Bobby Kennedy

by Larry Tye

  Bobby showed off his new feistiness to more than two thousand people at Columbia University’s Wollman Auditorium on the evening of October 5. Standing onstage alone in the glaring TV lights, a microphone in his hand, he looked younger and smaller than the student interrogators who threw him one hardball question after another for eighty-five minutes. Why run for office here in New York instead of Massachusetts or Virginia? “If it’s going to be judged on who’s lived here in the state of New York longer, then my opponent has. But then maybe you should elect the oldest man in the state of New York.” Are you using New York as a launching pad for the White House? “I have [had] really two choices over the period of the last ten months…My father has done very well and I could have lived off him. Or I could have continued to work for the government….Frankly I don’t need this title [of senator] because I [could] be called General, I understand, for the rest of my life.” What about Vietnam? “I don’t have an easy solution….The social effort to do things for the villages and the people who live in the city, is really going to be the key.”

  These were questions he had been asked before, and ducked. Tonight his answers were sharper, his mouth stretching into a familiar half smile before he delivered a self-mocking response, the laughter louder and the applause more sustained. His audience was filled with students from the most politically active generation ever in America, who four years later would help ignite the nation in protest over everything from the war in Vietnam to crumbling U.S. ghettos. For now, these fans of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones sensed that Bobby was as authentic as a politician got. He might have entered their auditorium in a stupor of bereavement, but now they watched him come alive. Even a question about the Warren Commission—did he accept its verdict on who murdered Jack?—couldn’t undo him. “When I, ah, spoke to the students in Poland, I said, uh, that the death of my brother was the work of, ah, one individual,” he said, barely audible as silver tears collected on his lower lashes. “I think the Warren Commission Report shows that conclusively.”

  It was the performance his admen had prayed for, knowing he had been underperforming but sensing he was about to break out, which is why they were there filming him. This was the wry, passionate Bobby who had faced down student leftists in Japan and Teamsters thugs in Washington. This was the man friends and relatives loved dearly but whom too few New Yorkers knew or understood. Now they would. The advertising experts culled segments to air on television for thirty minutes, fifteen, three, and one, along with spots of just twenty seconds and ten. “That was absolutely the turning point. His TV had been stiff. His speeches hadn’t come through,” said Feldman, the scheduling guru. “Those kids peppered him with every conceivable question, and he fielded them and answered them and treated them in an incredibly sensitive and responsive way.” The only one who couldn’t see that was Bobby himself. “ ‘It didn’t work,’ he said, ‘did it? You blew it. That was a lousy session. They were lousy questions. They were lousy answers.’ He had absolutely no sense of appreciation of what he had done. It was really the most fantastic and moving performance you can imagine.” When Bobby saw the TV spots and finally realized how good he’d been, Feldman added, he changed as a candidate: “It brought him to a realization that he could talk substantively, he could talk about the Kennedy period…and do it in real terms. He could dream a little for the people; he wasn’t just Jack Kennedy’s brother.”

  His hands still trembled, his knees moving up and down as he tapped his front tooth with his finger. But he finally displayed bits of the old joy not just with crowds of voters, but with the kids whom he had always touched and been touched by. After a rally in Brooklyn’s Borough Hall he was shaking hands when he noticed Cathy Troy, a ten-year-old so self-conscious about the freckles dotting her face that she hated being in public. “He had no idea who she was,” recalled Feldman, “and reached out to her and took her face in his hands and he said, ‘You’re beautiful. I hope you don’t ever lose those freckles. I have a daughter with freckles. I used to have freckles. My sisters used to have freckles, and I think that girls with freckles are absolutely beautiful. I think you’re beautiful,’ and he walked on.” He never knew that what he’d done sent Cathy “prancing around this house like no one you’ve ever seen,” according to her mother. “He was no more capable of doing that in the beginning of that campaign,” added Feldman, “than he could fly.”

