by Larry Tye
Wagner was, more than anything else, a man of ambition, which meant he could easily sniff out an equally hungry and more celebrated figure like Bobby Kennedy. The mayor “welcomed Kennedy’s arrival into New York much as the fifth-century Romans welcomed the entry into Italy of Attila,” observed the journalist and author William V. Shannon. Wagner had coveted that Senate seat, but he’d been distracted by the recent loss of his wife to lung cancer. With little time left, the mayor couldn’t see a way to snag the nomination for himself or, with LBJ lobbying for Bobby, for someone he would have preferred, such as Adlai Stevenson. Still, Bobby knew he remained anathema to many progressives, and he never trusted to chance. First he wheedled a last-minute endorsement from William Fitts Ryan, the only reform member of Congress; then he made two trips to Gracie Mansion to personally pitch the reluctant mayor. The upshot: Just four days before Bobby made his announcement speech, Wagner accepted the inevitable and welcomed to his city and the Senate race his “good friend, Bob Kennedy.”
One New York Democrat didn’t get the message that the nomination was a deal already sealed. Sam Stratton, an ex-broadcaster and now a congressman from Schenectady, was conservative enough to have won in a heavily Republican district and cantankerous enough to demand that he be heard at the upcoming state Democratic convention on the first of September. With the bands, banners, and bunting ready for a coronation, Kennedy trounced Stratton by 968 to 153 on the first and only ballot. The delegates roared out “Hello, Bobby,” echoing the “Hello, Lyndon” theme of the national convention a week before and the “Hello, Dolly” being sung a dozen blocks away on Broadway. There was only one sour note: Rather than reacting graciously to Stratton, who had declared his candidacy before Bobby did and might have won but for the Kennedy blitzkrieg, the nominee was angry that his challenger had refused to bow out early. When it came to politics, “Robert Kennedy tended to see things in terms of people ‘for me and against me, for us and against us,’ ” said Milton Gwirtzman, who worked for Jack, Bobby, and Ted. “I remember him saying, ‘Stratton’s really making things hard for me.’ That was hard for me to understand, because I saw how he had made things much harder for Stratton.” That Bobby couldn’t see was a sign of two things—a blinding self-focus that was typical of the Kennedys, and his rightful conviction that he was the candidate most likely not just to win but to make a difference.
The six thousand shirtsleeve delegates and spectators at the sweltering Armory on East Thirty-Fourth Street left convinced that the Kennedy political machine was as well lubricated as it had been when paving JFK’s way to the White House. But the fact that few if any of them made their way to the postconvention reception at the air-conditioned Sheraton-Atlantic suggested that the machine had some rust to shake off. The bartenders were at the hotel ready to pour while placards made clear who was being toasted. The problem: Nobody had invited the convention delegates. The nascent campaign had plenty of senior strategists like Harriman and Smith, but too few of the nuts-and-bolts types Bobby had put in place for Jack’s early runs. Alarmed at the nearly empty ballroom, Kennedy staffers scattered to nearby department stores to corral anyone they could. “I was just coming out of Stern’s and all of a sudden this girl grabs me,” explained one woman with a canapé in her mouth. “The next thing you know I’m shaking hands with Bobby!” Told what had happened, Kennedy quipped, “I knew there was something wrong. Not enough people were wearing delegate badges and too many were carrying boxes marked Macy’s.”
Bobby, meanwhile, had proved that while nobody was better than he at managing campaigns, he was unseasoned and unsteady as a candidate. It seemed that everyone in New York knew him, or thought they did, and most had a reason to resent him, starting with Italian Americans. They represented the state’s biggest voting bloc, at a million and a half, in an era when ethnic and religious identities mattered more at the ballot box than they do today. “There is the suspicion that anybody who makes a big case out of the Mafia, as Bobby Kennedy did when he was in Washington, is going to meet resentment in Italian neighborhoods,” wrote Jimmy Breslin. “These people look on the Mafia a little bit the way the Irish here regard the IRA. They are outside the law, but blood counts ahead of any law.” Bobby’s support for civil rights also stuck in the craws of at least some Italian Americans, who saw blacks and other minorities as competitors for scarce jobs. “All he talks about,” one such critic told The New York Times, “is niggers and spics.” Bobby didn’t make things easier when, in a visit to the city of Oneida, one hour west of the Adirondacks, he was presented with a pizza pie. “He looks down,” recalled advance man Jim Tolan, “and he says, ‘Where’s the fork?’ I think it’s the first time he ever had pizza in his life….Finally he got the idea you’re supposed to eat it with your hands.” Bobby’s Republican opponent, meanwhile, was doing whatever it took to lure Italians into his camp. “We developed the issue of what we felt was his smear of the Italian community with his Mafia views and probe on that, and we were able to develop a good following in the Italian community,” recalls Eugene Rossides, Keating’s campaign manager. “We had leading Italian Democrats come out for Keating.”
