by Gail Sheehy
“Sorry to barge in—but I didn’t see you at the launch party,” he said as I led him into what passed for a living room and we sat down on the sofa. “I won’t keep you up.”
“I really wanted to go, but no babysitter,” I said. “You must be so proud, Clay. To have your own magazine.”
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
He looked around at the homely evidence of domesticity, the scatter of toys, the odd socks, a curdle of spilled milk on the coffee table.
“You’ve probably never met a man like me.”
“And you may not have met a girl like me.”
He seemed intrigued.
“I know one thing—you can be a kick-ass writer.”
“Shhhh,” I said. “My little girl is sleeping.”
Abruptly, he changed the subject. “Do you understand politics?”
“My father’s a country club Republican, an Anglophiliac, if you know what I mean. My Irish mother is a natural-born rebel. So I guess I understand politics—it’s about fighting at the dinner table.”
“Then you’ll understand Bobby,” Clay said, moving closer. The sagging sofa threw him off-kilter; he moved back.
“Bobby who?”
“Kennedy.”
“Bobby Kennedy!”
“I want you to follow his campaign.”
A clutch of fear tightened inside. “Me? I’m not a political analyst.”
Clay suddenly became passionate. I remember his advice as something like this: “Gail, the way to make your name as a journalist is not to do lots of little stories. No matter how good they are, they won’t start a new conversation. Tackle a big story, something everybody’s talking about, but they don’t know the why.”
“BOBBY,” AS EVERYONE CALLED HIM, had announced his candidacy a month before, sounding very much like his idealistic older brother. He was running, he said, “to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old.” Much of the public was suspicious. Here was a dyed-in-the-brine Cape Cod, Massachusetts, man who dropped into New York State on a carpetbag and used his slain brother’s gilded connections to help win a Senate seat.
By 1968, America was murdering its dream of itself. TV cameras were showing our dark side. We had witnessed three summers of inner-city racial convulsions; brave black students being prodded like cattle; federal troops patrolling American cities; and U.S. Marines torching thatched huts in South Vietnam with women and children inside.
In Indianapolis two weeks before, on April 4, a largely black crowd had an hour to hear Senator Kennedy speak. The city’s police chief had warned him not to appear. As Kennedy’s car entered a black neighborhood, his police escort veered off. Kennedy turned to his aide and asked, “Do they know about Martin Luther King?”
They didn’t. On the platform, Kennedy faced the crowd and told them the horrific news: King had been shot dead that night in Memphis, Tennessee. The crowd gasped and wailed in horror. Kennedy spoke reverently of King’s dedication to “love and to justice between fellow human beings” and assured the crowd that “he died in the cause of that effort.” As an undercurrent of anger began to build, Kennedy reached beyond and into the hearts of the crowd to make a human connection.
“For those of you who are black and are tempted to . . . be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling,” he said. “I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”
That reminder of his personal tragedy cut through the color barrier. While sixty American cities erupted in rage and grief, in the city of Indianapolis where the words of Robert Kennedy had been heard, there was no fire.
A man of enormous empathy was not what I expected from Robert Kennedy. I had read about an edge of cruelty. Even his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, an unapologetic fascist, had described his youngest son as “a hater.” But during the two weeks when the world had teetered on the edge of nuclear war, back in 1962, as President Kennedy and his advisers debated what to do about photographs showing missiles on Cuban soil, it was Robert Kennedy who offered the voice of reason. In a man legendary for his aggressive behavior, it was a complete reversal of character. Here was the arch anti-Communist who represented Senator Joe McCarthy in his witch hunt now going up against the advice from almost all the members of the president’s executive committee convened to respond to the Cuban missile crisis.