  His rekindled fire brought out both sides of Bobby, the one who could sling mud as instinctively as he could bring a bashful girl out of her shell. Taking the high road, painting himself as an upstanding former attorney general, hadn’t been working, so he set his investigators loose on his opponent’s record. A widely disseminated leaflet titled “The Myth of Keating’s Liberalism” branded the senator an unabashed conservative on issues ranging from the minimum wage to civil liberties. “I was trying to destroy Keating as a liberal,” conceded Bill Haddad, who coordinated the research. The truth was that Keating had supported Kennedy administration bills more often even than Senator Mike Mansfield, the Democratic majority leader. The Reporter, an influential magazine that did its own comparison of Kennedy’s charges and Keating’s record, concluded that “the Kennedy forces have not been above inventing the nonexistent bill or amendment for Senator Keating to have voted against on the more important issues.” That sort of “clipping and cropping,” the magazine added, had a “vaguely McCarthyesque quality.” It also harked back to Jack’s broadsides against “Lodge’s Dodges” when he ran against the equally moderate Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., in 1952, and it anticipated today’s no-holds-barred opposition research. Whatever the ethics, it worked: Keating’s supposed right-wing tendencies, rather than Bobby’s, became the issue in liberal New York.

  Bobby did admit that his campaign staff had overstepped the bounds of fairness when it misrepresented Keating’s record on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Yet he opted not for an apology but for a counterattack, which was the Kennedy way as preached by Joe and perfected by Bobby. The head of the bipartisan Fair Campaign Practices Committee had condemned Bobby for “dishonest and unfair distortion” of Keating’s position, making it seem that he opposed the treaty when in fact he “strongly supported” it. But Bobby framed the issue in self-serving terms, going after the committee for inadvertently leaking to the press its letter criticizing him. “The tactical results of the Kennedy counter-foray were impressive,” acknowledged Bruce Felknor, the committee chief who was so wounded by the contretemps that he eventually resigned his post. A leak “that was unfair to the Attorney General,” Felknor added, “wound up as a net plus for him.” Bobby himself later conceded that if he hadn’t gone after the committee the way he did at that late stage of the race, “that would have been the whole campaign right there. Gone.”*5

  Early in the campaign Bobby had been reluctant to debate, not wanting to look like a bully beating up on his older (by twenty-six years), more courtly (by every measure) opponent. Keating sought to exploit that refusal. Late in October he bought a half hour of TV time and set up next to him an empty chair to remind viewers of what he called Bobby’s “utter contempt for the voters of New York.” The Kennedy campaign bought its own air time for later that night. But thirty minutes before Keating was due to go on, Bobby told his aides, “I can’t let him debate an empty chair. I’m going down there and sit in that empty chair.” And so he tried, with guards at the TV studio barring his way. No matter, he had turned the tables: Instead of stories about Kennedy ducking out on a debate invitation, TV stations had live footage of Bobby knocking on the studio door, with Keating later fleeing the scene as his aides hurled furniture and fake palm trees in the path of pursuing journalists.

  Gone, too, in the last month of the campaign was the flaccid slogan, “Let’s Put Robert Kennedy to Work for New York.” In its place was one tying him to the popular president: “Get on the Johnson-Humphrey-Kennedy team.” Bobby’s pride at not wanting to ride anyone’s coattails—especially those of a politician he loathed
—gave way to his fear of losing. He also received an endorsement from former president Harry Truman, who had never hidden his distrust of “that boy.” He campaigned alongside Adlai Stevenson, who Jack had said “acted like a girl,” and Mayor Wagner, who he knew considered him an interloper. He embraced those left-leaning intellectuals willing to embrace him—such dons of salon society as Jules Feiffer, Paddy Chayefsky, and Lillian Hellman—forgetting his lifelong disgust at mushy liberals. Like any successful coach, Bobby knew how to regroup midgame. He also knew it didn’t matter that Keating three years before had backed his nomination for attorney general, calling him “a longtime personal friend,” and had been his guest at Hickory Hill. They were rivals now, and Bobby would do what it took to win. That included embracing, figuratively and in the flesh, a president with whom the contempt was mutual.

