The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

by David Halberstam

  Kennedy faced many problems in Indiana and he had barely been in the race a week when the entire campaign changed. One night, with a minimum of fanfare, Lyndon Johnson withdrew as a candidate for reelection. Historians and reporters will speculate for years as to why Johnson did it, what his motives were. The most likely explanation is that he found himself tied to a hopelessly unpopular war and likely to be ravaged in the primaries by two critics and beaten by Kennedy, the politician he hated the most. As such he decided to withdraw as a candidate; and hope for one last chance to find peace. That destroyed Kennedy’s most important issue, the war, and more important, removed his favorite opponent, for it was Johnson who made him look good, made him a necessity. Many liberals, uneasy about Kennedy, could now, with Johnson departed, relax and smile at McCarthy again. Gene McCarthy, who often seemed to be a more incisive analyst than candidate, had said with considerable prophecy the day Johnson withdrew that it would hurt Bobby the most because until then Bobby had played the role of Jack Kennedy campaigning against Lyndon Johnson. Now it was going to be much more difficult, it was going to have to be Robert Kennedy campaigning against Jack. Kennedy’s opponents in Indiana were clean Gene McCarthy, a tough-minded candidate of considerable subtlety who was running on a similar platform (How do you attack McCarthy when you want his army? If you offend him, you offend his army), and Roger Branigin, the pleasant folksy governor. But these men were not his real opponents, the real opponent was Robert Kennedy himself. Finally he was the issue, and he was campaigning against himself, against the old fears and the old suspicions, though they might be different in different parts of the country. In the spring of this crucial year he had managed, because of his delayed entrance, to be at once too ruthless and too gutless for the liberals and the students, too radical for the middle class, too much the party man for some of the intellectuals, and too little the party man for most of the machines. He had then, the look of a man who intended to rock the boat, and rock it he probably would. He was in that mood, he sensed the country needed a little rocking. The suspicions of the good Hoosiers did not surprise him. Indeed he had anticipated and welcomed them. He had assumed they would have doubts about him for he knew who he was, and what he had come to champion in America, and he knew something about them and thus he assumed their doubts (indeed at times he would campaign hard, perhaps a little too hard, to ease their fears and suspicions), but the liberal suspicions, and the depth and intensity of them, had hurt and surprised him. He knew his own mistakes and he was willing to live with them, but now the animosity of the liberals shocked him. The liberal suspicions were not exactly new; they came and bloomed seasonally about the Kennedys. They existed about John Kennedy on his way to the White House, for Adlai Stevenson was their candidate then, and faded when Kennedy attained it. Indeed by the time of his death they had almost forgotten about Stevenson—so much so when one of the high priestesses of New York liberalism was asked to contribute to the Adlai Stevenson Institute in Chicago, she said no darling live politicians were her hobby. They existed about Robert Kennedy, especially because he looked and acted more Irish than his brother and had that McCarthy committee in his background. They faded upon his performance as Attorney General, bloomed again when he became an instant New Yorker on his way to the Senate, when he challenged Ken Keating, a man with a reasonably liberal record and who had identified himself regularly with Israel (“Keating,” the sign said in 1964, “Nasser’s Number One Enemy, Israel’s Number One Friend”). The suspicions faded even more in the late sixties, upon his performance as a Senator, and with the real fear of the war and the backdrop of The Man. They who had once feared him, and even perhaps voted for Ken Keating, had spent October and November depressed about the prospect of the forthcoming Johnson-Nixon-Wallace race. They had loved him in the fall; they thought of him often and remembered what was good in his brother’s administration and in his own record. Jack Kennedy would never have sent combat troops to Vietnam, they decided. Kennedy had thought of them often in this crucial time; he had played brinkmanship with the race, and had then entered gracelessly, rudely, and it now had all come back. But he was in, nonetheless, joining in this extraordinary campaign which had seen one after another of the traditional maxims fall.

  Kennedy’s own presence had helped transform the campaign; he had done what McCarthy might not have been able to do alone: he had driven Lyndon Johnson out and probably turned American policy on Vietnam around. A grateful liberal community, freed from its fear of the war and its fear of Lyndon Johnson, liberated momentarily from the attacks of the New Left, was celebrating its new freedom amid its old suspicions and dislikes of Robert Kennedy. It was symbolic of the fresh breezes suddenly flowing in American politics in the spring that the liberals once more had the luxury of disliking Robert Kennedy. He had helped slay the dragon only to become the dragon.

