by Larry Tye
* * *
*1 The Times was being disingenuous. Three weeks before, it had urged a run by Adlai Stevenson, the former governor of Illinois, whose roots in New York ran only as deep as the time he spent there as United Nations ambassador, which was less time than Bobby had lived there. Bobby made clear how he felt about the Times when, in a Kennedy Library interview with the paper’s longtime reporter Anthony Lewis, he said editors there were an “irritant” to him and JFK. His brother, he added, would often call from the White House to ask, “Did you read what those pricks said today?” (“Stevenson vs. Keating,” New York Times, April 24, 1964, RFK OH, December 4, 1964, 459.)
*2 Rosemary, Rose and Joe’s third child, was alive but—like her deceased siblings Joe Jr., Jack, and Kathleen—no longer part of Kennedy family life.
*3 John Kennedy was also accused of being a carpetbagger when he first ran for office in Massachusetts, having spent much of his young life living elsewhere. Bobby boasted about having grown up in New York, gone to school there, and held his first job there, all of which was true. But he sometimes got carried away, adding “I was born here,” which would have been a surprise to his mother, who gave birth to him in the Bay State (Shannon, Heir Apparent, 29).
*4 In 1942, the U.S. government seized the General Aniline and Film Corporation, claiming the chemical maker was a Nazi asset. A Swiss company, Interhandel, insisted that it was the rightful owner and that General Aniline was not a German front. After decades of arguments, Bobby’s Justice Department reached a settlement in 1963 that provided for General Aniline’s sale, with U.S. taxpayers getting 70 percent of the proceeds and Interhandel the rest. While Keating’s belated doubts about the deal didn’t stick, if he had probed deeper he would have found questionable ties between Interhandel and both Bobby’s father and JFK’s brother-in-law, Prince Stanisław Albrecht “Stash” Radziwiłł.
*5 There were more dirty tricks on election day, when Kennedy operatives helped steer voting machine repairmen in New York City to areas where they thought they’d do well and to delay them in other areas, said Philip Ryan, a former assistant U.S. attorney and Kennedy aide. When a voting machine in one area was locked and nobody could find the key, “we sent somebody out” to break the machine open, which Ryan acknowledged “was strictly against the law…Now that we haven’t been caught, I guess it was I that did that” (Philip Ryan OH, December 13, 1973, 82–84).
*6 His margin of victory was smaller—about half a million—when one adds votes cast for the conservative and two socialists.
*7 The first were the Fosters, Theodore from Rhode Island and Dwight representing Massachusetts, in the early 1800s.
*8 Most of his books were compilations of old speeches or diary notes, and most were written with the help of a friendly ghost. In the case of Pursuit of Justice, Bobby’s collaborator was a young professor whose wife had just had a baby and who therefore wasn’t anxious to take on the project. But “with somebody like [Bobby], you can’t simply say no,” explains Theodore Lowi. He never had regrets, however, since he got more credit than he’d expected (his name went on the cover as editor), more money than he’d counted on (“he was so decent”), and more cooperation than he’d dreamed possible (Bobby responded to most of his suggestions with “That’s a damn good idea”) (Author interview with Lowi).
Chapter 9
SENATOR KENNEDY
NOBODY HAD TO tell Senator Robert F. Kennedy that the world was filled with starving children. He’d met them—toddlers with the telltale swollen bellies, oozing sores, and persistent listlessness—in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. But surely not in America’s richly fertile Mississippi Delta, whose sugar, rice, and soybeans fed the world. Not after the billions we’d spent waging a War on Poverty, a war that the Kennedys helped kick-start. Not our babies.