  LBJ made two trips to the state and dispatched Hubert Humphrey, his running mate, on three more. “You don’t often find a man who has the understanding, the heart and the compassion that Bobby Kennedy has,” Johnson said at a rally in Buffalo. Bobby gushed back, calling LBJ “already one of the great presidents of the United States.” The words didn’t come easily to either of them, or ring true to their aides. At the same time that LBJ was singing the Senate candidate’s praises, the White House was trying “to shaft Bobby in every conceivable fashion,” reported Kenny O’Donnell, who said the only way he got the president to make that trip was by pretending to try to talk him out of it. Perfect psychology. It was no easier from Bobby’s side. “Johnson would get up on the platform, put his arm around [Bobby] and say, ‘This is mah boy. I want you to elect mah boy,’ ” recalled Richard Wade, a Kennedy campaign adviser. “You could see the whites of Bobby’s knuckles, as this would go on.”

  One last factor tipped the scales in the election: Joe’s millions. Wade, who lived in Chicago, was shocked when the campaign gave him a book of tickets on American Airlines so he could fly in as often as he liked: “I never even heard of such a thing.” Neither had New York assemblyman Al Blumenthal, who said, “We had cars, volunteer cars. We had babysitting services. We had an escort service for the elderly.” Bobby’s staff was so big that it filled five separate suites in office buildings and hotels across Manhattan, with more young volunteers than there were jobs or there had been for JFK’s Senate races. TV ads alone cost a million dollars, a record for a Senate race in New York and probably anywhere else at that time.

  Terence Smith, who covered the campaign for the New York Herald Tribune and studied its marketing, said the clear challenge was to dispel the candidate’s longstanding image “as a Little League ogre.” The strategy was equally straightforward: Film him unrehearsed, talking to voters in shopping center parking lots, on the Staten Island Ferry, in the auditorium at Columbia. Every night two planes shuttled that day’s footage free of charge to every TV station across New York so they could run it on the evening news, which conferred infinitely more credibility than any paid commercial. Every day, interspersed among ads of Bobby on the trail, were shorter ones with this soft sell: “Think about it for a minute. Which of the candidates running for United States senator has the better chance of becoming a great United States senator? A great United States senator. On November third, vote for Robert Kennedy.” Did that barrage, unleashed during the campaign’s final weeks, work? Bobby, who had been skeptical, became a believer. “The TV spots,” he said, “showed that I was something more than a Beatle.” Smith agreed: “There’s no question his image softened….It was a major remaking, not only of an image, really, but of a person.”

  Even as he freely spent his inheritance, Bobby held onto one rich man’s idiosyncrasy that he drilled into his aides: no Cadillacs or other limousines for his campaign caravan, no matter how generous the local car dealership was. He might ride around in a family plane and bounce between mansions, but he also was sensitive about appearing highfalutin, which is one reason why he wore frayed chinos and drove beat-up jalopies. “This was just a Kennedy thing,” explained Smith. “I remember on one occasion Bob coming to the top of the stairs of the plane, looking out, seeing that line of half a dozen shiny black cars, and just absolutely recoiling and backing off, and saying, ‘No, no, no, no.’ ”

  There is no denying that Bobby’s Senate campaign helped set a new paradigm for image building, but in the end his most effective tactic was the simplest one: tying his opponent to the Republican presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, whose popularity was sinking even faster in New York than in the nation as a whole. Keating tried to counter that by enlisting assistance from GOP stalwarts like Richard Nixon and Thomas Dewey and tapping the personal treasury of billionaire governor Nelson Rockefeller, whose bandwagon had helped carry Keating to victory in his first Senate campaign in 1958. But this wasn’t 1958. Going up against Bobby, the affable Keating seemed too hoary and slow, too Republican no matter his disclaimers, and too little interested in a post he would gladly have traded for the one he really relished: commissioner of baseball. Just before the election, the respected New York Daily News straw poll predicted that Kennedy would carry 57.4 percent of the vote, a forecast so rosy that it worried Bobby the cautious campaign manager at the same time that it delighted Bobby the candidate. Lubell, the World-Telegram poll taker, intensified that unease when he said that while Kennedy “should win,” Keating had “an underdog chance.”

