by Larry Tye
He still had enemies, but even the guilty verdicts for Jimmy Hoffa that spring and summer brought none of the “euphoria” they would have before, remembered O’Donnell. “He had enough tragedy of his own now.” Bobby’s loss and suffering made him “retreat into himself for quite a while,” says Rose Styron, a friend who had helped her husband, the author William Styron, navigate a similar voyage through darkness. “Bobby came out as a gentler, more expansive person.” He still had no patience for lost causes and remained a tough-minded pragmatist, but he had been enlarged in measurable ways that are unusual for adults and almost unthinkable for politicians. He questioned truths that he had taken as gospel—from an unflinching loyalty to the Democratic Party to an assumption that socialism was an unqualified evil—and softened his edges and his righteousness. There was more empathy now, more humility, more capacity to identify with delinquent children, dispossessed minorities, and others who were suffering.
The legend that would define his life after Jack wasn’t Camelot but Man of La Mancha, which he would see three times. Whereas Camelot was built around a fabulous world of chivalrous kings on noble quests, Don Quixote sensed that all of that was chimerical, yet continued to dream. For Bobby, the public purpose that went along with being a New Frontiersman had left him when Jack died. He had spent his first twenty-five years with the world seeing him as Joe Kennedy’s boy, and the next dozen as John Kennedy’s brother. Now he would be his own man, one who was both more tempered and fiercer. Like the character he loved in Man of La Mancha, Bobby Kennedy would tilt at windmills that his more cautious brother and father would likely not have noticed.
* * *
*1 Rose is reported to have said, just three months after her son Jack’s assassination, “The next president of the United States will be my son Bobby” (Beale, Power at Play, 270).
*2 In the aftermath of the assassination Ethel actually told her grieving sister-in-law, “I’ll share [Bobby] with you” (Robert Kennedy: His Life, 278).
*3 Bobby’s charge that as vice president LBJ had been useless at cabinet meetings was a bit hypocritical. Bobby himself considered most cabinet meetings a waste of time and often sent Nick Katzenbach in his place.
*4 LBJ fired Corbin and RFK hired him not long after, putting him on the Kennedy payroll.
*5 LBJ named names of the aides he couldn’t count on—Walter Jenkins, Jack Valenti, George Reedy—and added that Bill Moyers “was good but his most useful function was rewriting what other people did” (Robert Kennedy and His Times 660).
*6 Shriver, an immensely talented man, was learning that marrying into the Kennedy family closed almost as many doors as it opened for him. It would take both Jack’s and Bobby’s deaths before he could accept an invitation onto a national ticket, this one in 1972 from George McGovern. Everyone has a theory about why Bobby scorned his brother-in-law, but it came down to Sarge’s being everything Bobby didn’t like—a liberal, a Catholic intellectual, a savvy businessman, and a goody-two-shoes. Their different takes on life were on display one day in the mid-1960s when Joe and Rose’s grandchildren were playing football on the lawn in Hyannis Port. Little Bobby Shriver fell and began crying. Bobby Kennedy offered his familiar rebuke: “Kennedys don’t cry!” Sargent Shriver walked straight to his son, lifted him up, and said, “It’s okay, you can cry! You’re a Shriver!” (Mark Shriver, A Good Man, 46.)
*7 The nicest thing Bobby could find to say about Lyndon was that he had “consolidated” JFK’s accomplishments. In an equally frosty response, LBJ acknowledged RFK’s “very vital role in the conduct of public affairs” (Beschloss, Reaching for Glory, 26).
Chapter 8
OFF AND RUNNING
WILL HE OR won’t he? No one ever asked that question about John Kennedy, whose career course was charted from the day his older brother died and the family mantle fell on his shoulders. The path was equally clear for brother Teddy, the most instinctive politician in the Kennedy clan with the exception of the patriarch, who would claim and never let go of Jack’s old seat in the Senate.
