The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  Mayor Daley went to Mass every morning; he never missed his Easter duty—and never forgot an enemy. Kennedy had been that kind of pious gut-fighter. Like Daley, he was not personally corrupt; but he could deal with corruption to achieve some “greater good.” The memory of that fact no doubt galled Robert Kennedy in 1968—the memory of campaign tricks in West Virginia, the nastier memories of plots against Castro. He had shed much of that older self—but he had to confront it again if he meant to deal with Richard Daley.

  Daley’s intrusion could not have come at a worse time. McCarthy, while losing the popular vote in New Hampshire, had won twenty of its twenty-four delegates. Kennedy had decided to run, and knew he would be called a spoiler after McCarthy had risked the first challenge to the President. Kennedy informed Mayor Daley of his decision—and Daley asked him, first, to explore the idea of an outside commission to review Vietnam policy. It was a project doomed from the outset—President Johnson was not going to let Robert Kennedy set up a panel to criticize him; and Kennedy did not want to work for such a commission while his chance to campaign slipped by. Yet Daley’s influence was so great in the party that all sides had to go through the motions of desiring a review panel just because “Hizzoner” did. Johnson asked Sorensen for a list of names, to be delivered to McNamara’s replacement at the Department of Defense, Clark Clifford. Robert Kennedy went to the meeting with Clifford. Unwilling to serve on the review board, he had to say he would consent, if asked. That gave Johnson his chance to say Robert wanted to use the panel against him. The episode exacerbated conflict with the President, whose response in turn fueled anger in Kennedy’s supporters. The honorary Kennedy from days past, Richard Daley, was tripping up new arrivals at that status.

  Accounts differ on the timing of Kennedy’s decision to run—before New Hampshire, or after; well before New Hampshire, or just before. Kennedy was sending different signals to different parts of his own support system; agreeing now with one group, now with another; seeing too many sides of the matter to set a simple course. He caused conflicting impressions in others because he was in conflict with himself. That was clear down to the eve of his announcement, when the kick-off speech had been composed and the team of consultants had gone off to whatever empty beds they could find about his house. Even at this point, Robert had dispatched his brother to see Eugene McCarthy, campaigning in Wisconsin, with a proposal out of character for Kennedys in general and for Robert in particular: the two men would be friendly rivals, raising the war issue but not confronting each other in the same primaries. In short, “Let’s fight, but not really.” Kennedy wanted to take the war issue away from McCarthy without upsetting McCarthy’s troops too much—a proposal fully as unworkable as Daley’s, and one McCarthy rightly dismissed. Robert was entering the campaign and not entering it at the same time—which accurately reflected his mood on the sleepless night before he announced.

  Arthur Schlesinger, having gone to bed at one-thirty, was awakened by a whisper, “Ted! Ted!” It was Edward Kennedy trying to find Sorensen with the unsurprising news that McCarthy had said no. He did not want to wake his brother, who must be fresh for the morning press conference; but Robert was already awake, and he soon wandered into Schlesinger’s room, looking morose: “Well, I have to say something in three hours.” Schlesinger, who wanted no bitter or final division between Kennedy and McCarthy’s followers, said, “Why not come out for McCarthy? Every McCarthy delegate will be a potential Kennedy delegate. He can’t possibly win, so you will be certain inheritor of his support.” Kennedy gave him a stony stare and said, “Kennedys don’t act that way.” Kennedys didn’t act that way. But they didn’t back halfway into fights, either. When Schlesinger went down to breakfast and asked Sorensen where the candidate was, he said, “He is upstairs looking for someone else to wake up in the hope of finding someone who agrees with him.” Schlesinger continues:

  Ted Kennedy raised his arms in the air: “I just can’t believe it. It is too incredible. I just can’t believe that we are sitting around the table discussing anything as incredible as this.” Vanden Heuvel and I proposed that, as an interim measure, he come out for McCarthy. My impression was that both Teds thought this might be preferable to his declaring for himself. Then Robert entered the room, still in his pajamas. He had heard the last part of our talk. He said, “Look, fellows, I can’t do that. I can’t come out for McCarthy. Let’s not talk about that any more. I’m going ahead, and there is no point in talking about anything else.” With that he left. I proposed taking one more look at the situation. There must be some other course besides endorsing McCarthy or running himself. Teddy said, “No. He’s made up his mind. If we discuss it any longer, it will shake his confidence and put him on the defensive. He has to be at his best at this damned press conference. So we can’t talk about it any more.”

