The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

by David Halberstam

  In his public career, that outrage was turned at first to relatively minor issues, indeed sometimes to the wrong issues. But as he became a full-fledged public servant, he turned it to the great and dark questions of American life. This quality took him to stands and causes far beyond those accepted by more traditional liberals who accepted the society at face value. At dinner late one night in Indiana, Kennedy and Bill Haddad, an ex-newspaperman who had also served in the Peace Corps and the poverty program, and I were talking about the campaign. It seemed to me, I said, that as the campaign developed it was taking Kennedy further and further outside the establishment; that the more he saw of the country, the more he was turned off by the establishment and the existing representatives of existing institutions, and the more he was involved with the poor. (Indeed, Dick Harwood of The Washington Post would a month later write an incisive story pointing out that Kennedy had earlier said McCarthy faced the danger of being a one-issue man on Vietnam, but now Kennedy himself, tied to the poor, was sounding like a one-issue man.) Yes, Kennedy said, it was pointless to talk about the problem in America being black and white, it was really rich and poor, which was a much more complex subject. But if you keep going this way, I asked, won’t you finally have to take on the establishment. Kennedy nodded. And what if you take over and find that the very institutions of government and the society are strangling the country and perpetuating the imbalance? Haddad asked him. “Then we will have to change the institutions,” he answered quietly. Then he began to talk about the problems that would be involved in changing the institutions in this country non-violently. Haddad looked over at me as if this were a signal victory. Many months afterward he said that this was the first moment when he was convinced that Kennedy was different from other politicians and that he was the one major political figure who understood where everything was going and how serious it was. “He was willing to change the institutions. Even John Kennedy didn’t go that far. John Kennedy’s instinct, when he ran up against the institutions, was to try and challenge them, to elevate them. Which worked a little, but really didn’t work. Before, when I was in the Peace Corps and things would go wrong, I’d go running over to the White House and scream at Kenny O’Donnell. ‘You think you run the country! You don’t even run it from here to across the street!’ and he would answer ‘The trouble with you Haddad is that you think we don’t know it.’ And now here was Bob, seeing how deep it went, and how bad it was, and then suddenly breaking through—it was like finally seeing the blue sky. You had a sense he could go all the way and do something about it.”

  He could bring into American politics some of the very best people in the game: fresh, intelligent, even joyous men of a variety of views, and he could inspire them to an extraordinary degree. That was in part because he did not like sycophants, and because, more than most strong men who like power, he could listen to the quiet dissenting voices. Indeed one of the better epitaphs might have later read that, in a time of growing pessimism about American life among many of the best-informed young men, Robert Kennedy had nonetheless served as a rallying point for many of the most talented young men of the nation; men who were scarred by the events of the past decade, but still saw, through him, a hope of turning the country around. Yet he could also tolerate, on the fringes, self-serving and frivolous people; so that to the outsider, the Robert Kennedy people were blurred. Was it Fred Dutton, a rare practicing intellectual in American politics, or Mankiewicz, the thoughtful press secretary, who had decided to work for Kennedy when the Senator had denounced the government’s refusal of burial privileges to Robert Thompson, a Distinguished Service Medal winner but also an ex-member of the Communist party? Or was it John Lewis, the former head of Snick, a poor Negro boy from Troy, Alabama, still hopeful that the American dream might work, or was it some silly socialite? I remember once being in a crowd of some of his young social friends and wondering how in God’s name he could tolerate them, and deciding there must be some mean, perverse little Irish quirk in Kennedy which permitted him to accept the fawning of these people: one more victory for his family.

  He was visualized as a total politician, yet he frequently did things which were, technically at least, bad politics. His championing of the California grape pickers was, at best, high-risk politics and, by traditional standards, bad politics. One makes powerful enemies for marginally effective friends. His constant reiteration about the plight of the American Indians, their suicide rate, their hopelessness, had little impact on a crisis-belching American middle class which can accept no more than two causes at a given time.