Jewish New Yorkers, of whom 1.3 million were on the voting rolls, had their own reservations. During his six terms in the U.S. House and one in the Senate, Keating had attended umpteen bar mitzvahs, Jewish weddings, and fundraisers for Israel, a yarmulke planted on his skull. He had just the right Yiddish phrases in his lexicon, and fellow Empire State senator Jacob Javits or New York attorney general Louis Lefkowitz regularly appeared at his side. For anyone who didn’t know that Israel had named a fifty-acre forest after him, a sign at a Lower East Side deli reminded, KEATING AND ISRAEL GO TOGETHER LIKE BAGELS AND LOX. Keating made no secret of his disdain for his party’s presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, which made it easier for Jewish Democrats to justify splitting their votes. Bobby tried his own ethnic politicking, with the same clumsiness he displayed in the pizza parlor. At a kosher deli he asked for a glass of milk. At a Lower East Side eatery he eschewed bagels and blintzes in favor of melon and split pea soup. He couldn’t grasp why Jews were so determined to remember their enemies, whether it was the Irish toughs who beat them up as kids or the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain who slurred them as “sheenies” and “kikes.” “Why are they against me? Was it because of what my father did?” Bobby asked Gwirtzman. “That was twenty years ago.”
He didn’t have to wonder why other old rivals harbored a grudge. Roy Cohn was back in New York practicing law and letting everyone know the gripes he had against his former colleague from the McCarthy Committee. Jimmy Hoffa’s list was even longer. He pressed the House Judiciary Committee to investigate Bobby’s crusade against him, but Bobby’s congressional allies forestalled that effort. Teamsters magazines railed against a “Kennedy dynasty” and urged union members to back Keating. A Hoffa front group—Committee of Democrats for Keating-Johnson-Humphrey—distributed in Harlem five hundred thousand flyers attacking Bobby’s civil rights record, with other pamphlets attacking him as antilabor, anti-Italian, and anti-Semitic. Hoffa himself told The New York Times that Kennedy was “temperamentally and morally unfit” for public office. Thankfully for Bobby, the union’s 175,000-member New York chapter, already disillusioned with Hoffa, split with its national leader and endorsed the Democrat for senator.
Liberal New Yorkers didn’t need Jimmy Hoffa or Roy Cohn to encourage them to form their own Democrats for Keating group. Gore Vidal had detested Kennedy ever since their altercation at a White House dinner, and so had Paul Newman ever since the two argued about Joe McCarthy. Barbara Tuchman was no fan even though Bobby and Jack let everyone know they were crazy about The Guns of August, her book on World War I. Another surprising defector was Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., whose son and namesake was an aide to and eventual biographer of both Kennedy brothers. Jackie Robinson wasn’t a Democrat but he was back criticizing Bobby, explaining that whatever this Kennedy’s glamor, “it cannot be truthfully said that his r
ecord is spotless or perfectly consistent in defense of the rights of the Negro people.” Keating made it easy for the liberal critics, having helped pass the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1964, and on foreign affairs outshining even JFK by serving heroically in both world wars and sounding an alarm on the Cuban missile threat months before the missile crisis.
