The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

by David Halberstam

  It was a struggle which had begun as early as 1965, when Kennedy was shaping his new direction and his own staff—a surprisingly radical staff. He was gathering the kind of men he would now listen to, and thus to a large degree he was charting his own increasingly independent course in politics. It was a struggle which would reach its height, over whether or not Kennedy should run, in the late fall of 1967, and winter of 1967 and 1968. It was a classic struggle between the new politics people and the old pros. On the one side there were the young radicals (of one very young speech writer an older Kennedy aide said: “That kid gets his draft notice and we’re the only campaign in town with a speech writer in Canada”), also people like Mankiewicz who had come to Robert Kennedy rather than Jack Kennedy, and a few of the older eggheads, like Schlesinger and Galbraith. On the other side were the old pros, the 1960 veterans, including Larry O’Brien who held, at the time, that most radical of seats, Postmaster General under Lyndon Johnson.

  As early as the fall of 1966, two of Kennedy’s legislative aides had sensed the new currents, that the war would drag on and that the only new thing in the political equation of the war would be the growing national malaise. They saw Lyndon Johnson increasingly a prisoner of the war, and they believed that by 1968 the country would be ripe for a new, modern and moral candidacy. There would be new issues and a rejection of old foreign-policy clichés. More, they felt it should be a Kennedy candidacy. They felt a delicate and fragile balance would work for him in 1968. It would bloom once, and if he did not rise to it, it might never bloom again: for moral leadership once offered could not be easily postponed, it might pass to someone else. Walinsky and the others sensed that a Republican, Lindsay most likely, might easily move in and become the hero, if not winning, at least becoming the odds-on favorite for 1972. They did not figure on Eugene McCarthy.

  Kennedy’s staff was an interesting assortment. They were by and large Robert Kennedy men first, more than Jack Kennedy’s, and attracted by what they saw as Robert Kennedy’s instinct for radicalism. They would see the bumper stickers saying “Bobby Ain’t Jack,” and they would say to reporters: yes, that’s true, but not in the way these people think. Jeff Greenfield kept copies of college editorials he had written attacking Jack Kennedy’s Vietnam policies. There was a feeling among them that the early Kennedy years and the early Kennedy people were too cold-war oriented. Walinsky had joined Robert Kennedy after the State Department had tried to block pacifist A. J. Muste’s peace march from Quebec to Guantanamo and Walinsky, a very young justice department attorney, had prepared a memo denying State’s authority. Kennedy had backed Walinsky saying, “If an eighty year old man wants to walk eight hundred miles I don’t think it endangers the country. ...” Mankiewicz, a peace corps official, had been drawn to Kennedy during a briefing in late 1965. The Senator was about to embark on a major trip through Latin America and he met with high State Department officials. Kennedy had asked what he should say about the Dominican Republic intervention, and jack Hood Vaughn, then Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American affairs, had said, “You could tell them what your brother said at the time of Cuba.” The ice began to form and Kennedy said, “I hope you’re not going around quoting President Kennedy to defend the Dominican Republic.” It got worse from then on, Vaughn telling Kennedy not to worry because no one in Latin America cared about the Dominican events anyway. Kennedy asked what he should say in Brazil, and Vaughn suggested he say nothing, that’s what the Latins usually do. They discussed problems of American oil companies in Peru—the government had moved against these companies and this had triggered a cutback in aid. Finally Kennedy looked at Vaughn and said, “Well Mr. Vaughn, the way you state it, the Alliance for Progress has come down to this: you can suspend the constitution and dissolve your political parties and exile your opposition and you’ll continue to get all the aid you want, but if you play around with an oil company, it’s cut off.” There was no reply; it was very tense. At the meeting Mankiewicz, bitter about American policy in Latin America, had been the only official to speak out critically on American policies. The next day he breakfasted with Kennedy, and a few months later, faced with the prospect of leaving Washington, he went to work for Kennedy as a press secretary. These men pushed hard for a race, along with others such as Lowenstein who intended to have a candidate come hell or high water.