  He had become the chief spokesman of the dispossessed in this country and, God knows, the conservatives and reactionaries knew it. (In Texas, it was virtually impossible to get anyone to work for him in 1968. Someone finally asked Judge Woodrow Wilson Bean, one of the few men openly supporting Kennedy, why he was doing it, and Bean answered: “Because if he’s elected, anyone from Texas will need a pass to get into Washington, and I’m going to be the man handing out the passes.”) Yet, as he started his race, he was distrusted by liberals and intellectuals to a surprising degree. People who felt deeply about his brother regarded him with grave misgivings and deep suspicion, though in 1968 he had a far greater proven record than Jack Kennedy had in 1960.

  Part of it was that he was a Kennedy, which meant that everything was bigger than life. He could not be judged like other men; more had been given to him, more was expected of him, and more would be doubted about him. In Indiana, for example, he had attracted a much bigger press corps because he was a Kennedy, but similarly, when he won, a striking victory in a conservative state, he got surprisingly little credit for his victory. Only a landslide or a defeat would move the press. Indeed The New York Times and two of the networks called McCarthy the big winner in Indiana, because he had not been eliminated. The other part of it was the Kennedys’ own fault. Like the rest of us, they wanted things both ways but unlike the rest of us, they more often than not had it both ways. They wanted to be able to complain about the lack of privacy given them by the press, and yet be able to summon photographers and reporters from important magazines to reveal all kinds of innermost thoughts at opportune moments and permit all kinds of spontaneous family photographs. They wanted to be able to get the full measure and mileage out of the power and unity of the family, to the degree that outsiders felt that the power thrust of the family came first and issues second, and yet they wanted, at the same time, to convince the uneasy, sophisticated dissenter that they were doing all these things because of the issues involved. Then there was Camelot. The country at times liked Kennedy for being part of Camelot, and then hated him because of course there was no Camelot. And why did the Kennedys pretend there was? Wasn’t it nice to have an American royal family at last, but who were these Kennedys, did they think they were better than the rest of us?

  Thus he could not be like other men and this feeling extended to all of us; we all had our ambivalent feelings about him. I remember the night of Martin Luther King’s funeral. I sat with Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times, one of the most distinguished reporters in the country, a strong idealistic man, and perhaps as knowledgeable about race in the South as any man in the country, and a fan of Kennedy’s. We were talking about the long, grueling march in the very hot weather from the church to Morehouse College. Kennedy had made the march and had evoked by far the most passionate response from Negroes along the way. Yet he had taken off his jacket, as had some others, and I was complaining about this. I suppose I felt it was half youth-cult and half tough-cult, but Nelson was defending him. Others had taken their coats off; it was only normal; it was not demagogic. Why, he said, Martin Luther King would have taken off his coat at the funeral. No he wouldn’t, I said, you just don’t do that. No, said Nelson, King had even done it, at the funeral of Jimmie Lee Jackson, but when Kennedy does it, you all read too much into it. Case closed.

  Yet finally when he was judged, he had to be judged not just on the past and the my
thology of the past, but in his time, when America itself was changing so rapidly, and on his capacity for growth. They were not just the years before the White House, or even the three years in power, as the right hand of The Man, but also and equally important, those post-power years when he had stood outside the power establishment looking in, and had become consumed by the poor in America, and the inequities within the system. He had changed radically and he understood the rapid changes in America, and this did not always help him. Not only were many of the reporters describing the early Robert Kennedy, but they were also writing about their own version of America—vintage 1960. One man, Bill Wilson, a talented young television producer, an early Stevensonian, had worked with Jack Kennedy in 1960. He had not liked Robert Kennedy and had reluctantly come to work for him in 1968, but was startled by the change; “Now he is tough of mind and tough of spirit, not just tough of mouth.”