Other attacks on Bobby crossed ethnic, religious, and party lines, such as the one branding him a carpetbagger. His bids to cast himself as a New Yorker rang hollow and reinforced his image as rootless and rich. He leased from a wealthy designer a twenty-five-room Dutch Colonial house in Glen Cove on Long Island, staging his family there for press events but seldom staying himself. He pointed out the apartments the Kennedys had rented in Manhattan and said that their homes on Cape Cod and Palm Beach were for vacations, which offended people struggling to afford a single mortgage. He dug up evidence that New York’s first senator, Rufus King, also hailed from Massachusetts, as if that experience from the early 1800s was relevant or King’s carpetbagger status justified Bobby’s.*3 “Bobby was Massachusetts,” said the author and journalist Harrison Salisbury. “He hadn’t learned the Kennedy accent in Riverdale. Every time he opened his mouth he reminded you of that.” Keating, who was born in New York and lived his life there, offered his own reminder every chance he got, joking that “there have been people waiting in line at the World’s Fair longer than Kennedy has been in this state.”
His early attempts to fight back against those and other charges made clear not just the steepness of Bobby’s learning curve but the tenacity of his grief. “He’d be very quiet when we were in the plane or in a car; he often wouldn’t talk at all, he’d just stare out the window. Those of us who were around him much knew enough not to try to strike up a conversation; we’d wait until he would,” remembered John Burns, who was mayor of Binghamton and cochair of Bobby’s campaign. “He was obviously still depressed about his brother’s death and he really, I think, was wondering to himself if he was doing the right thing by running for Senator….He was not a happy man in those days.” Justin Feldman, the campaign scheduler, agreed that Bobby was “a dreadful candidate” at the start. “I think he was sorry he’d gotten involved. I think that he was sorry that he couldn’t indulge himself and wallow in his own grief.”
But if his normal high energy was missing, so were his characteristic sharp edges, which made him more sympathetic to many. “Everybody was sitting there waiting for this ruthless, aggressive man to come in, and they were filled with resentment,” Ronnie Eldridge recalled of the first time Bobby met her fellow reformers. “The doorbell rang….This scared little guy came in. And he, really, just looked so out of it all…very shy, his eyes down on the floor all the time, and it just took everybody by such surprise because they were really there to eat him up, and there really wasn’t anything, you know, to eat up. And it was very sad.”
He performed only marginally better in public, where his style amounted to JFK redux. He compulsively reminded voters what President Kennedy had wanted for the country and which of his missions remained unfulfilled. He mimicked his brother’s gestures, chopping the air with his right hand to make a point and tucking his left one into his jacket pocket. He smoked the short, slender cigars that Jack had favored. He embraced John Kennedy’s precept that issues mattered after you were elected. Until then they should be ducked, especially controversial ones like compulsory busing to desegregate public schools, or Congress’s Gulf of Tonkin resolution that gave LBJ the free hand he wanted in Vietnam. The would-be senator even borrowed the former president’s manner of driving home a point by quoting (or misquoting) wise men of the past, although Bobby overused it to the extent of citing, in a single fifteen-hundred-word statement, Andrew Jackson, Dante, Thomas Carlyle, Lord Tweedsmuir, Bonar Law, Francis Bacon, and John F. Kennedy himself. To some the aping seemed staged and even offensive. To Bobby it was natural and unavoidable. “We grew up together and some of what he was rubbed off on me, and some of what I was rubbed off on him. For me to change any of myself now would be phony,” he explained to a reporter. “I don’t talk of him as my brother for campaign purposes.”
It worked at first, because New Yorkers missed their dead president almost as much as his brother did and saw Bobby as Jack’s avatar. That was apparent in his first prolonged foray into Republican territory upstate, with fifty-one stops in twenty-one cities over three punishing days in early September. He ended in Glens Falls, population twenty-one thousand. He was running late, as always, only this time it was nearly 1:00 A.M. when he arrived, certain that everyone would be in bed or their pajamas. He was half right. Three brass bands and a thousand booming voices greeted him at the airport, with four thousand more waiting downtown. Many had taken a dinner break, then come back for the vigil—the men in T-shirts, the women in nightgowns, the kids in their PJs. “I’d like to make my very first commitment of the campaign,” Bobby told them. “I promise that win or lose, the day after election day, I’m coming back to Glens Falls.”