Bobby was different. Everything was a struggle for this most passionate and least polished of the Kennedy boys. He had made his acceptance of the post of attorney general seem like a riddle when, as his father and brother let him know, it was the only logical fit. It was true, too, for earlier jobs, whether it was working for the Republicans, then the Democrats, on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations or running his brother’s campaigns. He agonized over outcomes that were preordained. The point was to convince himself and those around him that he was less predictable than the evidence said, and less a pawn of his family.
By the summer of 1964, with neither Joe nor Jack to guide him, Bobby’s career and life choices felt even knottier. He had only just begun to dig himself out of a post-assassination grief that had left lines on his face and his collar a size too large. He told friends everything was on the table, and this time he meant it. Maybe he would use Joe’s millions to buy and run the New York Post. He contemplated traveling, studying and teaching, or writing a book. He’d ruled out running for governor of Massachusetts, a position with too little real power and too many sewer contracts to hand out, or governor of New York, which, since he didn’t meet the residency requirements, wasn’t actually an option. Neither were U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union or proconsul to Latin America, two jobs he had considered when Jack was president and he could have had anything. In June, with the matter of the vice presidency still unsettled, Bobby had offered LBJ and himself a way out. “If you wished me to go to Viet Nam in any capacity I would be glad to do so. It is obviously the most important problem facing the United States and if you felt I could help I am at your service,” he handwrote in a note that began with the difficult-to-concede “Dear Mr. President.” LBJ explained later that “I did not accept his offer because I feared, as did Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, that the potential danger to the late President’s brother was too great.”
Bobby had come to a crossroads and a crisis point. The breadth of the choices he was weighing reflected the reality that for the first time, he didn’t know what he should do. Could he really walk away from the family business and the Kennedy name? He already had all the advantages—influence, renown, and riches—that typically lured people into public life. “What I really want to do is leave the government in January and go away to study for a year at some university, probably in Europe,” he told a journalist that summer. “I want to take Ethel and all the children with me so I can be with them every day for that whole year.” But he was torn: “I do have a responsibility to a lot of people to try to stay in Washington. There’s Jackie, and a lot of others who depend on me.” He also was self-aware enough to realize the implausibility of his impasse: “It’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it? Thirty-eight years old and no place to go.” Reporter: “You’ll be back.” Bobby: “Yes, I’ll be back.”
Coming back meant more than simply coming to terms with Jack’s assassination. He had to know whether he had value in his own right or was just a brother and son, husband and father. He had to decide not what JFK’s New Frontier stood for but what RFK stood for. Experience had stretched him. Tragedy made him more introspective. Now he had to grow up fast and on his own. “He never verbalized anything about that being the transforming moment of his life; he never said anything like that. But I believe it was. I think there were these early dawnings while he was still Attorney General of change and growth. But I think until President Kennedy was assassinated, he didn’t really think about what’s the goal in his life,” said Jack Newfield, a Bobby biographer. “To think for the first time…‘Who am I?’ ‘What do I believe?’ ‘What is the meaning of life?’ ‘What is the meaning of my faith?’ ”
Those weren’t questions that Kennedys ordinarily asked, and Bobby looked for answers during his solitary afternoons spent reading at Hickory Hill. The Greeks and the existentialists spoke to him about the mystery of suffering and the danger of hubris, in both of which he was as v
ersed as they were. But the passages he underlined, reread, and quoted to friends also suggested a way forward. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step,” wrote Lao-Tzu, the ancient Chinese poet. Camus advised, “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don’t help us, who else in the world can help us do this?” Francis Bacon put it more simply: “In this theater of man’s life, it is reserved only for God and for angels to be lookers-on.”
Dropping out never was an option for Bobby, no matter how much he mused about it. His response to trauma had always been to try harder, not to give up. During that summer of his indecision he cobbled together a philosophy that was part Francis Bacon and part Joe Kennedy. While Jack’s death and Joe’s incapacitation had liberated Bobby to make his own career choice, in the end he reached the same decision they would have made for him. Public service was his calling as well as his inheritance. Yet Bobby was neither Joe nor Jack. He had greater depth and compassion, as would become clear. It wasn’t just Jack’s agenda that he wanted to see through, but one of his own that was more specific and more radical. “I like this kind of life better than basking on the beach at Acapulco,” he would say about his decision to stay in the spotlight. “It is the only life worth living for me…my reason for being alive.”
