The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

by David Halberstam

  “Like a bad guitar player in a bad high school band,” Warren Rogers of Look corrected. Kennedy agreed.

  The food was late, and he and John Glenn were both frequently interrupted by autograph hunters. Finally he turned to a friend and asked whether it was worth it, couldn’t it just be done on television, couldn’t you sit back and do it from the studios as some of his younger assistants were insisting. (Again the new politics/old politics split; the younger people thought most of the traditional campaigning was a waste of time and money, television could do it all. They wanted him to do less street campaigning, to pay less attention to newspapers.)

  No, said Dick Goodwin, “You have to go out there and do it all and you have to show that you don’t have contempt for them, that you value who they are.”

  “You could afford to do more by television if you weren’t so rich,” someone else said. “You’re too rich not to get out there and mix. McCarthy ought to run a television campaign.”

  Someone else said that it was all insane, that it didn’t matter any more. Visiting people was a thing of the past (though election results would consistently show that Kennedy ran better where he campaigned personally). The newspapers were a thing of the past. You didn’t get any space from Pulliam (Eugene Pulliam was the arch-conservative owner of the two Indianapolis newspapers whose treatment of Kennedy and his campaign was scandalous). Forget it—it probably makes you a little bit of an underdog. Papers have less influence than anything else in this campaign.

  But this too was quickly challenged. Newspapers, another aide said, were still important, in a limited sense. Not so much the reporters, except inasmuch as they can influence the columnists, and the columnists in turn influence other reporters, and finally the columnists influence the television commentators who still lack confidence of their own judgments. So one columnist saying one thing can trigger an entire series of comments. (Eugene McCarthy, referring to the same characteristic and a little bit bitter over his coverage and bitter about the American press in general, once compared all reporters to blackbirds sitting on a telephone wire. One flies off and they all fly off. One flies back and they all fly back.) Thus James Reston was very important and a campaign should consider his influence on other writers. Kennedy asked why Reston didn’t like him, and one of his staff people said it wasn’t dislike, it was just that he wasn’t at ease with Kennedy.

  He likes you, I said, turning to John Glenn. He thinks you represent the traditional American values as much as anyone these days. At a dinner party, in 1964, right after Glenn had announced for the Senate, Tom Wicker and I had complained bitterly about him and about the entire glamour syndrome of American politics. So Glenn had walked in space, what did he know about the earth. Was he just one more Kennedy satellite, like Salinger who was now running in California? We were quite strong willed but Reston had defended him. Reston liked the way he talked and what he believed; more, when he landed that day after the space flight and saw his wife for the first time, Reston had caught him “looking first at his Annie, and I liked the look in his eye.”

  I know, Glenn nodded, I’m having lunch with him in ten days.

  The television commentators, Kennedy said, they’re the ones. He mentioned a young correspondent covering McCarthy. “Boy, what I wouldn’t give to have someone like that on my side.” Another aide said yes, and named two other reporters covering McCarthy who were allegedly sympathetic to the McCarthy cause. “They’re all doves you know, and because of that they give McCarthy a free ride. Is that fair?” I told Kennedy there were a number of reporters covering him who were sympathetic to him because of his positions on race and Vietnam, and who were treating him a little gently. “You don’t expect me to be fair, do you?” he said.