  It was the race issue, not Vietnam, which hung over the campaign in Indiana. This was due in part to Johnson’s withdrawal and the Paris peace talks which had so suddenly begun; with that Vietnam ebbed as an issue. (Abner Mikva, an attractive reform candidate in a liberal Chicago district, had said that up until March 31, you could not say hello to anyone in his district without their saying, “Hello-how-are-you-where-do-you-stand-on-Vietnam.” “But after March 31, people looked away whenever you mentioned Vietnam; they did not want to hear about it, wanted to believe it had gone away. They only wanted to hear what you were going to do about them, and all this rioting.”) For this was a far different time from 1960 when John Kennedy could easily put together the blacks and the blue-collar whites. Now both the whites and the blacks were restless, and it was indicative of the situation that in Gary, one of Indiana’s few big industrial cities, a mayoralty primary had broken down almost fifty-fifty between the black wards and the blue-collar white wards; Robert Kennedy had been with the blacks on that one. In 1968 one sensed everywhere the new movement toward racial polarization, an ever spiraling hostility and a breakdown in communications. The racial gap seemed wider than ever, and seemed to be getting yet wider. The gap was not being narrowed, as good liberal Americans had assumed, and as it had for the Jews and the Italians and everyone before. The rich were getting richer in America, and the poor were getting poorer, and by and large the rich were white and the black were poor. The public schools which had allowed previous classes of American underprivileged to break out of their ghettos were now simply one more enforcer of the existing conditions. Schools confirmed existing inequities, graduating functional illiterates, showing the brighter black kids that it was really hopeless.

  They seemed angrier daily, as the promise of America failed to come through for them, and sensed acutely their own poverty in an affluent nation. Their moderate leaders were now being seriously undermined. They had told their people to keep working, keep praying, and somehow it all would be arranged; the heart of America was good and Christian. But there had been too few victories. The awakening which had begun with the outlawing of school segregation in 1954 and had continued with the various street protests was now out of control; the taste glands had been whetted, awakened and accelerated. More radical leaders were springing up, thanks to television. As in white politics, television was diminishing the old established order. Formerly the Negro leadership had been tightly structured and perhaps a little compromised because their organizations were somewhat dependent on white support, but now radical leaders were springing up without traditional structured organizations. With the aid of television, they were now being catapulted headlong into living rooms, those of black and white alike, on the basis of their looks, their anger, their ability to speak. There was a heightening of consciousness, and a sharpening of the sense of anger, for now the expectations were far ahead of the white society’s ability to deliver.

  Worse, the white society, so deeply involved in the war in Vietnam, seemed not to realize that it was failing to deliver. The young were threatened by the draft, were forced to go to hopeless schools which would prepare them
for guaranteed third-class jobs. Watching their televisions, they saw the anger in other cities. The mood became increasingly angry and violent Those who had been the followers of nonviolence in the early sixties had turned off; they let their hair grow out into the new Afro style; racial pride was now emphasized; Malcolm X, who had been largely a joke to much of black America in 1960, seemed the prophet now with his black pride and black consciousness and his view that the core of the problem was not black inferiority but white immorality. (Feiffer caught some of the mood in a cartoon strip which showed an angry young black with a beard and dark glasses, saying: “As a matter of racial pride we want to be called ‘blacks’ ... which has replaced the term ‘Afro-American’ ... which replaced ‘Negroes’ ... which replaced ‘colored people’ ... which replaced ‘darkies’ ... which replaced ‘blacks.’”)

  The nation seemed headed toward a kind of modified economic apartheid. It was moving very quickly toward it: whites leaving the cities for the suburbs, taking the good jobs and the favorable tax structure from the cities; white collars around poor, rotting black cores; the Negroes frustrated, living in slum conditions and unable to find decent jobs. If they found decent jobs, then they were unable to find decent housing and decent schools. Now the young blacks were totally outside the system, it meant nothing to them, held no promise. They would as soon destroy it as try and grope their way up it, and so they began to riot, tearing and burning down their black slums, their faces contorted with rage. It was the rage, not the causes of it, which showed up on white television sets; the whites, seeing that anger and that hatred, were now more frightened than ever. They decided, well, the hell with them, if that’s the way they want to be, after all we’ve done for them; I always thought they were like that, and now the politicians are giving in to them too easily. Thus more whites moved to the suburbs, leaving behind only the blacks and those very poor whites who hated the blacks the most. So in early 1968 America was facing a social crisis of spectacular proportions, and it was ill-prepared. The country was hardly united. The last time there was a comparable crisis was the Great Depression, but then everyone was poor. The Congress of the United States and the president of the United States represented the poor. Now the poor were largely invisible; they had precious little representation; and they were on the outside of a society which was affluent, a society which looked around and saw the visible Negro, the middle-class Negro who had benefited from the progress of the last fourteen years, who was now super-visible. White America felt, Let the rest of them be like that; after all, we worked our way up (when a young Irish nun who worked in Chicago’s west side, which is a jungle not even a ghetto, pleaded with Mayor Daley to come out there to see the conditions, the Mayor said, “Look, Sister, you and I came from the same place. We knew how tough it was. But we lifted ourselves up by the bootstraps ...”). It was increasingly prepared to answer the Negro’s anger by building bigger walls around the ghetto and sending more police in. Lyndon Johnson was imprisoned by the war in Vietnam and the complexities of the ghettos seemed far beyond his comprehension. Perhaps it was a generational thing, but he was still talking about the civil rights bills he had passed. Besides, those people who were protesting the ghettos most vigorously were also those who were protesting the war in Vietnam most vigorously, and that did not help their cause very much. So the polarization intensified.

