York on June 18, there were few levers available for RFK to use in order to change minds.
A chart prepared by Kennedy’s chief delegate hunter, David Hackett, to be analyzed at a June 5 meeting in Steve Smith’s Ambassador Hotel cottage, gave this “educated estimate” of the delegate breakdown:
Humphrey: 994
Kennedy: 524½
McCarthy: 204
Undecided: 872
Needed for nomination: 1.312
The “objective” was to get Kennedy to 1,432½ votes, with Kennedy gaining virtually all of the Illinois votes (the Daley factor), and majorities in the key non-primary states of Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, and an effective split in Pennsylvania. The objective also assumed that Kennedy would get no more than 45 of the 600+ delegates up for grabs in the South and Southwest.
The chart was published in the back of the book On His Own by Kennedy aides William vanden Heuvel and Milt Gwirtzman.
THE McCARTHY MELTDOWN: Sam Brown, the twenty-five-year-old who organized the “Clean for Gene” brigades in New Hampshire, told me that he and several other senior McCarthy campaign officials were preparing to announce their support for Robert Kennedy if he won the California primary, and were going to make that announcement within forty-eight hours of Kennedy’s victory.
THE NEW YORK TIMES editorial praising McCarthy for his wit was published during the Oregon primary; it can be found in Clarke’s The Last Campaign, which also describes McCarthy’s “joke” in Oregon about the Kennedy campaign leaking a story that someone took a shot at him. In the wake of Kennedy’s death, and McCarthy’s suspension of his own campaign, the remark never received any public attention. Whether the then-liberal New York Post would have switched its endorsement from McCarthy to Kennedy is, of course, a matter of speculation.
LBJ AND KENNEDY: The “nightmares” envisioned by Johnson—Robert Kennedy denouncing him as a coward and a weakling—were described by Johnson to Doris Kearns Goodwin, according to her book Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. The background of the tensions between Johnson and Robert Kennedy, as noted above, are described in detail in Jeff Shesol’s Mutual Contempt, which includes Johnson’s comment that “I believe that Bobby is having his governors jump on me, and he’s having his mayors jump on me, and he’s having his nigras and he’s having his Catholics. And he’s having them just systematically, one after the other, each day, go after me.”
In his memoir Remembering America, Richard Goodwin—who worked in JFK and LBJ’s White House—writes that he and White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers independently came to the conclusion that Johnson was demonstrating paranoid tendencies in the White House. He and Moyers, without knowing what the other was doing, consulted psychiatrists to try to gain insight into paranoia.
Evan Thomas’s Robert Kennedy leaves little doubt that the Johnson White House was the source for Drew Pearson’s column charging—accurately—that Kennedy authorized taps on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s telephone.
DALEY’S ENDORSEMENT: Daley’s quotes about the Vietnam War are authentic, as is the story of the “golden boy,” Joseph McKeon, a native of Daley’s Bridgeport neighborhood and a Harvard graduate, killed just weeks after his arrival in Vietnam.
THE WHISTLE-STOPS: John Barlow Martin, the Indiana native, deserves credit for prodding Robert Kennedy into the whistle-stop train trips through Indiana, Nebraska, and California. The words Kennedy speaks in
this section, including the jokes and lighthearted mocking of the conventions of campaign speech, are almost all words he uttered during those primary campaigns. The special car he used in those train trips is as described.
The Fourth of July speech, including the critique of the “growing power and authority . . . of the central government in Washington,” is composed almost entirely of words delivered by Kennedy during his Senate career and during his Presidential campaign. They can be found in Collected Speeches of RFK, edited by Edwin Guthman and C. Richard Allen.
THE CREDENTIALS AND DELEGATE CHALLENGES: Milt Gwirtzman, a more or less permanent Kennedy family retainer, says in his oral history that a credentials challenge was to be part of the post-primary nomination strategy. At the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Humphrey forces supported the successful challenge to the virtually all-white Mississippi delegation, replacing it with an integrated “loyalist” delegation, and helped design a compromise over the Georgia delegation, splitting it in two. In both cases, the insurgents gave most of their votes to Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern, running in 1968 as a stand-in for the murdered Robert Kennedy. The convention also voted to abolish the unit rule. More conservative Democrats, very much including Texas Governor John Connally, were furious at Humphrey’s campaign for these decisions.