  But the traditionalists had argued against it, men like Ted Sorensen, O’Brien. Amateurs willing to take risks in 1960, they had become professionals, establishment figures, by 1967 (witness Sorensen representing General Motors against Ralph Nader). The 1960 John Kennedy campaign had never been run outside the political establishment: it had been run to prove to the Democratic political apparatus, much of it Catholic and thus terribly sensitive on the issue, that a handsome young Catholic could win. However, they were now, in 1967, passing on the same clichés of American politics. The same men who had scoffed in 1960 when someone said a Catholic could not win, not yet anyway, were now saying yes, but you can’t unseat a sitting president. They were wealthy and successful men now. They had important jobs which placed them in contact with powerful, wealthy men, and simultaneously removed them from the new forces now being generated in American politics. Sorensen seemed symbolic: heralded in the press as a great liberal who had taught Jack Kennedy his liberalism, and had masterminded the great victory, he had gained an insider’s reputation, during the White House years, of being the most pragmatic politician of all, far removed from his liberalism. Following the assassination he did not plunge himself into the social issues with which the administration had been so concerned, but rather became just one more wealthy lawyer. Had he spent those post-assassination years working in ghettos or with Negroes, he might have felt the moral intensity of the times and he might have been more in touch with the country. Later in 1967 and 1968 his various public statements on the campaign sounded, ideologically, like those of someone from the Hubert Humphrey camp who had wandered into the Kennedy camp by mistake. (After the assassination he would talk publicly as though he had the right to barter the Kennedy mantle to Humphrey in exchange for some concessions on Vietnam.) His was in all a curious performance; and he had vigorously opposed Kennedy’s making the race. Symbolically, of all the old Kennedy people who got together at a Kennedy meeting in December, 1967, the one most sympathetic to the race was Kenny O’Donnell. He was not yet for Kennedy’s making it, but very close to it (“I’m almost there now,” he said at the time). He was in Massachusetts and could feel directly the first pressure of the college kids going for McCarthy; feel the potency of the new force, and feel it slip away from the Kennedys.

  The traditionalists passed on the myth that the country was more hawkish than you thought, which was not true. The country was less hawkish than you thought. The move was from hawk to dove and fast, and the polls which they carried to the meeting and quoted were wrong for two reasons: first because people do not tell pollsters the truth about how they feel if somehow they think it might mark them as unpatriotic, so that there is a very considerable built-in error; and secondly, and perhaps more important, because the questions were badly posed, and certainly not posed the way they would be in a vigorous and intelligent political campaign. Do you favor the war, are you against it, do you want to win, do you want to lose, do you want to escalate, or de-escalate. (Do you want to take a free trip around the world, all expenses paid, with a week with Brigitte Bardot in Paris. Do you want to take the same free trip around the world, all expenses paid, with the same week in Paris and the same week with Brigitte if it is going to give you terminal cancer?)

  Another reason why the traditionalists counseled the conventional wisdom was that they had served in the presidency and seen the wide and extraordinary range of its powers. (Indeed they were not the only people who believed that you could not unseat a sitting president. The airlines thought so too. American Airlines which, like TWA, wanted domestic routes, would offer a 727 to the Kennedys at the start of the campaign for a rough r
ental of about $130,000 a month; after Johnson withdrew the price suddenly came down to about $30,000. The price for an Electra, roughly $70,000 a month while Johnson was still a candidate, dropped to $18,000. It was a quick study in presidential power.) These 1960 men had become traditional professional politicians, and to challenge the traditional laws was to challenge their own being. They had, after all, a candidate who might easily become president of the United States if he waited, and as such they felt they had something to lose. They had become conservative low-risk politicians. Some of them, like Pierre Salinger, a little lazy, a little arrogant, had said too many silly things about Vietnam. (After Kennedy finally went in he ran into Salinger and teased him about this. “Are you a hawk or a dove now, Pierre?” he asked. Salinger answered, quickly and seriously, “Oh-I’m-a-dove-now-I’m-a-dove-now.”) Also, and this was crucial, there were basically differing views of Vietnam and the nation. After Kennedy made his major speech on Vietnam, in early 1967, he turned to Edelman, one of the young radicals, and asked, “Am I a big enough dove for you now, Peter?” No, said Edelman. “Good,” said the Senator, “that makes me feel a little better.” But of that same speech Sorensen would tell Jimmy Breslin that it was a mistake “because Bob Kennedy is the only hope in this country for your children and my children. And we can’t afford to have him in controversies this early.”