“I could not accept the idea that the United States would rain bombs on Cuba, killing thousands and thousands of civilians in a surprise attack,” Bobby argued, as later revealed in Robert Caro’s exhaustive account in Passage to Power. Kennedy believed the Russians had to be allowed to pull back without losing face. The rest of the advisers were surprised at the passion with which he put forward his moral argument. When Kennedy saw his brother, the president, alone, by the White House pool, he persuaded him to give Khrushchev every chance to reconsider, and above all, to avoid war by miscalculation. Bobby may have saved the world from destruction.
As a young liberal woman fiercely against America’s misadventure in Vietnam from the start, I was primed to like Bobby Kennedy. I had baptized my baby in antiwar marches in Washington. And he had captured me with a speech he made at Kansas State University earlier that spring. After students at Columbia had occupied university offices and race riots had convulsed more than one hundred American cities, Kennedy’s voice cracked when he praised colleges and universities that “breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.” It was a wildly incendiary thing for any politician to say, especially in conservative Kansas, but by then, even young moms like me were marching on the Pentagon while young men burned draft cards.
When Kennedy tried to depart the Kansas campus, he was overrun by adoring students who pulled at his hair and ripped his shirtsleeves. I heard my friend the photographer Stanley Tretick, of Look magazine, cry out, “This is Kansas, fucking Kansas! He’s going all the fucking way!”
“CLAY, I CAN’T WRITE ABOUT Bobby fucking Kennedy!” Hanging out on the road with the big boys had already infected my language.
“Look, every good reporter has to jump in and scramble until they get it,” Clay said, impatient now. “Read the clips. Read history! The same two or three political stories go on repeating themselves as if they never happened before.”
“Let me think about it.”
“No! The Oregon campaign starts this week. Then follow him in California, that’s the make-or-break primary.”
Frantically, I thought, What about Maura? My sister could stay with her for a few days.
Clay didn’t wait for my answer. “You can do it!”
“LET’S GO!” The moment the advance man opened the door of the private air terminal at Washington Dulles, a mob of reporters rushed out like penned-up cattle, racing for the best seats on Senator Kennedy’s chartered plane. All men, with a couple of exceptions. Startled, I lagged behind.
“Where are you from?” The Boston Irish accent was unmistakable. It was Robert Kennedy himself who fell into step beside me.
“Gail Sheehy, New York magazine.”
“Happy to have you with us, Gail.” He grinned, pushing the flop of wavy hair off his forehead. With his next words, he swept me off my feet. “How’m I doin’ in New York?”
I couldn’t wait to tell Clay: the senator from New York with the royal political family name was asking me, a mere pup from a month-old magazine he’s hardly heard of, how he was doing with the voters of New York. Clay laughed and gave me my first lesson in political journalism: “He’s trying to flatter you into feeling like you’re part of his election team. Don’t hold it against him, but don’t buy into it.”
Anyone walking down the aisle of an RFK flight would see rows and rows of seats occupied by the “Kennedy Mafia,” the men an
d women linked to the family through friendship, marriage, work, and political alliances and ready to put their lives on hold to help any Kennedy win an election. I was so low on the pecking order behind national journalistic stars like Sam Donaldson, my chances of getting an interview with the senator were slim to none. The only other woman on that plane, a wire service reporter, tipped me off to ask for the help of Fred Dutton, Bobby’s behind-the-scenes campaign manager, a rare advocate of women in politics.
Most of Kennedy’s campaign flights were jolly affairs marked by singing, drinking, and practical jokes played by his resident imp, Dick Tuck. On one long night flight, Ethel Kennedy led off a songfest with “Onward Christian Soldiers.” Campaign folksingers John Stewart and Buffy Ford crooned all the patriotic songs they knew while a stewardess made up the senator’s bed. At 3:30 A.M., Robert Kennedy dragged down the aisle from a TV taping session, shirt unbuttoned, tie hanging. From his mouth dangled a burned-out cigar. A pretty stewardess brought him a scotch and water. He sat on the armrest in the aisle and asked for “We Shall Overcome” and then “Hymn to Young People.” He kept drawing on the dead cigar, sometimes singing, sometimes leaning his head on his hand. His sad blue eyes seemed to rove planets away. Later he asked the folksinger Buffy to sit on the floor, beneath him. Now and then his hand absently picked up a strand of Buffy’s long taffy-colored hair. It was a characteristic moment—the melancholy flitting through joy, the distance and the need for closeness, the complete Irishness.
