If it is not traditional to appoint the campaign manager Attorney General, it is not exactly unusual either. So the question very early became whether Jack would appoint Robert to the justice department. The President was reluctantly inclined toward it, he wanted Robert Kennedy around and he trusted his advice. Joseph Kennedy was enthusiastically for it; the cries of dynasty hardly frightened or embarrassed him. Nothing would have pleased him more than to have founded a dynasty. Robert himself was dubious. He remembered that when Nixon had visited South Carolina during the 1960 campaign, Bill Rogers, the Attorney General and one of the ablest members of the Eisenhower administration, had been forced to hide in the plane because of his unpopularity. (Eight years later Robert Kennedy, visiting Atlanta, would see a young girl named Kathy McGrath, a twenty-two-year-old secretary who had come to the airport to meet him. When she asked for his autograph he would write: “To Kathy. You are now in charge of my campaign in Georgia. Good luck. You’ll need it. Bob Kennedy.”) Besides, there were other things in the administration which he would have liked to try, perhaps in State or Defense, places where he could learn and could soften the intensity of feeling against him. Jack Kennedy, wanting his brother in this special role, finally decided to go ahead, though noting to a friend: “I’d like to open the door at about 3 A.M. and announce that Bobby is the Attorney General and then shut the door and run like hell.” Jack Kennedy, witty, gracious, charming, had always been amused by his younger brother’s ability to take the heat for him. In 1962 a group of congressmen dropped by the White House to pay the President a visit. It was a pleasant amiable session and finally one Southern congressman said, “Mister President, I’m afraid I’m going to have to attack you in a speech for all this civil-rights activity.” The President laughed and said: “Why can’t you just call Bobby a son of a bitch?”
The early days of the John Kennedy administration were marked by a certain arrogance of the hard-nosed—we’re eggheads, but we’re tough too—and Robert Kennedy was one of the leading offenders. It was a time when activist eggheads with muscles were in, and old soft eggheads, many of them Stevensonians, were out. The newer men were in their late thirties and early forties, more often than not combat veterans of the war, well-read, articulate, playing down their idealism; it was not something one talked about. Chester Bowles was almost symbolic of the old kind, though many of the administration’s best ambassadorial appointments were made by him. He was too avowedly liberal, too quick to talk openly, in daily conversation, about idealism. Robert Kennedy was to finally emerge, in instance after instance, as the single most important liberal influence in the administration, but the very idea of this would have appalled him. In those days he would have been embarrassed to go around spouting liberal ideology; his liberalism was camouflaged under the tough-guy exterior. When Bowles appeared ready to blab about having been against the Bay of Pigs, Robert Kennedy’s finger went into his stomach: you were for it, remember that. (The story went around the country and it wasn’t the Bowles people who put it out either.) Indeed part of the mystique of the administration was toughness—Floyd Patterson’s photograph hung in the Attorney General’s office until Patterson lost the heavyweight title. Shortly after the administration started, with speaking invitations coming in from everywhere and very few being accepted, one came in from a Polish group. Come on, he said, let’s take that one. I like the Poles, they’re tough.
When Burke Marshall was being looked over for Assistant Attorney General, the early doubts about him were that he wasn’t tough enough; which was true. Marshall on the outside is a mild, quiet man; his fingers do not go into people’s stomachs, yet he proved in those years to be a man of as much steel and fiber as anyone that administration produced. He became as close to Robert Kennedy as anyone, and Kennedy, at the end, probably relied upon his basic judgment more than that of anyone else. He also had a part in teaching the young Attorney General that tough talk is not always toughness; that steel does not necessarily come from swaggering, boasting and hard talk (the New Frontier had a lot of that), but from quiet inner conviction. Nonetheless, to the end, the word tough had a fascination for Robert Kennedy. It was still a qualify he admired, though he might have given a much different description of it by 1968.
The years as Attorney General were very important for him in a variety of ways. For one thing they gave him an identifiable public record. Instead of being a shadowy figure slipping in and out of the back door, blamed for all that was bad, and credited with little that was good, he became a man with a record which could be checked. He was more than just an Attorney General, he was like a deputy president, particularly after the Bay of Pigs. He advised the President on almost every major issue, seeing the world from the eye of the storm. (The President quite accurately felt that the traditional advisers who came with the offices were more identified with their own particular agencies than with the Kennedy administration.) He was a good Attorney General, getting better. He made good, even excellent appointments. He gave people their head. Most important, on the great questions of the day, he was very good.