  The real and honorary Kennedys, who basked in the light of power and moved so confidently, were broken and divided among themselves, serving a divided man, finally abandoning advice in favor of therapy. The Kennedy pride was engaged, but had to be forsworn—Robert would have to fight Johnson while deferring to him. The family glamour had been eclipsed by McCarthy, who claimed the young constituency Robert thought belonged to his brother by right. The support Robert had assumed, McCarthy had gone out and earned; and now McCarthy could neither be wooed nor fought outright.

  Every move Robert made was opposed by one cluster of Kennedy friends. He had to get away from them; yet he could not. He wandered the house asking, listening, for what no one could say. He talked with everyone, with too many, because he could not talk it through by himself. Yet that was the one thing necessary. It was like being back in his father’s house, going with questions at night where certain answers would be given—all the sprawl of family and friends united by the fierce will that made everything cohere on the inside, defiant of anything outside. Robert was struggling to lift up the whole complex of Kennedy loyalties and personal ties, make it hover above difficulty, bright as his father had made it shine for a while. But the sheer accumulation weighed him down. He was a captive of his own courtiers, of those who were urging him on and those who were dragging him back, of the different worlds littered about him, of the dead man’s teams and the dead man’s shadow, of a legacy divided beyond reassembling.

  8

  Ghosts

  It’s narrowed down to Bobby and me. So far he’s run with the ghost of his brother. Now we’re going to make him run against it. It’s purely Greek: he either has to kill him or be killed by him. We’ll make him run against Jack.… And I’m Jack.

  —EUGENE MCCARTHY, 1968

  If Robert Kennedy could see an older self in Mayor Daley, he faced in Eugene McCarthy a kind of antiself. For years McCarthy had been considered the “other Catholic” Senator of presidential stature; and when McCarthy looked at John Kennedy he clearly thought there was only one real Catholic in the running. During the 1960 convention McCarthy tugged at liberal heartstrings with his tribute to Adlai Stevenson. But the Kennedys knew he was talking with Lyndon Johnson about a spot on the Texan’s ticket if Kennedy could be stopped. They took all the praise of Stevenson as an attack on John Kennedy, on the fake liberal. McCarthy was a natural for a Johnson ticket, just as Johnson was for Kennedy’s—to balance a northern Catholic with a Southerner.

  Unlike John Kennedy, McCarthy took his religion seriously; had even spent time in a Benedictine monastery. But in other ways Robert could see much of his brother’s appeal in this lazy Senator who moved easily with intellectuals. McCarthy’s poems had not won a Pulitzer Prize; but at least he had written them himself. He had a buttoned and unrumpled self-possession, a wit that could flick out and wound, a handsome poise, an equilibrium maintained by mockery. If anything, he made more of personal style than the Kennedys could—unlike them, he was not afraid to show his contempt for political hacks.

  McCarthy is an interesting study in the pride of people trained to embrace humility. He had given up most of the means of s
atisfying his ambition without giving up the ambition itself. By 1968 he had arrived at a desire for power whose purity was guaranteed by his unwillingness to take any practical steps toward power. He should be President because he would not try very hard to be. The American people were being tested. If he was not elected, they had failed, not he. All through the 1968 campaign he sought to legitimate a principled indifference as the true prophetic stance. “Don’t get excited,” he kept telling his enthusiastic young followers. Excitement is undignified. It musses one’s hair.

  While his young recruits worked day and night for him, he quietly disdained their zealotry. I watched him, that summer, come out of a meeting of Michigan delegates in East Lansing to answer waiting newsmen’s questions. “Do you think you won any votes in there?” Well, McCarthy said, these meetings with delegates are mainly a waste of time—a comment that became a self-fulfilling prophecy when the delegates read it the next day in their newspapers.