POST-PRIMARY TACTICS: Gwirtzman and others raised the possibility of a “mock” primary in Pennsylvania to pressure the pro-Humphrey mayors of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. A “lightning trip” abroad was also up for discussion, but these and other tactics were on the agenda for a June 5th meeting to be held in Steve Smith’s bungalow at the Ambassador.
NIXON CHOOSES LINDSAY: William Safire, who was a speechwriter for Nixon in his 1968 campaign and at the White House, writes in his book Before the Fall, that Nixon told him: “I gave a lot of thought to Lindsay—surprised?—but what the hell, he’d cut you up. Big gains up North, but Lindsay would lose us Florida, Texas, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Tennessee.” Republicans in the House of Representatives backed Lindsay as Vice President by an overwhelming majority. The possibility of a Robert Kennedy on the Democratic ticket—either as President or Vice President—suggests that Nixon would have taken a much closer look at the New York mayor. As for conservative outrage, the lessons of the 1960 Democratic Convention—when John Kennedy chose Lyndon Johnson in the face of liberal fury and very likely won election by that choice—would have provided an instructive example for Nixon as he pondered how to deal with RFK in the fall.
THE CHICAGO CONVENTION SETTING: The conditions in Chicago—the war-zone security, the work stoppages and strikes, the logistical nightmare confronting the armies of the media—are described in rich detail by Theodore H. White in The Making of the President 1968.
William Kunstler’s comment that RFK’s survival was “the worst thing to happen to the movement years” is a reworking of a comment Kunstler made in my presence to an interviewer in the green room at WNET, New York’s Channel 13, shortly before a taping of a talk show called We Interrupt This Week, in 1979, on which we were both panelists. What Kunstler did say was that the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy were the best things that happened to the radical movement, because it removed from the scene two men who might have diverted energy from the cause of revolution.
LYNDON JOHNSON’S HOPES FOR RENOMINATION: Johnson expressed his dissatisfaction with Hubert Humphrey as a candidate on many occasions to many people. The comments in this section are all taken from comments recorded in Dallek’s Flawed Giant, Woods’s LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, and White’s The Making of the President 1968.
Astonishing as it may sound, Johnson did plan to fly to Moscow for a flash summit with Soviet Premier Kosygin, announce a groundbreaking agreement on arms control, then fly to the Democratic Convention to address the delegates. Teddy White recounts the plan in a footnote in The Making of the President 1968. He was talked out of this dramatic move by Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, according to Clifford’s memoir Counselor to the President. But the White House was set to announce plans for a U.S.-Soviet summit to take place in October; the announcement was set for Tuesday, August 20, less than a week before the start of the Democratic Convention. That evening (as described in the chapter in this book), Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin asked for an urgent meeting, and informed them of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The announcement—and the summit—were scrapped.
As for Johnson’s hopes for renomination, he had a full team of operatives at the convention, including Postmaster General Marvin Watson and the convention’s executive director, John Criswell, who was in fact reporting back to him under the code name “Bert.” The speech quoted in this book—“as long as I have breath in my body I shall use it to encourage my country . . .”—was in fact a speech that was drafted for him for delivery at the convention.
The story is told in detail in an article by Justin Nelson titled: “Drafting Lyndon Johnson: The President’s Secret Role in the 1968 Democratic Convention,” published by Presidential Studies Quarterly in 2004.