On our third day in Oregon, Dutton let me know the senator was taking a very small plane to hop up and down the Cascade Mountain Range—probably twenty stops or more. “A nail-biter. You won’t have any competition for a seat.”
We flew over the Cascade Range of pine-studded mountains. When we landed in Roseburg, Ethel froze. Her husband had to walk through a mob of angry, rifle-toting Oregonians to debate the gun-sale issue. Rain started to fall. John Birchers were out in force, waving professionally printed signs: PROTECT YOUR RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS.
A woman holding a McCarthy sign stopped him; “I hear your dog bites.”
“He only bites children.” Kennedy’s quick wit usually melted hecklers, but in this place it was not working. The woman grew surlier. “They say you’re ruthless.” He flashed his big, blunt, uncontainable eighty-eight-keyboard smile. “Now, can anybody with a smile like this be ruthless?”
A young man tapped him on the shoulder. “I’ve been waitin’ two hours to tell you, I’ll shoot somebody before I see a Nazi like you in the White House.” Kennedy pretended not to hear. Now the senator climbed halfway up the steps of the Douglas County Courthouse. He turned, and in full unprotected view, he looked down the rifle barrels of this mostly hostile crowd and tried to engage them in a friendly debate. This was courage.
“I hear the local radio station said, ‘Vote against Robert Kennedy because he’s going to take your guns away,’” he said. “I’d like one of you to come here and explain that issue to me.”
A young man approached him. Kennedy looped his arm over the man’s shoulder. “I know some of you are volunteers with the sheriff’s posse. Did you know that 90 percent of the policemen who’ve been shot and killed in the United States in the last two years have been shot by people who shouldn’t have guns—people with criminal records or judged insane?” Murmurs of surprise. “All the law requires is that when someone purchases a gun by mail order, he must be competent to handle it.” Kennedy wound up with his favorite George Bernard Shaw quote, which seemed to tame the crowd. “‘Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and ask why not?’”
Ethel Kennedy, unnerved by crowds like this, had been dropped off for the rest of the day. Only a few Oregon reporters climbed back into the little DC-3. The senator sat in front, the seat beside him empty. After takeoff, he leaned over the back of his seat. “Would you like to sit up here, New York?”
I stepped over Freckles, the beloved cocker spaniel who always dozed at Kennedy’s feet. The senator was shivering from the last rain-soaked stop. He asked Dutton to hand him Jack’s overcoat. For me, this was a poignant moment. Five years after his brother’s assassination, Bobby was still mourning Jack’s death, still wearing his brother’s clothes.
The only question I remember asking Bobby is how he reconciled his attacks on Johnson’s Vietnam policy with his earlier support of his brother’s war. “I was involved in the decisions about Vietnam in ’63 and ’64 and ’65,” he replied bluntly. “I accept the responsibility for my part of the blame. But that’s no excuse for perpetuating the error.”
Wind blew a hard rain that smeared the plane’s windows as we approached Seattle. The senator was in a hurry to make a national press conference. Unbeknownst to us passengers, another plane was coming straight at us. Abruptly, our aircraft plummeted a thousand feet. Men screamed. My eyes shuddered closed. While we were still dropping, I heard Bobby Kennedy quip, “I knew Gene McCarthy was desperate, I didn’t think he was this desperate.”
THAT NIGHT DICK TUCK ARRANGED for the Kennedys to be back on their big campaign plane, in the air and out of touch, when the results of the Oregon primary came in. At 10 P.M., Dutton came back to Ethel Kennedy, who was swapping jokes with newsmen over a scotch and water. Dutton moved his lips silently. “We’re beat.”
