The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

by David Halberstam

  He felt it all slipping away from him, and felt himself caught in the particular bind of 1968. Lowenstein remembers calling him about ten days before the New Hampshire primary, jubilant because it had begun to turn; it was all falling into place. “We’re going to do it! We’re going to do it! It’s the beginning of the end for Johnson,” he said excitedly into the phone. “I expected the same enthusiasm at the other end, I was so carried away by what we were doing. But he was very cool, very restrained, and he said ‘You don’t think you’re being too optimistic?’ and then I realized how painful it must have been for him.” Other friends called and told him that New Hampshire was going to break it open. They pleaded with him to make a tentative announcement; to say that he was thinking of entering, so that he could share in the vote, and so that he would not be accused of moving in on McCarthy’s triumph after the primary. And in the last few days he began to move. Jesse Unruh, one of the powers in the Democratic party who had previously told him not to run, flew in from California with a poll which showed Kennedy beating Johnson roughly two to one, with McCarthy a distant third. This was crucial, for Unruh was the first of the Democratic party powers to favor the race. Up until then it had been nothing but eggheads and moralists, and when they would outline all the reasons for making the race, a Kennedy aide would say, “yes, I agree with all that, but how many delegates do you yourself have?” The Sunday before the primary Kennedy called his wife from the west coast and asked her to call Schlesinger and Galbraith and have them tell McCarthy that he was going in, a task that neither relished. Similarly Teddy Kennedy contacted Dick Goodwin, a Kennedy man now working for McCarthy in New Hampshire, and Goodwin passed along the word that Kennedy was considering coming in.

  Then came the New Hampshire results; they were staggering to the outside world. As late as early March, a sampling made for Time magazine by Roper Associates gave Johnson 62 percent and McCarthy 11 percent. But McCarthy had polled a startling 42.2 percent of the Democratic vote to Johnson’s 49.4. In addition, and this was to become a consistent factor, McCarthy ran very well among Republicans; with nothing but write-ins, he ran third on the Republican ticket, and he trailed the President by only 230 in overall votes; 29,021 to 28,791. It was a staggering victory for a country which was unprepared for it and yet delighted by it There was one last meeting of all the Kennedy brass. Steve Smith, his brother-in-law, had formerly opposed the race, but was now for it: if it’s in your blood, do it, he told the Senator. Most of the others were for it now. Burke Marshall, a trusted aide, was also for it, though cold logic was still against it. Two men still opposed it One was Edward Kennedy, a traditionalist, highly structured, very good at working with delegates, reassuring them; a different kind of man from Robert, less committed to lost causes, and more at ease in the camaraderie of the Senate. The other, Ted Sorensen, still conservative and cautious, still waiting for 1972; arguing not the new politics but the old mathematics, pointing out that even if Robert won all the primaries he would still need three-quarters of all the delegates outside the South. Others, such as Schlesinger, who had earlier argued for the race, now told Kennedy to wait a little, not to rob McCarthy of his hour of glory, not to re-create the old fears and suspicions in the process. Some argued that he let McCarthy do the primaries and then move in; others argued that he wait, create an artificial draft by having people troop in to see him daily, pleading with him to run, and having the pleas carefully leaked to the papers, until finally, against all his better judgment, for love of country he would run. But Kennedy was a curiously unsubtle man, not given to political pantomime. And he blundered right in, gracelessly, unable to wait, seeming to deprive McCarthy of his sweetest hour. “He didn’t even give us 24 hours so we could raise the money to pay our bills,” one McCarthy kid told Mary McGrory. New issues were made, the old Bobby was temporarily re-created, and McCarthy, who had privately acted ungenerously to Kennedy in the weeks before and who was very chilly about the news that Kennedy was coming in, was handed the white-knight issue. He became Clean Gene. “Kennedy thinks that American youth belongs to him at the bequest of his brother,” wrote Mary McGrory. “Seeing the romance flower between them and McCarthy, he moved with the ruthlessness of a Victorian father whose daughter has fallen in love with a dustman.” But he was in nonetheless, and alive; pleased to be liberated from the indecision, pleased to be back out campaigning again. In the same Senate caucus room where John Kennedy had made his announcement eight years earlier, Robert Kennedy made his entry statement. Many of the old guard were there. Men like Pierre Salinger who wandered about patting people on the back and saying “just like old times.” But he was wrong, it was not like old times. The candidate was different and, most important, the country was different.