  The dinner moved on to a quick discussion of what television would do to politics. There was a general assumption that it would throw the rascals out. “What about the new rascals it throws in?” someone asked, and mentioned Ronald Reagan. A sore point. Kennedy and Reagan had debated the question of Vietnam on international television a year before, and the general consensus was that Reagan had destroyed Kennedy. Part of the trouble had been the setting; they had answered questions on Vietnam posed by foreign students, militantly anti-American, and the questions were shrill, angry and hostile. Reagan became the cool defender of the country, while Kennedy, if he tried to discuss the substance, looked like he was supporting the kids. He had been placed in a clearly embarrassing position; he was off balance and edgy. “Next time you debate him, get a panel of right-wing kids to ask the questions,” someone said. I dissented: Reagan seemed to me to have memorized his cards and nothing more, while Kennedy, in contrast, had tried to answer each question with his own spontaneous responses, essentially the kind of intelligence and self-dependence which shows up very well over a long tough campaign, where automatic cards are not enough. Reagan had bobbled one question rather badly; a student had asked him something concerning the Geneva accords. He had answered smoothly and glibly but had misquoted and misrepresented the accords, and the kid caught him dead to rights. He had a copy of the accords right there and had read it out. It was the kind of mistake which, in a tough campaign, might be a fatal flaw. A misstep here and the intense pressure and fatigue of the campaign would magnify it, and the candidate would try and cover up and make yet another mistake, and soon he would be off balance, off his natural rhythm. Today an American campaign is a ruthlessly cruel and searching business; those television cameras look at you and look back, in Dylan Thomas’ words, “to the bed you were born on.” Anyway, I had thought there were fatal flaws in Reagan. Kennedy agreed and said that I could judge any future debates between them.

  The campaign was a curious, almost contradictory affair. There was no doubt that it was, technically, beginning to go well, that McCarthy was not exactly catching fire though he was running, as usual, a clever campaign that was easily underestimated. (His television was quite good, particularly a last-minute half-hour paid interview with Garry Moore, a real live Hoosier, a local boy, doing the interviewing. It was a slick piece of work, Moore taking the low road, and McCarthy the high road: Senator, isn’t it just terrible the way some candidates are spending money? Well Garry, I don’t want to comment on that, let’s talk about my campaign.) As for Branigin, they were sure he’d inevitably diminish as a candidate. Their first polls taken before they entered, the Kennedys always take polls before they enter anything, had shown them tied with Branigin 33–33. But they were convinced that, as the campaign intensified, Branigin, who was playing only to local chauvinism, would fade, the issues in 1968 were simply too great for an Indiana-for-Indianans pitch. They were, of course, building up the Branigin threat, casting themselves as underdogs, a favorite Kennedy trick since the West Virginia primary in 1960 where they poor-mouthed, and poor-mouthed the better to magnify the victory once it was in. The trick, of course, was highly suspect, and when the Kennedys were genuinely pessimistic, as in the last few days of Oregon, the reporters thought they were being put-on.

  The problem in Indiana was not so much whether it would be a victory, that looked better and better in late April (though the size was always a question, they wanted fifty percent as a means of ending McCarthy right then and there), but the tone and the balance of the campaign. It had become a curiously contradictory affair, reflecting the changing views of the candidate himself, the changing nature of the country, and the differences among his own advisers. In the beginning, when he had first challenged Johnson, the campaign had been by its very nature new politics and high-risk politics. It was defying the taboos, it was going outside the party establishment, indeed up against it. Its main issues were moral ones; it sharpened rather than muted the differences between Kennedy and the administration. Since the party apparatus was hostile, the campaign’s only resource was shock—quick striking victories, fashioned on dramatization of the issues, in primary after primary until California, where a smashing victory would destroy the President. Though the race was
mathematically impossible, it somehow seemed within reach. This was particularly so because one sensed that Johnson was a hollow man, and when he went, he would go down quickly. While this phase of the campaign was on, the younger more radical advisers were more in command. They were the shock troops and they believed in the moral issues and in the sharpening of them. They had always been the advocates of the race, because of the preemptive quality of the issues. They knew little about the delegates, and their strategy was simple; make the delegates come to you.

  Then Johnson withdrew, and a more traditional campaign began. Vietnam disappeared, temporarily at least, as a viable issue. (In Indiana Kennedy had fumbled around with it. To raise it as a major issue was considered unpatriotic because of the Paris peace talks, and yet he doubted the seriousness of these peace talks; indeed the war was the issue which had forced him into the race.) At the same time, delegates once locked, even if uneasily, to the President of the United States, became unlocked. “Dick Daley’s office was like a revolving door for Kennedy people for a few days,” said one Chicago politician. The tone of the campaign had changed, had become muted; the role of the young radicals, and the other Robert Kennedy people, tempered, much to their annoyance.

