No one could really help Bobby, not even his wife, Ethel. Whereas it would have seemed that Ethel would be the one who could have reached him, this was not the case. He could have long conversations about his brother with his sister-in-law Jackie, but not with Ethel. She was closed off from the pain of losing Jack, and simply couldn’t—or wouldn’t—discuss it. Her coping mechanism was to avoid sadness because she feared that if she gave in to it, she would fall into a depression so deep she might never emerge. She had long ago learned to live her life as dispassionately as possible when it came to dealing with the deaths of loved ones. Therefore, when she did talk about Jack, it was always in empty platitudes. For instance, one night, according to family history, Bobby was particularly sad at the dinner table. “There will never be anyone like Jack again,” he said. Ethel looked at him and said, “Well, don’t worry, Bobby, because Jack is in heaven looking after all of us, and everything will be okay.” It wasn’t what he needed to hear in that moment. He shook his head in dismay. “And those were the words spoken by the wife of the attorney general of the United States,” he said, his tone one of disdain.
Bobby tried to go on—and, of course, he would go on—but it was different for him after November 1963. With Lyndon Johnson as president, Bobby’s role in government was greatly diminished. He served in LBJ’s cabinet for less than a year before resigning over Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War. He viewed the war as divisive and unwinnable and felt he could best oppose it by becoming a senator from New York in 1964, replacing Senator Kenneth Keating, who was retiring. He also felt that with a half-million troops now overseas, there was little hope that the escalation of the war would end anytime soon. Therefore, he began speaking out against it, and with each speech he felt a bigger groundswell of public support. By 1967, it had become clearer than ever that Bobby Kennedy intended to run against LBJ for the presidency in ’68.
Getting Sargent Out of the Way
The possibility that Robert F. Kennedy might enter the presidential race was of great concern to President Lyndon Johnson. Almost as bad for Johnson was the very real possibility that Sargent Shriver might somehow end up a part of the RFK team. After all, at this time—the beginning of 1968—Sarge was still director of the Peace Corps under Johnson and also special assistant to the president. Though Bobby had made it clear that he considered Sarge a threat, Sarge was still his brother-in-law. Therefore, Bobby would likely find a place for him on his campaign, and it was thought that Sargent would probably accept such an appointment. Thus it had become a very real possibility that an important and well-respected person in LBJ’s cabinet—Sargent—could end up aligned with one of the president’s sworn enemies—Bobby. LBJ wasn’t happy about any of it and felt he needed to take decisive action. The next thing everyone knew, he came up with the novel idea of packing Sargent Shriver up and sending him to Europe as ambassador to France.
Obviously, the president wanted Shriver out of the country and as far away from the Kennedys as possible, thus the offer. It wasn’t as if there were many in his administration or in the Kennedy family who didn’t realize his true motivation. The question was whether or not Sarge and Eunice would go for it. “It wasn’t the worst idea in the world for Sargent,” recalled George Smathers, “in that it would get him out of a bad situation. He was either going to have to remain loyal to LBJ, as was his duty. Or remain loyal to the Kennedys. The problem was thought to be Eunice. If Bobby was going to run for president, no way was she not going to be in the States to help with the campaign. It seemed pretty black-and-white that Eunice would never go.”
Torn Loyalties
Throughout the years, it has repeatedly been theorized that Eunice Kennedy Shriver would unequivocally support her family’s interests over her husband’s. She was a Kennedy, it has been explained, and as a Kennedy she would naturally place more importance on what her family wanted than on what Sargent wanted. This was simply not the case. In fact, the opposite was usually true. Eunice almost always supported her husband’s interests before her family’s, and it was well known in the family that this would be her position. She believed Sargent was a great man and always maintained that it did not diminish her brothers or anyone else in the family to recognize Sarge’s immense contribution to society and his own political goals and ambitions. Yes, of course, she wanted the best for her Kennedy family. But she was an independent thinker. She didn’t just go along with the family’s aspirations. She was a Shriver as well as a Kennedy, and she wanted what was best for her husband. Anyone who thought otherwise just didn’t know Eunice Kennedy Shriver. This loyalty pull would always be an issue for her, however, sometimes causing her great pain. She simply couldn’t understand why her family was so ambivalent about Sarge. Considering all of the good Sargent had done for America, Eunice couldn’t fathom how anyone could be so dismissive of him. Her father, Joseph, certainly didn’t feel that way. He had made it clear many times that he was a big supporter of Sarge’s. Were Bobby and Ted just jealous?