On civil rights both he and his brother entered with a nominal interest, and Robert Kennedy left with a growing sensitivity. They had both come from Massachusetts where the race question was for a long time a minor ethnic political issue. Had they been from Illinois or New York they might have been more immediately sensitive to the complexities and depth of black feelings. Rather they had run in 1960 as traditional liberal Democratic politicians: hold the old coalition together, be for (rather than against) the Negro, don’t say anything against them, give whoever their anointed leaders, are the minimal reward, usually one notch above what the previous administration gave. Besides, 1960 was the last year of the old order. The Negroes, given the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on segregation in the schools, had waited for six years for the courts to give them their share of the action. Now, in 1960, the young restless lads who had received no benefit from the legal change were taking the matter into their own hands. They began with sit-ins, demanding the right to eat bad overpriced hamburgers just like any other American. They radically changed the pace and tempo of the race question in America, and inevitably, the federal government would be involved in a growing number of moral decisions. The Kennedys did not realize this at first, they were still thinking in traditional terms. They had done a little more for the Negro than the previous administration and they had not yet realized that a revolution had started. They were like most important and influential Americans of that time; they were far more interested in foreign crises than the coming domestic storm. In addition, their hesitance to take the initiative on civil rights at the start of the administration reflected their nervousness after the narrow victory of 1960; one sensed that they planned to go slow in the first administration, then run again, in 1964, win by a landslide, and then move ahead on civil rights.
In 1963 Robert Kennedy decided to meet with a group of Negro intellectuals and artists. Just why was never clear, but the impression was strong that he wanted to hear what was on their minds, wanted to be praised a little, and wanted to create continuing ties of friendship—perhaps toward 1964. He asked James Baldwin, the peripatetic writer and protester, to arrange it. Many of the Negroes invited never exactly understood what it was they were being so impatiently summoned to, but arrived at Baldwin’s desperate plea. The meeting was a disaster. Kennedy totally misjudged the temper of the Negroes who, meeting in a large group with a white man, all went to the more militant position. (Six years later I asked him what he learned from the meeting. He said, “Never meet with more than two or three Negroes at a time. Never with eighteen. With eighteen it’s hopeless. Everyone has to be more militant. Now I realize what they were saying, and why, and why they were so angry, but what was hard to take at the time were the ones who let me take the roasting and then came over afterward to sympathize.”) A young civil-rights worker who had been beaten on the head during one of the then-recent Freedom Rides got up and said that it made h
im sick being there. He apparently meant that it made him sick having to sit there and ask for his rights which by constitutional right were already his. Kennedy, however, misunderstood and thought him to be saying that it made him sick to be with Robert Kennedy. Kennedy had been under the impression that the Kennedys were for the Negroes, and that, of course, the Negroes understood this, and so he pointed to administration accomplishments. They were stunned; to them Kennedy was talking about one drop in a very big bucket, and they had thought he had, at least, realized this, realized how little had been done for the Negroes. At the end of the meeting Baldwin told people that “Bobby Kennedy was a little surprised at the depth of Negro feeling. We were a little shocked at the extent of his naiveté.”
But the momentum of American life was headed toward new and militant demands, and the protesters carried the administration with them. Again and again the administration was caught in civil-rights crises, inevitably to land on the side of the Negroes, and inevitably to bring greater affection for the Kennedys from the Negroes. Similarly, there developed in Robert Kennedy a growing sensitivity to the problem of black and white in America. The Kennedys became committed on civil rights in those years simply because there was nowhere else to go, except backward. Thus in 1968, in a black neighborhood, a handmade sign over a Kennedy storefront would read:
Kennedy white but alright.
The one before, he opened the door.