  II

  SUDDENLY THEN, IN THE early spring, Robert Kennedy was running. A shy, abrupt and sometimes passionate man (“He’s unassimilated, isn’t he?” Robert Lowell once said, after watching him at a party), he was more at ease running his brother for president than running himself. Now devoid of his privacy, forcibly shorn of his shyness, he was trying to control some of his passion. The spot was hardly ideal. In the normally alien state of Indiana, he was campaigning in cities and villages, trying even the tiny hamlets; stopping at little crossroads where no candidate for president had ever been because it was part of the American ethic that the rich may run for office so long as they campaign harder and longer than the poor. He was campaigning among the black and white, though rarely among the black and white together, not in the America of the sixties. These were uneasy days in an uneasy territory, for he was marked, this Irish son of an Irish millionaire, as being not just the friend of the black (indeed practically the black candidate) but Catholic as well. This was hostile soil, a land which had given Richard Nixon, though in 1968 it was hard to believe, 225,000 more votes; and there to remind him of both the past and the present were the bumper stickers, “Nixon Is Safer.” When they said safer, they meant, and everyone knew it, Kennedy is Unsafe. (Nixon memorabilia amused Kennedy, particularly a signboard which showed Nixon, trustworthy, healthy, sober, carrying a briefcase, and doing something sound and practical for his country, and said: “Nixon is the One.” He would tease with the crowd. “Nixon’s the one what? ... Look at that briefcase. ... I’ve been wondering all this time what’s in that briefcase. ... Do you think he’s a briefcase salesman?”)

  Robert Kennedy’s aides were masters at bringing him to the right places, big cities for big Democratic votes, so that over the television screens that night there would be flashed photographs of huge crowds mauling Robert Kennedy, and a message to be read by the bosses of the Democratic party. But now the aides tuned primarily to Indiana, sought ever smaller villages where hopefully they might avoid some of the shrieking teenagers who had so lovingly pursued Kennedy throughout the campaign and who showed up again and again on television. It was, they knew, counter-productive to their parents, and their parents could vote, and were not likely to vote for their daughter’s singing idol or that ilk. Yet even in the little towns the campaign rhythm remained one of constant, concentric circles formed by age and passion. The inner circle was very very young, too young but passionate, “Who cares if his hair is a silly millimeter longer?” said the sign. The voters of 1972 and 1976. The second ring was a mixed bag, still young, but of voting age; a few signs pro, a few signs against: “Defoliate Bobby,” “Give Your Blood to American Troops Not the Vietcong.” Then finally on the outer ring, quietly coming and listening and watching; neither jumping nor cheering nor stealing his cuff links, nor untying his tie, the good citizens of Indiana. They were often outside hearing range, for the sound equipment was uniformly terrible. There was no portable bull horn; it had been suggested but Ethel Kennedy had vetoed it. A bull horn, she said, looked too coarse on television, too much like Lyndon Johnson. They had come, the good Hoosiers, to see another one of those Kennedys. They wondered if he were ready, and whether he was as good and as nice as Jack. “He isn’t as hands
ome as Jack,” said the woman in Peru, Indiana. “No,” said the woman with her, “but he’s still handsome just the same.” They tried to measure him to sense whether or not he could be trusted. They would come and hear the shouting kids and wonder what it was all coming to anyway, and where it was all going to. The same question sometimes bothered the candidate.

  There was already a ritual and an almost narcotic rhythm to the campaign, though it was still very early. The plane would land and, even if it was a smooth landing, everyone would clap; if it was rough, there would be enormous cheering. Everyone would then spill out of the plane. The aides would curse the local advanceman for not bunching up the crowd at the airport; instead it had been spilled all around the airport fence and would not show up on television (“always get a hall which is a little too small,” said the same aide.) The band would play the Kennedy fight song, “This Man is Your Man,” to the tune of “This Land is Your Land.” Music by W. Guthrie; lyrics by T. Sorensen. There were the inevitable dogged McCarthy fans to heckle. One sensed that if Kennedy landed in a blizzard in Alaska at 3 A.M. in 1976 there would be five McCarthy people with homemade signs saying “Why Did You Wait Bobby?” or “McCarthy, Our Profile in Courage.” “The McCarthy people always look like they’re either going to or coming from a Quaker meeting,” said a reporter.