The more she thought about it, the more Eunice was able to trace the family’s ambivalence about Sargent back to his decision to stay on with LBJ after JFK was killed. “They were upset about anybody working for President Johnson,” Eunice would admit many years later. “But Sarge felt a real loyalty to the programs. I agreed with him. What was the alternative? Sarge has terrific talent and great concern for people who are underdogs. That’s not something he came upon when he married me or when he went to work for the Johnson administration. It was part of the very core of his being. If you take that out of somebody’s life because you think he’s being disloyal to a man who is dead, well, I just didn’t think it made sense.”
Eunice thought she at least had her mother Rose’s support when it came to Sargent, but then in March 1968 something happened that made her question even that. During a visit to Timberlawn, Rose had asked Sarge to take a walk with her after lunch. She told him that she understood that LBJ had offered him the ambassadorship to France and she wondered if he was going to accept the position. He said, according to his later memory of the conversation, that he hadn’t made up his mind. She wanted to know why. He was still considering possibly running for office in Illinois, he told her, and also he wanted to make sure he wasn’t needed in Washington. Perhaps he was alluding to a position on Bobby’s team if Bobby decided to run for president. Rose said, “I want to tell you something, Sarge. Getting offered the opportunity to be ambassador is the best thing that could happen to you and your family. When Joe became ambassador to Great Britain, it was marvelous for our children. You’ve got an opportunity here to do for your family what Joe was able to do for ours.” As they walked along one of the manicured pathways of Timberlawn, Rose continued, saying, “You know, it’s quite a compliment the president is paying you by asking you to be ambassador of France.” Sargent agreed. “Then why haven’t you accepted?” she pressed. “Why haven’t you told him you’re ready to go?”
When Sargent reported back to Eunice the conversation he’d had with her mother, Eunice wasn’t sure what to think. It was obvious to her—as it was to just about everyone else, for that matter—that LBJ just wanted Shriver out of the country to clear out another Kennedy acolyte. LBJ’s wishes aside, if Bobby was to run for president, shouldn’t Sargent be in America to help with the campaign? He had been invaluable to JFK’s campaign, after all. It was as if Rose Kennedy was now another family member who didn’t recognize Sargent’s true value. Perhaps the Kennedy matriarch wasn’t looking at it quite that way and was really just trying to be supportive, but it felt to Eunice that she had aligned herself with Bobby and Ted in their view of Sargent.
“If that’s how Mother feels, and that’s how Bobby feels, then fine. I say we go,” Eunice decided. Of course, there were other reasons to go as well, as Eunice well knew. “She might have been a little annoyed at the time, but she was also eager for new opportunities abroad and realized her husband would excel at his ambassadorship,” observed Jack Valenti. “It
was an important job and, certainly, peace could not occur in Vietnam without France’s involvement. Sargent Shriver was more than qualified, had the diplomatic skills necessary for the job, and could doubtless act as a valuable conduit between French president Charles de Gaulle and the American president—Lyndon Johnson, or whomever would be his successor.”
Therefore, in the second week of March 1968, Sargent Shriver accepted President Johnson’s offer to be ambassador to France.