  Tonight, two weeks after Johnson’s withdrawal, Kennedy was on a plane talking with a small group of reporters. The campaign seemed to have gone slack, to have lost its intensity since Johnson pulled out; the quality of spirit, of excitement, almost of a crusade, that had marked the first couple of weeks seemed to have gone. The crowds were noticeably less emotional, and the Kennedy people themselves seemed less spirited; indeed the campaign was more cautious. One of the reporters mentioned this and asked Kennedy whether he wished Johnson were back in the race. “No,” he said, “it’s much better now. It’s not as dramatic, and you people [reporters] miss that. Not as exciting. But it’s better now. All those delegates are unlocked. The other way was much more exciting but it was more uphill.” I disagreed with him; it seemed to me that Johnson’s withdrawal had reinstated McCarthy as an important candidate, and that it was going to be much tougher now.

  Kennedy started talking about the party. He mentioned the dinner in Philadelphia right after the Johnson withdrawal, an occasion that shattered Walinsky and his colleagues because Kennedy had praised all the old hacks of the party. He said that had he entered New Hampshire against Johnson “there wouldn’t be one Democrat in the entire country talking to me. I couldn’t have gone to any party dinners at all. They would have booed me. They would all accuse me of dividing the party. Now [because of McCarthy] they know that the division was already there.”

  Someone mentioned the loyalty of the party people to Johnson, but Kennedy brushed that aside. They were never loyal to Johnson, he said, though they were loyal to the office. Johnson had been weak with the party, not tending to small party affairs, not going to party dinners (“nobody listens to what you say at them, but it’s important to go, important to show that you care”), whereas Humphrey had been very good at tending to party functions. Hubert, he said, had more money in the bank with the pros than Lyndon did. Then he spoke warmly of Humphrey; Humphrey is getting a few breaks, “and if anyone ever deserved a break, he does.”

  That night, the discussion with several Kennedy aides was about Mayor Daley. (I was writing a piece about Daley when I switched off to cover Kennedy, and I would soon be switching back to the Mayor for a few weeks.) Daley’s presence hovered over this entire campaign. Though big city bosses are generally on their way out, he is the last truly powerful one, and though his power is likely to ebb and be diluted nationally in the future, his strength at this convention was immense. He controlled the big Illinois delegation, and some of the smaller bosses with smaller delegations would key on Illinois. This campaign was a curious one, not so much a horse race as a horse show, parading in front of Daley, showing him how much class and style and power you’ve got, and hoping he agrees. Daley was the judge. Unless the showings in the primaries and the polls were very good, he would probably go to Humphrey, and the Kennedy people were aware of this, aware that Daley was more comfortable with Humphrey than with the more radical, abrasive Kennedy. “One of his other big mistakes in 1968,” said Mankiewicz, referring to the failure to enter the race earlier, “is going to be that he thinks Dick Daley regards him in the same light that he regarded Jack Kennedy. It’s a very different time now.”

  “Here was general agreement about this, for this was a group of the newer Kennedy people. Someone noted the enormous difference in styles and worlds of Daley and Kennedy. When Kennedy was trying to decide whether or not to enter the race, he made one rather odd last-minute attempt to maneuver Johnson on the war; he proposed an objective panel on the war which would recommend ways of getting out with honor. The White House leaked word of this to reporters. Kennedy was enraged, and called Daley, asking him for advice about what to do, Daley’s advice was immediate: Just deny it. “Can you imagine that,” said the Kennedy man, “there’s Bob with forty of the most important reporters in the country waiting outside his hotel door, and the White House has already leaked it—a pretty official damn leak—and Daley says, deny it. Cook County is a long way from modern politics.”