  But the polarization posed serious problems for any serious politician, white or black. It was difficult to talk to both societies at once, the poor angry black America and the affluent smug white one, which wanted black progress on its terms. If Martin Luther King, a moderate in 1964, talked as a moderate in 1967–68, he would lose his black constituency because he would seem too conservative, too much a Tom; yet if he talked radical, which would retain his black constituency and which he was now doing, he was in danger of losing the white semi-establishment following which was so basic to his cause. Similarly, if Robert Kennedy made the extra effort, as he did for three years, to walk in the ghettos, and talk to the leaders and represent their views on a national scale, then he immediately endangered himself among the whites as looking too radical, too identified with the blacks; perhaps he was even causing some of that restlessness, encouraging them to riot. It was becoming increasingly difficult in America, in 1968, to have any meaning in the black community and any credibility in the white. It was a simple fact of political life that there was a certain amount of happenstance in Kennedy’s attempt to do it; anyone else as identified with blacks (and the view of Kennedy was that you had to make that identification, the country desperately needed someone who had some meaning for the Negro populace, otherwise they would turn off the country completely) would nominally have lost the whites. But he as a Kennedy, with that residue of glamour, and also as a Catholic (who moved the Slavs and the blue-collar working class), might be able to do it Lindsay, as strong with the blacks, had a good deal more trouble with the blue-collar voters. So now, in 1968, Robert Kennedy was trying to put all the odd pieces back together. He was trying to keep the Negroes, who loved him with an intensity that was special in such a rich country, to bring back the kids and the liberals, and to hold on to the blue-collar whites as well. Perhaps a Kennedy could do what no one else in America could do, could walk that particular narrow path. He was doing reasonably well in the early days of April, talking about the divisions in the country; the need to be generous; saying we must end this divisiveness, we must work together; these problems can be handled, America has the capacity and the generosity to deal with them. On April 4, he went before a huge audience at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, and he spoke of this hope for a generous America, and during the question and answer period a young Negro asked him:

  “You are placing great faith in white America. Is this faith justified?”

  Kennedy answered, simply. Yes. And then added: “I think the vast majority of white people want to do the decent thing.” And that was what he believed. He felt that most white people simply did not know what it was like to be a black man in their own country, what the schools and the housing were like; they did not understand the historical conditions which had created the black man’s dilemma.

  Then he boarded his plane to fly to Indianapolis and, as he did, an aide told him that Martin Luther King had been shot, was seriously wounded, and was probably dying in Memphis. He seemed staggered and for a while he did not mention Dr. King. When he finally began to talk he said, “To think that I just finished saying that white America wants to do the right thing, and even while I was talking this happened.” It gets worse and worse, he said, “all this divisiveness, all this hate. We have to do something about the divisions and the hate.”

  He landed in Indianapolis and learned that yes, it was true, and Dr. King was dead. Then he went on to a previously scheduled rally in the ghetto area; he had not wanted to go, but others convinced him he must honor this obligation. He spoke to an audience which was primarily black and he told them the news about Dr. King. In the background you could hear the gasps and the wails, and then he gave, extemporaneously, perhaps the best speech of the campaign, perhaps the best speech of his life:

  Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black—considering the evidence there evidently is that they were white people who were responsible—you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country in great polarization—black people among black, white people among white, filled with hatred toward one another.

  Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend and to replace that violence, that strain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand and love.

  For those of you who are black and
are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust, at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say I feel in my heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despair against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”