What he heard about hunger at a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill in March 1967 so alarmed him that a month later he flew to a field hearing in Jackson, where his airport greeting party included a gauntlet of KKK protesters shrieking “nigger-lover” and carrying a sign reading LET LBJ SEND RFK TO HANOI, NOT TO MISSISSIPPI. The next day he and fellow senators listened intently as witnesses gave human faces to the figures recited in Washington. Black sharecroppers were surrendering their jobs to crop-picking machines, then being chased out of the state by white oligarchs who were petrified they’d lose power now that Negroes had the vote. Two-parent families were ineligible for welfare and, with zero income, could not scrape together the monthly fee of two dollars per person for food stamps. Bobby knew better than to take seriously Mississippi governor Paul Johnson’s sneer that “all the Negroes I’ve seen around here are so fat they shine!” But surely Marian Wright, the young civil rights activist, was being equally hyperbolic in testifying that scores of her fellow Mississippians were “starving. They’re starving, and those who can get the bus fare to go north are trying to go north….I wish that [senators] would have a chance to go and just look at the empty cupboards in the Delta and the number of people who are going around begging just to feed their children.”
“I want to see it,” Bobby said. The following day, while other senators on the Poverty Subcommittee flew home to the perquisites of Washington, he and Chairman Joe Clark ventured into the region that once was the dominion of King Cotton. Their first stop was a black outpost in the bowels of the Delta, at a shotgun shack where daylight shone through cracks in the floor and ceiling and the only item in the refrigerator was a jar of peanut butter. Fifteen people called it home. The stench was a nauseating brew of mildew and outhouse. Children huddled out front, clad in rags that barely covered the open sores on their arms and legs. “What did you have for breakfast?” Bobby asked a young boy. “Molasses.” he said. “For supper?” “Molasses.” “For lunch?” “Don’t have no lunch.” A large, ancient-looking woman in baggy clothes thanked the senators for their offer of help but explained that she was too old to wait. How old was she? Bobby asked. “I’m thirty-three.”
“I’ve been to third-world countries and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bobby whispered to his aide Peter Edelman as they trekked across a field of uncut grass to another weather-beaten hovel. Clotheslines crisscrossed one room. Bricks propped up a bed where an infant sucked on a bottle. An open toilet out back had no plumbing. There were no tables in the house, nor any knives, forks, or spoons. Annie White, mother of seven, was in the kitchen doing laundry over a washboard and zinc tub that could have been her grandparents’. Her twenty-month-old son sat nearby in a tattered diaper, his tummy bloated from too little food rather than too much. The boy picked at bits of cornbread and rubbed spilled kernels of rice in circles, around and around in a hypnotic motion. Bobby knelt beside him on the dirt floor, silently stroking his cheek. It was the way this tactile senator communicated—a pat and tickle delivered at the child’s eye level, where adults seldom ventured. A minute went by, then four more. The boy remained transfixed by his scraps, oblivious to the flies swarming overhead or the senator with tears streaming down his cheeks, trying desperately to make a human connection.
Quietly shattered, Bobby stepped through the back door and told those within hearing, “We spend $75 billion a year on armaments and $3 billion a year on dogs. We have to do more for these children who didn’t ask to be born into this.” Cliff Langford, editor of the local weekly newspaper and a longtime Kennedy hater, shouted back that the two senators were being brainwashed and “I don’t know of anybody starving down here.” Bobby: “Step over here and I’ll introduce you to some.”
The reassembled motorcade—a pair of senators, a dozen reporters from state and national newspapers and the three TV networks, along with a squad of U.S. marshals, state highway patrolmen, and local police—headed toward Clarksdale, where a crowd of a thousand young blacks waited. But Bobby wasn’t quite ready. He insisted on stopping at one more roadside shack, where he was greeted by an out-of-work farmer named Andrew Jackson, who invited him in, unsure who he was. Jackson said h
e was supporting his family of six on twelve dollars a month. His house had no electricity, running water, or toilet. On the wall were two photographs—of the Glorybound Singers and John F. Kennedy. “Is you really Mr. Bobby Kennedy?” Jackson inquired. “Yes,” said Bobby, as he grinned and clasped his host’s hand, “and are you really Mr. Andrew Jackson?”