  Then a brief airport speech: I think we can do better in America, I think we can turn America around. Much cheering though the sound system does not work. Into bus and down into the heart of town; reporters screaming at bus driver not to lose contact with the lead car, not to let sightseers slip in the motorcade. (A reminder of Dallas. For another Dallas was always in the back of everyone’s mind and in Logansport, one day, Kennedy was speaking when we happened to look up to the roof of a building. There was a cop up there, poised with a telescopic rifle. It was a frightening sight. Someone asked the police chief what the cop was doing. “We want this man to leave our town the same way he entered it,” he said.) Same speech in town, closing with the words (as Kennedy gave them) of George Bernard Shaw: “Some people see things as they are and ask why; I dream of things that never were and ask why not?” Shaw was basic to the campaign; he was the signal for reporters, making their phone calls or grabbing coffee, to run for the bus. Indeed, on occasion Kennedy closed a speech saying, “as George Bernard Shaw used to say, ‘run for the bus.’”

  We’d land in the next town and Dick Tuck, the wagonmaster, would look at the crowd and say that at least 50,000 people were waiting for us and had been waiting for six hours. Tuck looks, and there is no other word to describe him, bawdy. He is the surviving humorist of American politics; Tuck, the man who put the girl spy on the Goldwater train; who once hired a stewardess on Goldwater’s plane to ask him whether he wanted coffee, tea or hemlock. He ran for state senator in California, making the Los Angeles river, which is dry, his major issue. “Either fill it up or paint it blue.”

  The great Tuck specialty, however, was the haunting of Richard Nixon. Tuck prepared a sign in Chinese for a Nixon visit to Chinatown which said, when translated in the newspapers the next day, “What About the Hughes Tool Loan?” Tuck hired a sweet little old lady to greet Nixon after the first Kennedy-Nixon television debate: “Don’t worry, son. Kennedy beat you last night, but I’m sure you’ll do better next time.” (Later in 1968 Tuck worked at the Republican convention for Nelson Rockefeller, where, among other things, he hired a group of pregnant women to carry signs reading: “Nixon is the One.”)

  Now Tuck was vaguely in charge of the press. As we drove into town he’d note that the bus driver estimates the crowd at the airport between 7,800 and 78,000. Though it was a clear day he’d add that “this crowd is much larger than the crowd Richard Nixon drew ten days ago on a day when it was not raining nearly as hard as it is today.” He’d also quote several unidentified local officials at the airport saying they have just switched over from McCarthy. “You didn’t talk to them?” he’d ask, surprised. Earlier in the day a reporter had complained that the candidate deviated from the prepared text. “Robert Kennedy is not a text deviate,” Tuck snapped.

  These were tough, exhausting days, beginning early in the morning, fifteen, sixteen speeches, endless trips, bumps in the sky, private interviews in the back of the plane for those that demanded them. “Senator, there’s a Danish reporter who’s come all the way over to see your campaign.” There was trouble with one Dutch reporter who turned out not to be a reporter but a Dutch politician come aboard to study American politics and the Kennedy style so that he might try the same thing out on the Dutch. Then there’d be strategy conferences between the air pockets, and at stop after stop the same speech: I’m not satisfied with America the way it is; I think that we can do better; I think the violence and the divisions are unacceptable, and so I ask for your hand. And the humor to blunt the ruthless image which pursued him relentlessly. I talked to my brother Edward (great laughs because of the family), and asked him for some campaign buttons, and they arrived, 15,000 of them (small laughs of anticipation), and they all had his picture on them (big laugh now), and I told him he couldn’t do that, I was the candidate (small laugh), and it was too late to enter the race, and besides, people would say he was ruthless (big laugh).