  Kennedy had begun his public career as a social illiterate. He worked for a time for the justice department, and then took a job with the McCarthy committee, a natural enough liaison worked out through his father, who admired McCarthy. (McCarthy and the elder Kennedy had become good friends; the elder Kennedy admired McCarthy for his enemies: liberals, members of the Eastern establishment, and the British.) Kennedy’s role was not major, largely working out statistics on allies who were trading with the Communists during the Korean war, and he eventually ended up as a counsel for the Democrats on the committee. He admired McCarthy, did not dissent or even think to dissent from what he was doing. He did not see anything particularly destructive to it, and saw McCarthy being destroyed by Roy Cohn and David Schine who played to his desire for publicity. (“He was on a toboggan,” he would later tell one interviewer. “It was so exciting and exhilarating as he went downhill that it didn’t matter to him if he hit a tree at the bottom. Cohn and Schine took him up the mountain and showed him all those wonderful things. He destroyed himself for that—for publicity.”) Kennedy broke with McCarthy more over Roy Cohn than anything else; a relationship which almost ended with a fistfight He ended his tour of the McCarthy committee by serving as counsel for the Democrats, though he did remain loyal to McCarthy to the end, one of the few who did, as the Wisconsin Senator ravaged himself. At the end, Kennedy received an award as one of the Junior Chamber of Commerce’s young men of the year but walked out during the main speech by Edward R. Murrow, who had distinguished himself to most of the nation by his battles with McCarthy.

  After that he joined the Senate Rackets Committee, becoming a relentless chaser of hoods in general and Jimmy Hoffa in particular. Here the full force of his indignation was felt for the first time in this country. One reporter who covered the Teamster investigations was enormously impressed with Kennedy’s determination, his single-mindedness, the way his anger exploded at Hoffa’s operation and Hoffa’s belief that he was beyond American laws. “At once you admired what he was doing, the intensity of it all, and how well he did it, and at the same time you wondered a little about Kennedy and how he felt about labor in general,” the reporter said. This was a feeling that much of labor’s leadership was to retain; the leadership went for Jack Kennedy in 1960, but it always remained uneasy about Robert Kennedy. It felt that he had enjoyed the Hoffa prosecution a little too much, and this hurt him some in 1968. Kennedy’s puritanism bloomed and flourished during the combat with the hoods and the toughs. Joe Gallo, one of the hoods investigated, later recalled that Kennedy had looked at him and said, “‘So you’re Joe Gallo the Jukebox. You don’t look so tough. I’d like to fight you myself.’ So I hadda tell him I don’t fight.” Kennedy himself thought that the toughs, themselves, were overrated. He once told a friend that anyone who talked as much about being tough as Hoffa did, couldn’t really be that tough. Yet a violent struggle emerged; they threatened each other, they swapped insults, they were ready to match each other in push-ups. Kennedy once drove home past midnight, the last person to leave the Senate office building, only to see the lights in Hoffa’s Teamster office still on; he turned around and went back to his own office. Kennedy was in those days very much the prosecutor, not a great social-cause-and-effect man. He saw the American system working, and working well, and he simply saw Hoffa violating it. The Teamster years were not beneficial for him. Rather they benefitted Jack Kennedy, giving him needed national exposure, and hurt Robert Kennedy’s standing with his future constituents, the liberals. He did, however, make some acquaintances among the extraordinary group of investigative reporters covering the Teamsters who were to become his most trusted friends: Wally Turner, John Seigenthaler, Ed Guthman. Yet Kennedy would retain, and find difficult to shake, the image of a prosecutor, and people in general, and liberals in particular, do not like prosecutors. Liberals do not like investigations of labor, even if it is corrupt. In those days it went against their instincts, it might be labor baiting, and yes, they would think, maybe Hoffa is abusive, but isn’t he being singled out? In sum, Kennedy would lose more by the Hoffa investigation than he would gain. Hoffa would call him ruthless, and that would stick. Hoffa might be ruthless too, but he would not be running one day for the presidency of the United States.