  Kennedy’s own instincts were probably to run. His wife Ethel badly wanted him to. She sensed his moral commitment, and she sensed that he would be miserable and never forgive himself if he didn’t go. Kennedy sensed the changes. But if he had the advantages of the past, the name, the ability to assemble bright young men, the ability to make headlines, he also had the liabilities of the past. He was surrounded by advisers who had aged, and he was particularly vulnerable to them. They had been advisers, intellectual advisers, to Jack Kennedy, and that was part of his blind spot. That meant they were automatically superior, perhaps more intellectual than he was. He had not realized that in the restless chase of the last four years he had gone beyond them; he now knew more about the country and its mood than they did. He did not trust his instincts, and it was a crucial mistake.

  Gene McCarthy, not tied to the past, able to accept the issue on its moral value alone, went in. It seemed at the beginning a particularly frail candidacy. As late as February 3, the Gallup poll would show President Johnson’s national margin over McCarthy to be 71 percent to 18, with 11 undecided. McCarthy’s campaign seemed to lack the glamour, the drive, charisma, one expected in a national campaign. (Everyone expected a candidate to have charisma. Even Pat Paulsen, the Smothers Brothers’ presidential candidate, was once asked: “Mr. Paulsen, do you have charisma?” “No,” he answered, “I had it once in the Marine Corps but I haven’t had any since.”) McCarthy was seen, after having announced for the presidency, eating alone in restaurants in Washington and New York. His scheduling was bad. Hours and hours of his prime time seemed to be wasted. His meetings were often only half filled. The campaign was run on a low key from the start, and, as it turned out later, a deliberately low key. Some of his closest aides and backers were worried from the start. They thought low key was all right, but there was a point where it bordered on laziness, and they sometimes wondered whether there was something physically ailing the candidate, something he had not told them about.

  Sometimes McCarthy seemed to mock the entire process—laughing at the system, laughing at the traditional rites of vote-seeking, even mocking himself. If he had to give good lines, if he couldn’t help being witty, then at least he could throw them away. Mary McGrory, a columnist who loved McCarthy, wrote that he was trying to run for the presidency without raising his voice. There was something unbending in him, a furious pride, and so at a time when he was doing something which genuinely dazzled the entire American intellectual establishment, when he probably could have had the best advisers and speech writers in the country, he had very few. His staff was often shockingly weak. He could not bear to solicit their aid, they had to volunteer it. And even then, when they did, it did not work well. He did not take well to other men’s advice, nor did he use their ideas. This was a sharp contrast to the Kennedy’s who have always had an extraordinary ability to attract intellectuals and to retain them; to use just enough of their material to keep them committed, to make them feel they are making the breakthrough, winning the candidate to their view. McCarthy was also unlike Humphrey who has always been weak with intellectuals, unable to hold onto them because with all his energy he seemed anxious to prove that he didn’t need them, he could do it all himself, thus leaving them unfulfilled.