  McCarthy had been stung once by his own ambition, when Lyndon Johnson renewed in 1964 the talk, from 1960, about becoming his Vice-President. Merely continuing that negotiation meant that McCarthy had to undercut his own senior colleague from Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey. But McCarthy crawled partway toward Johnson before being rejected. The humiliation mattered less than his own guilt at yielding to the base scramble for advancement. He would not yield again. So far from bowing to the voters in 1968, he barely bothered, on many occasions, to notice them. He closeted himself with Robert Lowell and made fun of the demeaning aspects of running for office. Refusing to stoop for the crown, he showed his contempt for all those who did—and principally for Robert Kennedy. If the world would not give him the presidency, over the clowns who were running for it, then the world owed him something just for his refusal to join the clowns.

  He is still trying to collect what the world owes him—as my wife and I found out later, after a National Book Award presentation: he and a young woman he was escorting saw us sitting with some friends at a restaurant, sat down uninvited, ate an expensive meal, and, after the brandy, left us with the check. It did not come as a surprise, in 1976, when he repeated the campaign act he had disdained in 1968 (when he had a chance)—all, a friend of his assured me, to keep his lecture fees high enough to support him.

  As a liberal “Commonweal Catholic” of the forties and fifties, Eugene McCarthy did not share some Irish Catholics’ fondness for the other Senator McCarthy. And he still felt, in 1968, that Robert Kennedy was just Joe McCarthy’s ex-goon—a cut above Roy Cohn perhaps, but not even up to his older brother’s pretensions. Even after Robert was murdered, McCarthy would not utter the minimum words of praise that would unite the two peace campaigns. Robert’s team, rebuffed, went to the convention with a new leader, George McGovern, dividing the dissenters’ energies. Then, to top it all, McCarthy seemed intent on repairing his treachery to Humphrey in 1964 by refusing to attack the Vice-President for the President’s Indochina war.

  Yet, despite all his personal flaws and the pettiness of his attitude toward Kennedys, McCarthy was immune to attack from Robert Kennedy. He had done what Robert wished, too late, he had undertaken. He had challenged his party’s incumbent, even before Tet; and many thought he deserved the fruits of that challenge. When McCarthy first announced, Robert knew his own young staffers felt disappointed in their boss and envied their rival. Some wore McCarthy buttons on the inside of their lapels. Old Kennedy hands, leaderless after their appeals to Robert, joined McCarthy’s effort—Kenneth Galbraith would stay on even after Robert joined the race, after Richard Goodwin went back to his first loyalty. Robert spent the last months of his life lamenting that McCarthy had the “A kids,” the ones who went first with the courageous man, the kind who had looked up to his brother. Kennedy Robert had to run with the “B kids.”

  Having disappointed his followers by inaction, Robert infuriated many when he did act, coming in as a “spoiler” after McCarthy’s New Hampshire upset. Murray Kempton, who had learned to respect Kennedy’s concern for the poor, manifested after he won his Senate seat, reacted bitterly to the late entry into competition with McCarthy. In a telegram to Edward Kennedy, turning down an invitation to his book party, he said: “Sorry I can’t join you. Your brother’s announcement makes it clear that St. Patrick did not drive all the snakes from Ireland.” Kennedy could not feed this resentment by overt attacks on McCarthy. He had to defer to him, praise him, hope for his followers somewhere down the road. That was the odd story of 1968 for this old gut-fighter—he could not attack Daley, nor McCarthy, nor Johnson himself. He had to run against men while bowing to them constantly and asking their pardon. One side of the Kennedy legacy now belonged to the hawks around Johnson, who invoked the late President’s pledge to fight all over the globe. It was hard enough for Kennedy to see Johnson usurping his brother’s tough rhetoric with the help of President Kennedy’s most warlike cabinet members. But when Robert turned to the other side of his brother’s legacy—the side that inspired youth—he found an even more dangerous, because more charming, usurper in place, mocking him with a smile and saying, “I’m Jack.”