Questioning LBJ’s Motives
Just a couple days after Sargent Shriver told the president that he would accept the assignment to France, Robert Kennedy announced that he would run for president of the United States. Most people in the Kennedy camp were very enthusiastic about Bobby’s plans, but surprisingly, Ted was not. “Ted’s position was that it was the wrong time for Bobby to emerge as a presidential candidate,” recalled David Burke. “His concern was that, in the end, the election would not be about Vietnam, it would be about the Kennedys, and whether or not the family was hungry for power. He was afraid that Bobby’s running would be negatively perceived by many Americans, and that if he then lost the election it would contaminate the terrain for ’72. He was worried about the Democratic Party. Ted was very shrewd about politics. In some ways, more shrewd than Bobby, and that was saying a lot. He was afraid the party would end up splintered, and as a result, someone like Richard Nixon could end up president. He turned out to be very prescient. Then, of course, there was the personal issue. He would never say it, but he was afraid of losing Bobby the way he had lost Jack. He would say things like, ‘We’re not that far from 1963,’ which would hint at his true feelings. There was a lot of fear there, which was understandable.”
Still, the announcement was made on March 16, 1968, in the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building—the same room where his brother declared his own candidacy eight years earlier. RFK stated, “I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies. I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I’m obliged to do all I can.”
That same week, Sargent and Eunice Shriver hosted Joan Braden and Jackie Kennedy for dinner at Timberlawn. Over the meal, Jackie brought up Sargent’s possible appointment as ambassador. According to what Joan Braden later recalled, Jackie said she thought it was an interesting idea, but she was suspicious of LBJ’s motives. “After all,” she said, “did you know that he once wanted to name me ambassador to Mexico?” Everyone was more than a little surprised by that revelation. Even Sarge didn’t know about it.
In fact, back in November 1963, right after JFK’s death, LBJ came up with the unusual idea of naming Jackie ambassador to Mexico, replacing the then-present ambassador, Thomas C. Mann, who had been appointed to that position by JFK and was set to retire in December. LBJ discussed the matter with an aide in a taped telephone conversation.
“This is screwy, but can you hold on to your chair?” LBJ asked his aide. “Would it be just terrible to ask Mrs. Kennedy to be ambassador to Mexico?” LBJ laughed nervously when the aide seemed taken aback by the idea. When the aide said he needed to “sleep on” the idea, LBJ continued to push it. Finally, the aide said he was concerned about how Jackie—and the public—might perceive the offer. What would be the effect of that? “There wouldn’t be any effect if nobody knew it but the two of us,” LBJ argued, “and I wouldn’t mention it to anybody but you, and if she didn’t want to [accept] nobody would ever know it but you. And if she did want to, God, it would electrify the Western Hemisphere,” Johnson continued. “It’d be more than any Alliance for Progress and she could go on and do as she damn well pleased… she’d just walk out on that balcony and look down at them and they’d just pee all over themselves every day.” When the aide still seemed hesitant, LBJ asked, “She wouldn’t be mad [at the offer], would she?”
The aide answered, “Oh God, no. Then after an awkward beat, “God, no.” And another beat: “God, no.” LBJ continued: “You think they [presumably the public] would think we’re tryin’ to use her, or somethin’?”
“I’d really like to think about it,” answered the aide.
LBJ then said he had recently talked to Jackie “and she just oohed and aahed over the phone and she’s just the sweetest thing and she was always nicer to me than anybody in the Kennedy family… she just always made me feel like a human being, and that’s the biggest thing I got [to offer] and I think it would just revolutionize Latin America.” Jackie could live in Mexico for three weeks, LBJ said, and come back to the States for a week, if she wanted to, “ ’cause I don’t give a damn what she does,” he said, “but I think she and Tom Mann together would sew up this hemisphere, and I believe that’s what she’d want to do. And I think her husband up in heaven would look down and say, by God, he [LBJ] saw she had it just like I did.”
In the end, LBJ decided not to present the offer to Jackie; the job went to career officer Fulton Freeman. However, Jackie found out about it anyway—from Ethel, who heard about it from Bobby. Jackie respected Thomas Mann, had met him when she and Jack visited Mexico during the Chamizal border conflict, which the president was responsible for settling. She said privately that she would have been embarrassed for Mann to even know that LBJ had made such a consideration. After all, there were any number of delicate negotiations going on at the time between the United States and Latin America, and it seemed completely reductive of the position to think that Jackie could fill it.