  McCarthy did not go through the usual pretensions either. He did not like the press and would not do the little things which made the daily life of reporters easier and endeared a candidate to them. He did not give them fire and, worst of all, he did not seem like a man running for the presidency. It all seemed terribly small-time. I remember trying to call Blair Clark, McCarthy’s campaign manager, in early December after he announced. There was no campaign manager home; no answering service; it was only after many tries that a Negro maid answered. I gave my name, sensing, even as I did, that it would never reach Clark (it did not). One recalled McCarthy early in December at a meeting before a temple in Great Neck, Long Island. A long day for McCarthy: first a speech, then a press conference, the candidate patently answering question after question for the television people. Finally he thought he was finished. “Now can we have a press conference for the writing reporters?” someone asked.

  “I thought we just had one,” McCarthy said.

  “No you’ve had two conferences and both were for television. Now we can get serious?” the reporter asked.

  McCarthy protested again: Look, he pointed to some reporters, they had asked questions and he had answered them, ergo a press conference. “I thought it was a press conference,” he repeated.

  “You’ve got a lot to learn,” said the reporter. “Yes,” said McCarthy, “I have a lot to learn.” It was to get worse. The press would consistently underestimate his chances and, in McCarthy’s view, underplay his activities; and he would grow embittered and occasionally petulant. He knew what they wanted him to do and say; he just as obstinately refused to do it. If they wanted anger, he would give them calmness. He would deliberately keep them waiting, often argue with them. A well-known columnist once asked for a copy of his speech. “What do you care?” McCarthy asked back, “You’ve never accurately reported my speeches before.” Once he let the reporters sit around waiting in a lobby for hours. When they finally sent an aide up to see him, to express their displeasure, he snapped, “Why don’t you go down there and play them some music.” To the mighty Walter Cronkite, interviewing him he would point out that young David Schoumacher, the regular CBS man and a favorite of his, asked better questions. He was bitter toward the press. One sensed that many of the frustrations he felt about American society were symbolized by his dislike for the press; he felt he wasn’t demagogic enough for the American press. He felt they did not give him credit for his intellectual superiority, they wanted showmanship and they did not understand how he was handling this particular issue. The press did underestimate him. Reporters would see him ambling through his schedule in New Hampshire, giving what were predominantly bad speeches. The first three times I heard him he was simply terrible, giving his regular lecture-circuit $l,000-special on the History of Humanitarian Thought in the West. Stevenson without Stevenson, I decided. The reporters did not believe his own explanation—that the issue was already too emotional; it was there, deep in the people themselves, and all they needed was a political outlet for it and that was what he was providing. He was playing it very well, the quiet man. He had felt the mood; he had decided that the people felt there was already too much divisiveness in the country. His style was not to be divisive. He came across well in some of those small meetings. They listened and decided that yes, Gene McCarthy is a gentleman.

  More, he had a cool analytical eye
and he realized, himself, that American politics were changing and changing quickly. Sometimes it seemed he could analyze better than he could campaign. He sensed very early the new power of the kids, the massive influence of television (whose reporters he treated better than writing reporters) and, more important, he sensed that simply by running he would get his share of television time. He saw early that the old liberalism was increasingly irrelevant, and that the old coalition was fractured and by and large meaningless. The old liberals, he said, would speak with pride on how hard they had fought and were still fighting to pass civil-rights legislation, but that much of this was now viewed as irrelevant. “Johnson,” he told me in December while campaigning, “is going out with a list of achievements, the laundry list, all these bills he’s passed, all these things he’s done. What he doesn’t realize is that the people he’s trying to convince don’t care: he hasn’t answered the questions that bother them. It’s become a moral question, a question of values. He hasn’t got their answers.” He was articulating new issues and new priorities for an affluent America, shifting the issues of the Democratic party from the old economic orientation to new moral ones, asking what the quality of American life would be and what the thrust of American life would be. He was saying, in effect, that the more traditional liberalism of the last decade had failed because, though liberal legislation had been passed, the immense burden of America’s military budget and foreign aid commitments had made the victories meaningless and left social programs more bankrupt than the nation realized. He was in this sense setting forth and clarifying the issues, not just for this campaign but for the next decade.