Every stop brought more of the same. Women grabbing for a tuft of hair. Children mobbing him as he stood waving from his convertible. Newspapermen filing stories flush with superlatives. In Rochester, Keating’s birthplace and residence, the crowd was so thick and zealous that it took thirty policemen to move Bobby the thirty feet from his car to the Civic Center, where four thousand fans had been waiting for three hours. It wasn’t his oratory they were after; few even listened. They were there to see and hopefully touch him. “It’s sex appeal,” said one reporter. “He stands there, stooped and diffident, with that sad Bugs Bunny smile of his, and they love him.” Another gushed that he was bigger than the Beatles, the rock band that was then leading the British Invasion of the U.S. popular music market. “If I send in one more story about the unprecedented crowds,” said The New York Times’s Johnny Apple, “my editor will crown me.” But even editors who spent their lives on the political desk had to admit they had never seen anything this tempestuous, with overflow audiences swarming the candidate from six in the morning to eleven at night, day after day. Before long Bobby’s right hand looked like raw meat, while his left was swollen and bruised. Both were too sore to shake.
“This is something new in American politics. It is not to be explained by mere curiosity,” the veteran politics watcher Joseph Alsop wrote. “It can only be explained, in truth, by admiration and indeed by love—the same love and admiration that still brings thousands to Washington every weekend with the prime purpose of visiting President Kennedy’s grave.” Murray Kempton, who had covered New York politics almost as long, captured the voice of those thousands when he wrote in The New Republic, “If the Attorney General has a wound so great that, not to heal him but just for a little while to relieve him, he must be made a Senator, then we owe him nothing smaller.” Bobby understood what was happening. Thinking of Jack in a rare moment of quiet during his tour upstate in September, he muttered, “These crowds should have been his.” Even as he soaked in the warmth and absorbed the jostling, he was too much of a realist and too canny to believe it could last. He confided to Ed Guthman, his aide at Justice and now on the campaign staff, how he thought the election would play out: “I’ll draw huge crowds as I go to different parts of the state for the first time. All the attention will be on that, and it will last for about three weeks. I’ll hit a low point around the first of October. The question will be whether I can turn it around and regain the momentum.”
Right on schedule, internal polls by both campaigns in late September showed Kennedy’s lead evaporating and Keating pulling even or slightly ahead. While some doubted those results—was Bobby a bit too anxious to take on the mantle of an underdog and Keating too anxious to look as if he could lose?—the New York World-Telegram telegraphed the change of fortunes a week later, with the public opinion analyst Samuel Lubell writing that “Robert Kennedy is running well behind Sen. Kenneth Keating.” Many Kennedy admirers, Lubell added, are saying, “It’s not fair to kick out a man
like Keating even for a Kennedy.” At just that moment—with the election just six weeks away—the incumbent took his hardest shot yet at Bobby, charging that as attorney general, he had “made a deal” to turn over more than $60 million in assets of a government-held company to a front for a “huge Nazi cartel.”*4 The implication was obvious: Kennedy was a chip off his father’s anti-Semitic block, and New York’s Jewish voters had better beware.
The accusation struck a raw nerve in Bobby, rallying him to defend not just his brother’s administration but his father’s integrity. Coming on the heels of the discouraging polls, it was a wake-up call: Unless he focused, he could actually lose. To a warrior like him—and a Kennedy—that prospect was unfathomable. First he punched back against the Nazi slander with the same appeal to Americans’ sense of fair play that had worked so well for JFK when he fended off anti-Catholic bigotry in 1960. Bobby pointed out that it was Keating himself who had introduced the bill making the $60 million sale possible, adding that he had “never heard of a charge as low as this one….I lost a brother and a brother-in-law to the Nazis. I’m not making any deals with Nazis.” The pro-Keating New York Times agreed, chastising the senator for raising “a fake issue” and making clear that “Attorney General Kennedy did not make ‘a deal with Nazis’ he settled an incredibly complicated lawsuit.” But Bobby wasn’t done. He flew in from Mississippi Charles Evers, brother of the martyred civil rights leader Medgar, to tell New York Negroes why they’d be making a mistake to support Keating. Harry Golden, the legendary publisher of Charlotte’s Carolina Israelite, did the same with New York Jews. “[Bobby] had been reluctant to attack Keating directly, fearing that, with his reputation for toughness and aggressiveness, he might create sympathy for the white-haired, well-meaning Senator,” recalled Guthman. “That ended when Keating accused him of being party to a deal with Nazis….His strategy shifted, and he was free to carry the fight to Keating.” What could have been a knockout punch for the Republican incumbent had turned into a boomerang.