The senator came back from his private cabin with a smile, his hands wrapped in towels to sop up the bleeding from all the physical contact.
“Hey, how can you look so happy?” Ethel asked.
“Because I had such a good day.” It was his fatalism again.
After eighty days of nonstop campaigning, Kennedy slept late on the day of the California primary and took his family to the beach. Polls closed at 8 P.M. CBS projected Bobby the winner, but other networks held back.
I had to catch the red-eye back to New York. My plane was in the air when his victory became certain. At that moment, Kennedy was hurrying through the hotel kitchen on the way to his press conference.
It was after 6 A.M. when I staggered out of the taxi from JFK and upstairs to my apartment. I had a sour premonition that something wasn’t right. Maura woke when I snapped the three locks. I picked her up so she wouldn’t wake my sister and carried her into the living room. The phone rang.
“Were you in the kitchen?” It was Clay, in a voice I had not heard before.
“The kitchen?”
“At the Ambassador?”
“Oh, God, no, what happened?”
“He was killed, by a Palestinian. He’s not officially dead yet, but it’s all over.”
I went numb.
“How soon can you get me the story?”
I turned on the TV. Watching recaps: Kennedy, responding to a reporter, turned his face, looking for Ethel. I didn’t see the assassin raise his arm over the senator’s aides. I didn’t hear the shots fired from a snub-nosed revolver inches from Kennedy’s head. I didn’t see Kennedy stagger and fall. I didn’t hear the chaos, the yelling, “My God! He’s been shot! Get a doctor! Get the gun! Kill the bastard! No, don’t kill this one! Oh my God, they’ve shot Kennedy!”
Maura walked into the living room just as another recap showed Ethel Kennedy kneeling on the floor and grabbing her husband’s hand. Blood was pooling behind his ear. Maura’s voice of innocence asked the question that would cause all Americans to search our souls: “Why is the lady in white bending over the man on the floor? Did something bad happen?”
“A bad accident,” I lied. “Would you like French toast this morning, sweetpea?”
I fed Maura, changed my clothes, woke my sister, and sat in front of my typewriter, lighting one cigarette after another. Clay’s words played over and over in my head. “You’re a journalist . . . a witness to history.” I meditated for a while. A shield of detachment gradually formed around my feelings. I began typing.
It was his fatalism that carried Bobby Kennedy through, I wrote. For all his fearlessness in pleading for rational gun control, he had to kn
ow the chances were good that sooner or later, he, too, would walk into an assassin’s bullets. Among his last words were “Is everybody all right?”
Even now, in the twenty-first century, America is more than ever saturated with guns and apparently guiltless about routine massacres of innocent civilians and little children.
AROUND NOON, THE INTERCOM RANG. “He’s comin’ gup, the fancy man.”
Maura got help from my sister to open the door for Clay. I heard him enter my little study and felt his breath over my shoulder. He was reading my copy.
“Not bad,” he said. I ripped the next page out of my typewriter and handed it to him over my shoulder.
“How long till you finish?”
“Two or three more cigarettes.”
He massaged my shoulders. I felt the tension release. Before either one of us knew what was happening, Clay and I were awkwardly kissing. We had to have something that still mattered.
I asked him to stop. “Maura.” He immediately withdrew. Nothing was said. We both retreated into our familiar safe professional roles, but a trespass of the heart and mind had been committed.
CHAPTER 7
Failing Up
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG for me to learn one of the most basic requirements to become a successful book writer. One has to have the stomach to take the roller-coaster lurches from failure to success and back to failure. I was fortunate. I failed early.
My roman à clef about marriage that Clay published, “Lovesounds of a Wife,” created a good deal of buzz. To hear the story of an adulterous affair from inside the head of the betrayed wife was a new and unsettling experience. Wives and husbands fought about it. She loved it, he hated it. That’s exactly what happened in the household of Gay and Nan Talese.