  There was a general assumption that Kennedy was to have a much tougher time ahead with Daley than he realized, that a coolness existed which the Senator had not realized. (“What hotel is Bob Kennedy taking over in Chicago?” a reporter asked a Daley aide in late April, and the Daley man answered, “Bobby Kennedy isn’t taking over anything in this city.”) The one thing working for Kennedy was that despite Daley’s probable preference for Humphrey, he likes winners above all, that’s why he had steadily expanded his power base, and the Kennedy people believed that they could prove that they had the winner and that Humphrey simply couldn’t carry a weak ticket. One Kennedy man recalled being in Chicago with Jack Kennedy in 1960, at the time of the debates, when Daley was actively for Kennedy. “I arrived and was preparing for the debate and he kept asking us, ‘Where’s Daley? Where’s Daley? Anybody heard from Daley?’ And no Daley of course. So we had the debate, and the moment it was over, who’s the first guy bursting into the television studios, surrounded by a phalanx of his yes-men? Why Daley of course. He knew for the first time he’d got a winner.”

  Kennedy became more dependent on the traditionalists who had opposed the race but were now more at ease with it. They knew delegates, they worked among the delegates, but they also were a tempering influence on the campaign. The delegates, many of whom were tied to the big city machines, were uneasy with Kennedy’s radicalism and his ties to Negroes. In Chicago, for instance, the militant blacks Kennedy had touched were the sworn enemies of Daley and his machine. Daley was uneasy with Kennedy’s appeals; if this young man were elected he might threaten the city machine. He might give federal money directly to these wild black men, and thus cut off the machine’s power among the poor blacks through traditional patronage. He might just finance Dick Daley’s opposition, and Daley was not happy about the course of it. And Daley might now be the most important single man in the party. And so the delegates were uneasy with the course of the campaign. A basic split soon developed between the radicals, the Robert Kennedy people, and the traditionalists or Jack Kennedy people, with someone like Fred Dutton serving vaguely in the middle as an interpreter to the generations. “The young people think the New Politics is already here and they want Bob to lead it in, or failing that, to be a martyr to it,” said one staff man. “What they don’t see is that Bob is a transitional figure with ties to both the new and the old, but that he also wants very much to win. They have too much conviction. They are too sure of themselves for the complexities and pluralism of American politics. Walinsky makes too many flat statements such as ‘the country is against the war,’ or ‘the country is for the Negro.’ The kind of thing they want Bob to do is the sort of thing you do from the pulpit or from the editorial page, but not necessarily in politics. They want something new, the sharpening of
issues and differences. You could almost call it the politics of abrasiveness. The traditionalists want to soften the differences, ease them over, say something like there’s no real difference here between you and me, but our guy is better and besides, he’s a winner.”

  The young radicals for their part thought that the cutback on race (“I was the chief law enforcement of this country ...”) was a mistake, morally and politically. The entire country already knew where Kennedy stood on the race issue, particularly those who hated Negroes. There was no sense in 1968, with its instant communications, of trying to fool them. Those who hated Negroes would know where Robert Kennedy stood—either they would hate him too, or they would come aboard. But cutting back was harmful among the liberals with whom he was in already serious trouble. His image was blurred. If national reporters and television reflected his edginess on race, as they were bound to and as they did, then it would hurt him once more there. It would re-create the image of the too political Bobby, and this finally would backfire. (What is the difference between you and Barry Goldwater on some of these programs in the ghetto—about plans to involve the private sector more in the cities, he was once asked. “The difference is that I mean it,” he answered. The view, expressed by Walinsky, was “we should do our own thing, and win and then let the delegates come to us.” The young men were still bitter about the failure to enter the race the previous fall (“We’d have the nomination by now,” one said in late April), about the loss of their real base to McCarthy—the professors, liberals, intellectuals, kids. They thought that this had thrown Kennedy off balance in the campaign. Because he had come in late, McCarthy had picked up Kennedy’s natural base and as a result Kennedy was forced to appeal to blue-collar people, which contradicted his appeal to blacks and liberals. Had he entered early he would have been right on balance, running from strength with Negroes, kids and liberals, and pitching to blue collar simply by his presence. He would have been able to go into working-class neighborhoods and instead of talking about law enforcement, he could talk from a stronger position, putting the emphasis on the need for generosity, and reconciliation in America.