  The campaign began in Indiana, and it was the search for a domino. Most campaigns begin in New Hampshire, a land of journalist overkill, with television reporters outnumbering Hampshiremen. New Hampshire is usually bigger than life; candidates die there and are born there, and it would have been a nice piece of turf for Robert Kennedy. New England, friendly, compact; a state where they still had all the old voter cards, and no kickback against the blacks there, not with that fine Protestant ethic. Even the hard core of Johnson’s strength against McCarthy, those blue-collar workers who had voted for the President, were largely Catholic and would have gone to Kennedy, a more ethnically Catholic candidate than McCarthy. But they had let New Hampshire slip away. They had entered too late and Indiana was the first available primary. They came charging in, hoping that somehow Indiana would come around and then topple Nebraska; and then they would topple Oregon which would topple California, which would topple Mayor Daley, the fifty-first state. So the Kennedys were running hard but a little late. Three days after the announcement they had flown to Alabama and Tennessee, taking a regular flight to Atlanta, and chartering small planes over to Tuscaloosa. The charter man in Atlanta wanted some kind of proof of credit, having apparently read somewhere that the rich are the slowest in the world to part with their money, and so Fred Dutton, Kennedy’s traveling aide, whipped out his Carte Blanche card and $1,800 worth of charter was charged to it. This was all fine, except that the rich are slow paying, and by June an angry Carte Blanche was threatening to suspend credit to Attorney Dutton unless he quickly paid his bill. It was symbolic of the entire campaign. In 1960 the Kennedys had planned everything long in advance, the preliminary trips had started in 1957 and 1958, the early scouting; then the candidate showed himself visually to the delegates and Ted Sorensen, carrying a little notebook, checked out the delegates. By 1960, when Jack Kennedy announced, the basic organization and strategy was already laid out; responsibility already carefully delegated. Now in 1968 they were instinct-shooting. The events were running ahead of the men; until the very day that Robert Kennedy announced, most of them thought they would be sitting it out until 1972. He entered on March 16, and Teddy called Gerard Doherty, one of Teddy’s men: Look Gerry, you take Indiana. On March 22, he arrived there, with a week to get 5,500 signatures for the filing. Everywhere panicked phone calls were going out, and people were told to get down to Indiana. Why? asked one woman, a dedicated political worker in 1960 but now a mother of two. Because we need you, they said. Need me to do what? she asked. We don’t know yet. But get down here by Friday; and off she went. So if they were running a little late they were also running very hard, with almost desperate energy; a campaign pieced together at the last minute. Two students from Fordham were put in charge of forty fr
om Ohio State because they arrived at volunteer headquarters four hours ahead of the larger group, and pulled their assignments first. They were all, in the flurry of activity, sent to a white working-class neighborhood where they were less than welcome. If these blue-collar whites wanted to hear about Robert Kennedy, they did not want to hear about him from some smart-aleck college kids who should have been off at college studying a little harder, and who had probably burned their draft cards anyway. Eventually the kids were moved to a black ward where they were warmly welcomed and made common cause. Much of it was like this, and in many ways the Kennedys were curiously unsure of themselves despite their reputation for slickness and for being a part of the well-oiled Kennedy machine. (“Does the powerful Kennedy machine have any more typewriter paper?” asked a secretary on the plane one day.) Indeed they were so unsure of themselves that they had carefully and gratefully listened to the advice of one Gordon St. Angelo, the Indiana state chairman. The nice Mr. St Angelo had given them all kinds of friendly advice, such as, “Stay out of Indiana.” They had liked him, had thought of him as Their Mr. St Angelo, only to discover once in Indiana, having disregarded his advice, that he was no friend at all, that he wished dark days for them, and had indeed devoted most of his working hours to calling press conferences where he discussed how much the Kennedys were spending in Indiana, buying all those votes, a tactic which, he confided to a reporter, was by far the most effective way to attack the Kennedys. They did not like Mr. St Angelo and somehow, later, one sensed Mr. St. Angelo would get his.

  The staff was briefed everywhere on what was obvious about Indiana: a conservative state, strong Ku Klux Klan in the old days, more like Kentucky and Tennessee than anything else; go easy on the race. So they were running a somewhat muted campaign, fearing both fore-lash and backlash. The problem was part religious and part racial. Southern Indiana was part of a great religious belt which began in the Midwest, heading southwest through Tennessee and Kentucky into Oklahoma (Oklahoma, traditional Democratic territory, had given Richard Nixon one of the largest percentages of victory in 1960), and in some of these areas the more fundamentalist churches were militantly anti-Catholic: preacher after preacher had taken the pulpit to campaign if not for Richard Nixon then against Jack Kennedy. The issue had burned like a brush fire, costing Jack immense numbers of votes. He had eased the religious issue some; he was young and handsome and did not look like a Catholic, and television had helped to break down some of the older prejudices. But if prejudices die, they die slowly, particularly in an area undergoing some economic difficulty, and in 1968 some of it was still there. (Larry O’Brien, one of the architects of the 1960 strategy which had been so dependent upon winning every single primary, proving that a handsome young Catholic could win, could still offer small and fervent prayers to Stuart Symington who, for reasons known only to God, had chosen not to enter Indiana in 1960.) And there was prejudice against Negroes too, and Robert Kennedy entered Indiana in the minds of white Indianans as the man most identified with the upward and now unruly thrust of the Negro. He was their candidate; he would go into their areas and be mobbed, much more so than Gene McCarthy, whose voting record was basically similar on race, but who seemed curiously dispassionate about that most passionate question. One looked at McCarthy on television and did not think of Negroes. McCarthy, like Nixon, seemed safer.