That trip to the Delta is often cited as Bobby’s epiphany regarding the depth of poverty in America, and proof of his ability to focus a laserlike spotlight on a hidden issue like starvation. It was both. Only four of nine subcommittee members deigned to travel halfway across the continent for hearings on issues afflicting the hungry and poor, most of whom didn’t vote or matter in Jackson or Washington. Fewer still—two senators, to be exact—stuck around to see the horrors they had heard about. Once there, not even the big-hearted Chairman Clark would plant his tailor-suited self on a grimy kitchen floor to talk to an underfed toddler. Bobby wasn’t putting on a show; he didn’t know anyone was watching. He sought out human misery, then sought to ease it. Even the battle-hardened Marian Wright saw something that changed her opinion of the senator from New York. “I’d formed an image of him as a tough, arrogant, politically driven man from the Joseph McCarthy era,” she said. “These feelings dissolved as I saw Kennedy profoundly moved by Mississippi’s hungry children.” It had the same effect on Curtis Wilkie, who covered the trip for the Clarksdale Press Register: “You’ve seen these guys phony up emotions, and this was genuine. It had an emotional impact on me like it would anybody who was watching.”
But declaring himself a ministering angel was hardly enough. This New England patrician realized that Mississippians and others would judge him by what he could deliver. So the very next day, he and Edelman met with Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman. “Orville,” Bobby said, “you have got to get some food down there.” Freeman balked: “Bob, there isn’t anybody in America who has no income.” Kennedy: “I’ll tell you what. I’ll send Peter here back down there with some of your people….Will you agree that you’ll change the regulations if your people are convinced there really are people in Mississippi who have no income?” Freeman said he would and, when the evidence came in, he loosened the food stamp rules. Kennedy also got the nonprofit Field Foundation to dispatch doctors to examine hundreds of children like those he’d seen; they documented kwashiorkor,*1 rickets, and other signs of actual starvation in what the doctors deemed a “national disaster.” Mississippi’s segregationist senator John Stennis was so embarrassed that he proposed $10 million in emergency funding for food and medical services. Newsmen at CBS were so startled that they produced a first-of-its-kind documentary titled Hunger in America. “He didn’t go away,” said Marian Wright, the first black woman admitted to the Mississippi bar. “Robert Kennedy’s pushing, passion, and visibility set in motion a chain of events that culminated years later in the virtual elimination of hunger in America during the Nixon years.” It also ended in Wright’s marrying Edelman, with Bobby’s encouragement.
Kennedy scholars often write off those Senate years as a prosaic interlude between Bobby’s action-packed attorney generalship and his exhilarating run for the White House. He wasn’t nearly as eloquent a senator as his brother Jack, they say, or as effective an insider as Ted. True enough, but that was not nearly the complete story. Jack got to the Senate because he and Bobby ran a brilliant campaign paid for by Joe, while Teddy made it there on Jack’s and Bobby’s coattails. The Kennedy name and money helped Bobby, too, but unlike his brothers, he had done his homework. He learned the Senate’s arcane ways a decade before when he played decisive roles in the Army-McCarthy hearings and the rackets probe. He helped steer America’s domestic and foreign policies for nearly three years as attorney general and de facto deputy president. He discovered how to connect with voters at the same time as he ran his own campaign. Bobby was readier for his new role not just than Jack and Ted, but than all but a handful of senators in the institution’s 178 years.
That groundwork paid quick dividends. Bobby was from the beginning a national senator even if parliamentarians didn’t recognize such a thing. His older brother had steered clear of controversy to seed his run for president, and it took Teddy half a century to earn his crown as Lion of the Senate. Not Bobby. He didn’t have the patience to serve a long apprenticeship, and if all he cared about was restoring a Kennedy to the White House, he wouldn’t have been moving to the left on issues such as ending poverty when much of the country was reacting to the culture wars by tilting rightward. He delivered his first speech in the Senate just three weeks after his swearing-in, compared to Jack’s five months and Ted’s sixteen. He attended hearings on issues that mattered, like hunger, with his very presence ensuring that reporters would come. When petitioning the White House could help, he held his nose and did it. Few in Congress made better use of their full palette of tactics and strategies—from model programs to the bully pulpit—than the very junior senator from New York. Even so, liberals said he was providing an illusion of dissent, while conservatives worried he was all heart and too subversive. Neither could see at first that he was crafting a new creed—grasping at the bits of FDR and his father’s New Deal collectivism that still worked, and borrowing from heroes such as Herbert Hoover and Ralph Waldo Emerson who saw the centrality of self-reliance. He also was hardheaded enough to disdain rebellion without results, which set him apart from most 1960s activists.