  He had never, of course, lost sight of the priority assignment in those days—to elect Jack Kennedy President. That ambition was the family ambition and it never dimmed. Was Seigenthaler a close friend through the Rackets Committee investigations? Well then, the Kennedys would later send Robert down to Nashville and use that connection as a base in searching for delegates, in meeting people. In 1956 they had an attractive young candidate, and they had come within a hair of the vice-presidency in the open convention. Beaten by Kefauver, Robert Kennedy, working the floor, had found that many delegates liked Jack Kennedy, thought him a real comer, but Estes, well old Estes had been to their homes, had sent them postcards. Between 1956 and 1960 a lot of postcards were sent out by the Kennedys and a lot of homes visited. (Jet travel has enormously changed political conventions. In the old days when travel was so slow, the proselytizing was done at the conventions and thus the delegates arrived more malleable. Now, with jets, they are visited, wined and dined locally and sought at their very doorsteps. By convention time one nominally knows whom they’re for.) The interim years were thus crucial and the Kennedys became adept at all this; there were so many of them to go visiting and they always had the financial resources to do it. But the 1956 race proved valuable. Young Robert Kennedy traveled with the Stevenson campaign all over the country, sitting quietly, realizing that the election was lost, but that it was a fortuitous break that Kefauver rather than his brother was on the ticket (the onus would not go against the Catholics). He made endless notes on how badly the campaign was run, the poor timing, the waste of the candidate’s time and energy, the failure to schedule well, the lack of press kits.

  He was an excellent campaign manager for his brother in 1960. Though it was Jack Kennedy’s campaign, an extraordinary number of the key men, the organizers, the drivers, were men brought in by Robert. It was as if Jack were in charge of the intellectual component, the speeches, the policies, the ideology, while Robert was in charge of organizing, of the talent, of the loyalty, picking and deciding which men could do it and which could not. Bobby would test the men; Jack would test the ideas. As campaign manager he had the total trust of his brother. He guarded Jack’s interest zealously; Jack was a precious commodity and was not to be scratched, worn down or irritated. He understood Jack and his best interests. The brothers, different in style and in friends, had been brought much closer by politics; without the common link of Jack’s destiny, they might have gone quite different ways, with different friends, different wives, different tastes. Now Jack Kennedy had a campaign manager who understood not only the candidate, but the family; someone who would not be too independent, or peek his own publicity, or get independent ideas, and someone who could take the heat. This latter is terribly important.

  A campaign is a difficult thing and there are endless decisions to be made. Not
only must the candidate be saved from making them in order to conserve his time, but more—a lot of the decisions are cruel, they have an element of rejection in them, and they can make enemies. Thus a person whose campaign idea or campaign role is rejected must not be made to think that it was the candidate who had turned him down. He must think that it was unsympathetic underlings. In this case it was the illiberal Bobby who was blocking him out. It was also Bobby who had to separate the endless fights between the local reform groups and the local machines, while keeping both in the Kennedy camp. It must always be the Good Jack and the Bad Bobby. “I’m not running a popularity contest,” he said at the time. “It doesn’t matter if people like me or not Jack can be nice to them. I don’t try to antagonize people, but somebody has to be able to say No. If people are not getting off their behinds, how do you say that?” He was very good, always willing to take the heat, always willing to back up his people, and willing to try the unorthodox. (A young political science professor who bucked the organization in upstate New York, in 1960, got an enormous kickback from the machine, which went directly to Robert Kennedy: Was one young egghead worth five old professionals, even if Kennedy himself had given the go ahead on the strategy earlier? The professor, to his surprise, found that Kennedy backed him up. He became a lifelong and influential devotee.) Kennedy was at times rough and almost too devoted to his purpose. Anyone, in those simplistic days, who opposed Jack was a bad guy likely to be roughly treated; and even friends found their sensibilities trampled on. A lifetime of intelligent and dedicated service to certain principles meant nothing to Kennedy if the person was somehow blocking, or likely to help block, Jack Kennedy’s presidential ambitions. Harsh words were spoken; and years later people would exonerate Jack Kennedy and remember Bobby Kennedy. It was at the convention that he told the unhappy Humphrey, wavering between Stevenson and Kennedy, “Hubert, we want your announcement and the pledge of the Minnesota delegation today or else.” To which Humphrey replied: “Go to hell.” But he ran an excellent campaign. They had enough delegates, and they kept them in line. If he was frequently and justifiably accused of twisting arms one notch too many, it was also true that on the first ballot their calculations were almost letter perfect It was also true that the first ballot was vital. The bosses still had their doubts about Kennedy and the liberals still loved Stevenson, and any defection might start an outbound tide. If they missed on the first ballot, they might miss completely. But the convention was won, and so was the campaign. Jack became the handsome young President and Robert took the heat; he had won for his brother but lost for himself.