RFK CONFRONTS THE RADICALS: Robert Kennedy’s willingness—even eagerness—to engage in face-to-face arguments with radical critics is almost a pattern in his public life. All the confrontations described in this chapter happened. (See, for example, Evan Thomas’s biography Robert Kennedy, Richard Goodwin’s Remembering America, and Clarke’s The Last Campaign of Robert Kennedy.) Kennedy’s more civil engagements with college students, in which he expressed his opposition to student deferments, is an integral element of every story on his 1968 campaign—including a fortieth-anniversary retrospective piece I did for CBS Sunday Morning in June 2008. His remark that a black man like John Lewis might someday be President was made frequently during his campaign and often drew hoots of incredulity.
Hubert Humphrey’s anger at the media coverage parallels his reaction to the coverage of the disorder around the convention; he did in fact say, according to Teddy White, that he would be appointing the FCC Chairman, and that an investigation of the coverage might be in order.
HUMPHREY BREAKS WITH JOHNSON: The reality here is very different from my speculation. At the 1968 convention, an agreement was reached between Humphrey’s forces and the anti-war campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern for a compromise peace plank. But President Johnson’s representative, Marvin Watson, told Humphrey that the President would not accept it, and threatened to deny Humphrey the delegates he needed for nomination if he went along with the compromise. In his memoir The Education of a Public Man, Humphrey expressed regret at his failure to confront Johnson.
“Now I know, in retrospect, that I should have stood my ground,” he wrote. “I told our people I was still for the plank, but I didn’t put up a real fight. That was a mistake . . . I should not have yielded. Having said that, I feel it is highly questionable whether I could have succeeded. President Johnson, enraged, would have become a formidable foe, causing troubles that I could probably not have overcome.”
THE CONNALLY-RIBICOFF FACE-OFF: All right, I am playing here. At the 1968 convention when Senator Abe Ribicoff of Connecticut rose to nominate George McGovern, he said, “With George McGovern as President, we wouldn’t have to have Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago.” From his front-row seat, Mayor Daley yelled at Ribicoff what many amateur lip readers took to be an ethnic insult fused with a popular obscenity. Daley’s friends insisted he was using one of his favorite terms of scorn: “You Faker!” rather than “Jew F—er!”
THE NOMINATION: I make no pretense here of engaging in anything other than educated guesswork. Any successful credentials challenge to Southern delegations would have meant some increase in Robert Kennedy’s delegate strength; and (see above) the projections by Kennedy’s campaign as of June 4 assumed he would have almost no delegates from the region. Pennsylvania would have been the toughest of the big non-primary states for a breakthrough, while Ohio and Michigan seemed more promising at the time of Kennedy’s death.
Humphrey and Kenn
edy had genuine affection for each other, so the prospect of a unity gesture—the loser introducing the winner to the convention—is well within the realm of possibility. Shortly before the California primary, I asked Fred Dutton whether RFK would accept the Vice Presidency with Humphrey, and Dutton said (as he does in the book) that he was certain Kennedy would say yes.
Similarly, I have no special insight into whom Kennedy would have chosen as a running mate. The choice of Terry Sanford as a running mate fits the “plausibility” standard: He was from the South; he had a progressive record on civil rights; he was a governor; and as the head of Humphrey’s Citizens’ Committee, he was a symbol of unity.
Virtually all of Robert Kennedy’s acceptance speech was taken from speeches he delivered at one time or another in the last four years of his life.
NIXON’S STRATEGY: Nixon’s plans to run against Johnson (and then Humphrey) as the candidate of change is spelled out in memos (including the one quoted here) included in Safire’s Before the Fall. With RFK as his opponent, another strategy would have been required.
HOOVER AND BOBBY: A shelf of books describes the growing gulf between FBI Director Hoover and Robert Kennedy; Evan Thomas’s Robert Kennedy is one excellent guide to the story.
As to Hoover’s relationship with Clyde Tolson, some things are matters of fact. They did lunch every day at Harvey’s Restaurant (and later the dining room of the Mayflower Hotel). They did vacation together. Tolson was Hoover’s sole heir. He did move into Hoover’s home after the Director’s death. And FBI agents did refer to them as: “J. Edna and Mother Tolson.” When a Time magazine writer implied there might be something curious about the relationship, the reporter was subject to a full-field FBI investigation.
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