  —

  THE KENNEDY FAMILY jumped into Bobby’s race with even more fervor than it had Jack’s and Ted’s, because Bobby was less of a natural campaigner and needed their help more. It also offered them the same catharsis it did Bobby. Winning another campaign could help convince everyone that the dynasty Joe had shaped could be brought back to life in the wake of Jack’s loss. And just trying helped them forget their torment.

  Rose, now seventy-four and the biggest draw of any Kennedy, set the pace. “I realized Bobby could stand a little coaching and further that if he and I were on the platform together I could make him feel somewhat more at ease. I had a special utility also, as his mother, in meeting the charge that he was a ‘political carpetbagger,’ ” she explained. “We had a little routine worked out….He brought up the charge that he was an outlander, then turned to me and said, ‘Tell them, Mother.’ Which I would do, chapter and verse, about moving from Brookline to Riverdale and to Bronxville when Bobby was only two years old…and then even afterward we always had a residence in New York City, and that the city had always remained the headquarters for my husband’s business interests, and Bobby and all the others had gone for some years to schools in New York, and so forth—and what more identification with the state could anyone want? All of which seemed to soothe people’s fears.” So devoted was she to this favorite son that on her fiftieth wedding anniversary, she left Joe’s side to campaign for Bobby in the faraway Hudson River Valley.

  Joe, too, supported Bobby wholeheartedly, as he’d made clear from the earliest days of the campaign in spite of his difficulty speaking intelligibly. “When we were in New York, Bobby would always arrive at the apartment very early in the morning to have breakfast with his father,” said Joe’s nurse, Rita Dallas. “Mr. Kennedy’s voice would rise in excitement and then fall into a low, confidential whisper, while Bobby listened carefully…I can see [Bobby] sitting with his hand in a pan of warm salt water trying to relieve the swelling that was caused from hours of shaking hands….His voice would lift and explode. ‘I’ll make changes, Dad,’ he’d say. ‘You know I’ll make changes. Millions of people need help. My God, they need help.’ Mr. Kennedy would nod his head solemnly, then reach out his hand to his son.”

  The Kennedy girls, Jean and Pat especially, offered their help along with their money. Steve Smith, Jean’s husband, spent his days on his cream-colored telephone in his oversized office in the Pan Am Building, raising cash and setting up a campaign organization. He made himself indispensable, although he wasn’t the alter ego Bobby had been for Jack. Ethel, who was five months pregnant, campaigned alongside her hus
band and assembled the family when asked to in Glen Cove, their pretend home. The kids jumped in, all eight of them, for special events like the convention. “We were campaigning in New York with all my siblings and we were on a stage someplace and he said, ‘Now I’m just going to introduce my children,’ ” recalls Kerry, who was barely five. “And he went down the line, and he was pretending he couldn’t remember everybody’s names. We were laughing and reminding him, and then we were switching places and making him reintroduce the same ones again and again. I don’t know how you put that into a book and make it funny but it was, to me it was….You were going to be happy, enjoying yourself, because that’s the way he was….It was just really fun to be with him.”

  The one relative missing from those events was the former First Lady, although she was one of those who had encouraged him to stay in public life. “There was an abundance of suggestions on ways in which Jacqueline Kennedy could be used in the campaign,” said Gerald Gardner, an RFK speechwriter who wrote a book about the campaign. “They included everything from television commercials to joining the candidate at Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. [Bobby] said no to all of them.” It was partly that he didn’t want to sully her, and partly that she was preoccupied with John, Caroline, and reclaiming her life. He also didn’t want to look as if he was playing politics with his brother’s memory and widow.