With the general direction set, the particulars of the route remained to be filled in. Jack was no longer there to appoint him to anything, and he had burned his bridges with his brother’s successor. To remain in the public realm, Bobby would have to run for an office of his own. That would mean leaving the security of the backstage and facing voters’ embrace or rejection. It also meant a shift from the executive arena, where he could order things done the way he liked, to a world of conferring with voters and collaborating with fellow officeholders. He had always joked about his ruthlessness, but it was very real to countless critics and would require softening or explaining. It would have been easier to own a newspaper that he could run from behind the scenes, or to hide out in academia. Maybe in retirement.
Only one job made sense now, that of U.S. senator. He understood the institution from his days with Joe McCarthy and John McClellan. He had spent nearly all of his career in Washington, and few knew better how to run a campaign for the upper chamber, as he showed with the ones he orchestrated for Jack in 1952 and for Ted ten years later. Most important, the Senate would restore his national platform and provide a launching pad for the White House that all the Kennedys craved. The only remaining question was which state to run in. The U.S. Constitution and Bobby’s personal fortune gave him fifty options. He thought about moving to Maryland but ruled that out when his friend Joseph Tydings said he was planning to run there. There was a Senate election in Virginia in 1964, but that would have meant taking on the incumbent Democratic titan Harry Byrd, who’d held the seat for more than thirty years and was a scion of one of the first families of Virginia. The Kennedys were the first family in Massachusetts, but the seat there that was up in 1964 was Ted’s.
That left New York. As he would point out repeatedly to voters, he had moved there before he turned two and, depending how you counted, had lived there even longer than he had in Massachusetts. More to the point, the New York metropolitan area was as cosmopolitan and cocksure as Bobby himself, home to America’s titans of money lending, merchandising, and labor guilds. It had a history of embracing outsiders as its own and elevating them to the nation’s stage. But Bobby was too savvy a politician to ignore the risks. While New York had half a million more registered Democrats than Republicans, the GOP held both U.S. Senate seats, the governor’s mansion, both houses of the state legislature, and a majority of the congressional delegation. Despite the years he had spent in upscale Riverdale and Bronxville, and the real estate his family still owned and rented in New York, it didn’t take an investigative reporter to determine that his true home was Hickory Hill in Virginia and his voting address was still Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Toughest of all, the state seemed to like just fine its courtly, silver-haired incumbent senator Kenneth Keating, a born-and-bred New Yorker who had won all seven elections he had contested. Bobby sent a young lawyer across the state to assess his chances, and the news he brought back wasn’t good: Keating, the seventy-eight-page report predicted, would trounce Kennedy by 650,000 votes.
The press relished Bobby’s guessing game, and since May it had been parsing every sign that he’d jump in and every hint that he wouldn’t. A strong vote in favor came from President Johnson, who delighted in the prospect of Bobby’s focusing on an office other than his own, ideally in a place that required a moving van to get to. But The New York Times weighed in against such a bid, editorializing in mid-May that “there is nothing illegal about the possible nomination of Robert F. Kennedy of Massachusetts as Senator from New York, but there is plenty that is cynical about it….If he became a candidate, he would merely be choosing New York as a convenient launching-pad for the political ambitions of himself and others.” That tongue-lashing from a broadsheet he saw as anti-Catholic and anti-Kennedy made Bobby want to run even more.*1
Just when he seemed ready to declare, the Kennedy curse struck again that June. This time the victim was Ted, whose plane crashed into an orchard in Western Massachusetts, killing the pilot and a Senate aide and hurling Kennedy’s corkscrewed body into the cockpit. Ted emerged with a broken back and a lung punctured by the tip of one of several cracked ribs. Luckily, he wasn’t paralyzed, but doctors had to suction water and air from his chest to keep him from suffocating. “I guess the only reason we’ve survived is that there are too many of us. There are more of us than there is trouble,” Bobby told the columnist Jimmy Breslin after rushing to Ted’s bedside, where he stayed for two days. “If my mother did not have any more children after her first four, she would have nothing now.”*2 And to aide Ed Guthman: “Somebody up there doesn’t like us.” Soon after, Breslin and his colleagues reported that Bobby was canceling any plans to run for the Senate.