  John Kennedy, without any trace of radicalism himself, ignited the hopes of young people in the early sixties. The authorized aspect of this was the Peace Corps. An unplanned—and undesired—result of it led to sit-ins and the march on Washington, the Free Speech movement, the Port Huron Statement. John Kennedy would never, like Robert, consort with Tom Hayden; but he helped, like an inadvertent Dr. Frankenstein, bring Hayden into being. Now Eugene McCarthy had captivated and partially tamed the Kennedy monster, made the shaggier types cut their hair and go “clean for Gene,” brought civility back to the protest movement. He had not only inherited the Kennedy youth following, but seemed to have elevated it. Thus, when Robert Kennedy appeared late on the scene, McCarthy could say to his speechwriter Jeremy Larner, “We’ll make him run against Jack.” Arthur Schlesinger finds this statement meaningless, mere verbal posturing. But the meaning is not hard to find. McCarthy, the man who should (in his own eyes) have been the first Catholic President, now stood where the next Kennedy should have, blocking the mere physical heir with a higher spiritual claim. “So far he’s run with the ghost of his brother. Now we’re going to make him run against it.” Lyndon Johnson feared Kennedy because he was the heir; McCarthy felt that Robert was no heir at all, and had no claim. For Robert Kennedy to attack McCarthy would be to attack the A kids who belonged by right to John Kennedy. It would be attacking his brother.

  Kennedy shunned debate with McCarthy in Indiana and Oregon, not simply from the “old politics” rule that the better known does not share platforms with the lesser known. He feared confrontation because, on too many points, he had no good case to make against McCarthy—none that could not have been made against his brother. “He either has to kill him or be killed by him.”

  McCarthy seemed to have a malignant gift for doing what would diminish Kennedy. He moved ostentatiously free of the constraints that were hobbling his rival. Kennedy attacked the war; but McCarthy pointed out that his opponent would not criticize those who had escalated the war—McNamara and other Kennedy appointees. John Kennedy’s first official appointment had reconfirmed J. Edgar Hoover in office; so McCarthy campaigned in 1968 on a pledge to fire Hoover—something Robert Kennedy could not promise. Most important of all, McCarthy attacked President Johnson—the way he spoke of “my” helicopters and “my” fighting men and “my” war. McCarthy indeed had reason to resent the man who had humiliated him in 1964; but his attacks were mild next to those of his followers who asked Johnson, chanting, for his daily “kill count” of Americans. McCarthy only looked daring next to Kennedy, who was strangely tongue-tied about the President.

  This restraint puzzled Kennedy’s followers. The explanation given was that Kennedy should not trigger Johnson’s paranoia. As he told Jack Newfield: “I don’t want to drive Johnson into doing something really crazy. I don’t want to hurt the doves in the Senate who are up fo
r re-election.” Now we know that, with Johnson as with Hoover, Kennedy’s hands were tied. He feared what Johnson might release about his brother, going all the way back to the Inga Arvad tapes. In 1967 Johnson started dropping hints to the press that he knew about the Kennedy plots against Castro. He even told Leo Janos of Time that the Kennedys “had been operating a damned Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean.” Robert could not be certain how much else Johnson had learned from Hoover or the CIA. He had to assume Judith Campbell’s simultaneous affair with John Kennedy and Sam Giancana was known to the President from files in either agency. His own service as Attorney General had not endeared him to Hoover. He did not want to provoke either man into campaign leaks or revelations.

  Robert’s Johnson problem had been both typified and exacerbated by the Manchester affair in 1966. After the President’s assassination, Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy had many reasons for controlling the family image. They wanted a dignified treatment of the national tragedy. They did not want to be pestered by a thousand writers seeking interviews. The high-handedness of some Kennedy aides in dealing with Dallas authorities would need soft-pedaling. The autopsy follow-up could be embarrassing on the matter of Addison’s disease. And the search for other assassins could lead in the direction of Cuba, of CIA attempts to use the Mafia against Castro.

  To all these motives must be added the problem of future relations with President Johnson. In the aftermath of the assassination, Kennedy friends and aides expressed a hatred of Texas and Texans that focused, understandably if unfairly, on Lyndon Johnson. And, as usual, the resentment of the honorary Kennedys outran that of the real ones. The emotion at the center of things was exaggerated by outsiders, who compensated for their distance from the original fire. On the flight back from Dallas, there were ugly little outbursts, anguished rude comments—some of which Johnson had heard about, some he had not. It was important to control the reporting of these events—and, if possible, to delay any reporting of them. The Kennedy team had to work with Johnson, for a while at least—to appear patriotic (and to be patriotic), to avoid charges of pettiness and desertion when the nation was in crisis. Besides, Robert Kennedy felt Johnson was an aberration, an intruder, whose harmful effect could be controlled if he were forced to accept Robert as his running mate in 1964. As long as that option remained, he told his people to express their loyalty to the new President. Frank reporting of those people’s real feelings had to be prevented.