This was no Saint Bobby. He was as headstrong as ever. He trumpeted his self-sufficiency in an institution that turned on collegiality. But the odyssey he had been through—the painful deaths of three siblings, the loss of his father’s guiding hand, crises over Cuban missiles and campus race riots—brought to the surface his senses of irony and empathy. It happened not in a single transformative moment but in subtle, incremental stages. Most people harden as they add years and accumulate power, but Bobby’s sanctimony and starchiness increasingly yielded to his introspection and idealism. He had firmly and finally become one of James Baldwin’s handful of righteous warriors. “I hope I’ve learned something in the last ten years and understand some things better,” he told a journalist seven months after he’d taken office, with characteristic understatement. He realized that elective office wasn’t merely a means to claim the thrones Joe Kennedy had dreamed of for his sons. His mission, from early in his career as a senator, was to be the tribune of America’s outcasts. Jack may have won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about senators with the courage to go against the grain, but Bobby came closer to living that profile.
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IF THE MISSISSIPPI Delta served as a metaphor for the troubles that moved Bobby as a senator, the impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York City offered a microscope to examine and test his preferred solutions. Like most of his good ideas, this one grew not out of a reasoned blueprint but a seat-of-the-pants sensibility that he had to try something, anything, to keep America’s ghettos from imploding. Young blacks felt so trapped that when an off-duty white police lieutenant in New York shot a fifteen-year-old Negro under disputed circumstances in the summer of 1964, the incident ignited race riots not just in Harlem but in Philadelphia, Chicago, Rochester, and Jersey City. Black parents were frightened, and so was nearly all of white America. Lyndon Johnson responded with a set of New Deal–like education, health care, and welfare programs that he called the Great Society—lifting millions of Americans out of poverty, but not treating underlying social and racial ills. By the summer of 1965 the violence had spread to the West Coast, with the Watts district of Los Angeles going up in flames, leaving thirty-four dead. America seemed on the cusp of another civil war, this one pitting slum dwellers in the North and South against everyone else. At the end of his first year as a senator, Bobby instructed Peter Edelman and Adam Walinsky, his closest and smartest aides, to formulate some new approaches.
Their suggestions formed the basis of three provocative speeches that he delivered to three very different gatherings in New York on co
nsecutive days in January 1966. To an assembly of Jewish fundraisers, many of whom had abandoned their urban neighborhoods as blacks moved in, he insisted that integration—economic as well as racial, of neighborhoods, schools, and jobs—was essential “to assure that every American comes to know the full meaning of the truths that we held to be self-evident for the rest of America almost 190 years ago.” The next day he told a black audience to get realistic. Ghettos weren’t going away, but they could be made safe and livable if community leaders did less finger-pointing and more soul-searching. “None of this can happen,” he lectured, “unless you will it to happen, and unless you can and do make the hard and sometimes unpopular decisions which come with responsibility.” Speech three offered the most novel ideas to his most skeptical listeners, the mainly white members of the United Auto Workers union. Rather than battling with ghetto Negroes, Bobby explained, blue-collar Caucasians had to see their shared need for better education, better jobs, and a better life. “We are only at the beginning of a beginning,” he said in appealing for the black-white alliance that had become his obsession. If anyone other than a Kennedy had been saying those things, his audiences would have walked out before they finished their chicken à la king. He succeeded in jump-starting the discussion, with them and with the wider public, but it was still just words. Talking about something made Bobby eager to do it. So he handed Walinsky and Edelman two new assignments: tell him what laws and programs were needed, and find a place to put those visions to a real-world test.