“Looks like he just wanted to use you, Jackie,” Sargent opined. “What do you know about Mexican affairs?” he added with a gentle smile.
“That’s exactly my point!” Jackie exclaimed. “And now I think he’s using you, Sarge.”
Sargent didn’t comment on Jackie’s theory. Neither did Eunice.
The Decision Is Made
That Bobby Kennedy had officially announced his intention to run against him was not good news for President Johnson. But at least he had gotten Sargent Shriver out of the picture. “LBJ was tickled that he could hold a Kennedy brother-in-law out of the race,” said his aide Joe Califano. “To him, the appointment of Shriver as ambassador to France was made in political heaven.”
But then, at the end of March, in what was nothing if not a fast-moving story, a plot twist occurred that few saw coming: Lyndon Johnson decided that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president in the 1968 campaign.
In the end, there were many reasons for LBJ’s surprising decision, but the unpopularity of the Vietnam War most certainly topped the list. Throughout his presidency, Johnson had been adamant that America could not lose the war, for if it did the country would appear weak to the world and, he feared, risk making its global interests vulnerable to attack. At the time, it was said that JFK had intended to cut back the number of troops in Vietnam (this theory is up for debate now, with some historians considering it revisionist history), but it became LBJ’s mandate to increase those numbers, and as he did, the casualties mounted as well. By 1968, it was a very unpopular war, and most Americans linked it, and the deaths of so many servicemen, to their president. “All of his other achievements—his successful push toward civil rights, for instance, and his [and Sargent Shriver’s] War on Poverty—didn’t much matter when contrasted against the Vietnam War, at least in the popularity polls of the time,” noted Jack Valenti. In fact, Johnson realized that there was practically no way he would be reelected and decided to bow out, stunning the entire country with his now famous words, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” In short order, Vice President Hubert Humphrey announced his own candidacy for president of the United States.
Now that LBJ was officially out of the race, was it really necessary for Sargent Shriver to accept the post he had been offered as ambassador to France? Perhaps not. Certainly, if Bobby had simply appealed to Sargent and told him that he was needed on the c
ampaign, it seemed unlikely that Shriver would have gone to Paris. “But I don’t think he ever felt, quite honestly, that it really made a difference to Bobby,” Eunice would say in an interview in 1972. “In those three or four months that led up to the decision [for Bobby to run] he [Shriver] was never consulted. He knew Bobby could get along very well without him. When Sarge is told he could make a difference, he doesn’t hesitate twenty seconds.”
In fact, Bobby asked Eunice to intervene and talk to Sargent about possibly becoming involved in the campaign. However, Eunice felt strongly that if her brother needed Sargent’s help, he should be the one to ask for it, again demonstrating her genuine loyalty to Sargent. That Bobby asked her for help and she refused him said a lot. “Bobby, why don’t you talk to him?” she pressed, according to her memory. “He’ll do anything you want him to do.” However, Bobby was nothing if not stubborn, and he still resisted personally calling Sargent. His reluctance just made no sense to Eunice. Certainly, if Sargent needed Bobby’s assistance, she reasoned, he would have shown him the respect of picking up the telephone and calling him personally. Now Eunice was starting to get angry.
Finally, in early April, Bobby Kennedy did make an overture to Sargent Shriver—he dispatched an attorney named Donald Dell to meet with him.
Until very recently, Donald Dell had been special assistant to Shriver in the Office of Economic Opportunity. A former professional tennis player and three-time All American, Dell had been a member of the U.S. Davis Cup team and would go on to become one of the nation’s first professional sports agents. (In 2009, he was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.) In 1968 he had just begun working for the RFK campaign. Bobby had been a close friend and frequent tennis partner. According to what Dell recalled many years later, “Bobby obviously knew of my history and close friendship with Sarge, which is why he sent me to meet with him. We sat down in one of the parlors of Timberlawn’s main house and talked about Bobby’s candidacy. You could really talk to Sarge. Anyone could, really. He was very approachable.”
After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present Page 9