Ted’s accident reminded Bobby of the responsibility he already bore for his own eight children and Jack’s two. Yet even as Bobby was worrying, Ted quickly got better and began encouraging his older brother to reengage with the world. The civil rights bill had passed and LBJ made clear that if Bobby chose to run, nobody would block his way to the New York Senate nomination. He needed to focus on something other than Lyndon’s Washington and Jack’s memories, and he was already spending more time in Manhattan with Jackie and other family. Yes, he had told the press and public he wasn’t going to run, but circumstances had flipped and, as he would prove repeatedly, he could, too, on a dime and without a flinch. “Bobby typically addressed his career decisions in that manner,” Ted said. “He lived and made decisions in the moment and not in the cold, calculating way that some critics have tried to attribute to him.” Or as Bobby himself had put it, “These things have a way of solving themselves…all of a sudden everything is obvious and right.”
Joe Kennedy understood that better than anyone else. Although he was mute by then, and unable to find the words to tell Bobby how he felt about his running for the Senate, “he was still actively giving instructions and advice,” said his nurse and interpreter Rita Dallas. Bobby “hunched and strained to hear every garbled word, almost as if he expected clarity to burst forth. There were times when I felt he was actually trying to pull words from his father’s mouth….It was apparent that Mr. Kennedy sanctioned and approved of Bobby’s decision to run. He still yelled at him and shook his fist under his nose, but it was in a different way, for he knew that in this son rested the hope and future of the Kennedy image.”
So it was that on August 25, standing before a podium crowded with broadcasters’ microphones at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, Bobby Kennedy announced to New York and the world that the campaign was on. “There may be some who believe that where a candidate voted in the past is more important than his
capacity to serve the state,” he said in a Boston accent and feisty phrasing that were unmistakably his and an undisguised challenge to skeptics like those at The New York Times. “I cannot in fairness ask them to vote for me, even though my mother and father have had a home in New York since 1926 and I attended New York schools for six years before my father became Ambassador to Great Britain, and I have once again established residence in this state. But I do not base my candidacy on these connections. I base it on the belief that New York is not separate from the nation in the year 1964. I base it on the conviction that my experience and my record equip me to understand New York’s problems and to do something about them. I base it on the fact that the greatest state in the union must play a leading role at the Federal level in solving these problems. And I wish to play a part in that effort.” He was elated to have finally made up his mind and eager to share his thinking, but his 755-word message that magnificent summer day could have been boiled down to two: I’m back.
—
THE FIRST STEP on the road to the Senate was to secure the Democratic nomination. Smoke-filled back rooms were more than a metaphor back then, and Bobby was the consensus choice of the political bosses everywhere from the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Harlem to suburban Nassau County and upstate in Buffalo and Albany. Those same power brokers had helped JFK, and Bobby was old-school enough that he had no hesitation about paying them the deference they demanded (his favorite expression was “He was awfully good to us in 1960”). Even when he’d been publicly saying he wasn’t running, ex-governor Averell Harriman had been quietly lining up for him influential liberals across the state. Kennedy in-law Steve Smith was doing the same with key political operatives, reporting back that “if it’s there, it’s there. It was there for us.” But Bobby knew that New York City contributed half the votes in the state, and that reform-minded city dwellers would resent his back-slapping his way to the nomination. That meant winning the blessing of Robert F. Wagner, Jr., the three-term mayor of New York and, recently at least, a critic of Tammany Hall and a champion of reform.