On foreign affairs he became a surprisingly cool and thoughtful influence. In an administration heavy with political scientists, Robert Kennedy’s basic value to the President was that he had excellent common sense, judged people well, and often followed his own best instincts. (Following one’s best instincts and common sense would have avoided both the Bay of Pigs and the ground war in Vietnam.) His role grew after the Bay of Pigs. The President needed him, and one sensed that the President set out to expand Robert’s world, picking the Attorney General for foreign assignment as the President’s representative and thus putting his younger brother into situations which might expand and broaden his view of the world. I went on his first major trip, in August 1961, when Kennedy represented the President at the independence ceremonies at the Ivory Coast. He was shy, uncertain of himself. (I remember him wrestling with both his French and his speech: “Your President, Houphouet-Boigny, is the George Washington of your country.” Then he listed all the similarities between American and Ivorien history.) But even here, certain characteristics came through. He wanted a candid and thorough briefing before leaving and he was appalled by the lack of knowledge and interest of the first three men the State Department sent over. He kept sending them back until the Department sent over a young man named Brandon Grove who had just spent three years in the Ivory Coast, and who knew the background and the current political balance. Kennedy immediately drafted him for the trip, and later took him on his world tour in 1962. The other thing he demonstrated on arrival was his disdain for normal diplomatic procedures, many of which are hopelessly out of date in a contemporary world. The embassy there had scheduled a series of meetings with all the official people. Instead, he wanted to talk with students, labor leaders (as much as they had them), and of course he wanted to get out into the boondocks to see how the people lived. The embassy felt he ran roughshod over it, pushed its members around, made unnecessary and unfair demands, and insulted its good Ivorien friends. Almost everyone else loved it. This would not be the last embassy to feel this way.
He behaved particularly well during the Cuban missile-crisis in 1962. At the height of the crisis, when the two main choices were a naval blockade and a surprise air strike to eliminate the missile sites, most advisers appeared to favor the bombing. Robert Kennedy strongly opposed it. The air strike, he said, sounded like a Pearl Harbor in reverse. It would be hard to explain to the rest of the world—particularly after the Bay of Pigs—why a great nation was bombing such a small one, and most people would doubt that the missile sites really existed. He did not want his brother to become the Tojo of the sixties. Dean Acheson, a power man and a man with a considerable reputation, attempted to destroy the Attorney General’s argument. The young man, he said, simply wasn’t dealing with the realities of power and this was a situation where you used power. But Kennedy insisted: American tradition and ideals were completely against such a bombing raid and the world would never understand it. Douglas Dillon, originally for the air strikes, swung around on the basis of the Attorney General’s argument. “What changed my mind,” he later told Elie Abel, who chronicled the crisis, “was Bob’s argument that we ought to be true to ourselves as Americans, that surprise attack was not in our tradition. Frankly these considerations had not occurred to me until Bob raised them. ...” Later during the same crisis the Attorney General was useful again. Khrushchev had sent a Friday note which was conciliatory but then made a Saturday broadcast which seemed more threatening. It was Robert Kennedy’s simple but sound idea to ignore the Saturday message and simply respond to the Friday one.
On Vietnam he was one of the principal authors of the counterinsurgency commitment. An early enthusiast, he forced everyone in Washington to go to special classes on counterinsurgency. Yet even then his judgment was helpful. During 1963 when I was in Vietnam and was not exactly the favorite reporter of the Kennedy administration, the administration saw that a major foreign-policy disaster was shaping up and wished that the crisis would go away or, failing that, that my colleagues and I would go away. Michael Forrestal, the White House man on Vietnam, saw, probably more than any other Washington official, what was coming. He saw it clearly and used his influence to change Washington policy. At the time he told me that if you wanted to get dissident ideas through to the President (which is a very important thing, given the constantly increasing power of the executive branch, the natural isolation of the Presidency, and the instinct of most men to tell powerful men what they want to hear), the single person most open to suggestion and to accepting bad news was Robert Kennedy.
Those were nevertheless good and heady days for the Kennedys, a confluence of power, intelligence, style and glamour perhaps never seen before in this country. Everyone, it seemed, was bright, handsome and tough and had a goodlooking wife. They set a style which those of us on the outside might envy, for it was true that the Kennedys, with their wealth, could have free what money could not buy. They could get other immensely talented people to work for them who would not work for other politicians no matter how correct the politician’s ideological position or voting record. Those who were simply wealthy found glamour; those who had glamour and wealth found power. It was, in fact, too good a time. They inhaled people; thoughtful journalists and intellectuals who could not be bought in the real sense were taken over by the Kennedys and the glamour. They became too close, they went regularly to Hickory Hill, saw only what they wanted to see, and finally in the eyes of their colleagues they became Kennedy satellites, Kennedy insiders. Their gossip would be listened to, their presence at a dinner party sought, their post-administration books bought, but finally they would be seen as Kennedy men, and this would come back to haunt Robert Kennedy. Years later, when his own candidacy was advanced, many of the people who now spoke for him were a little tarnished, their independence questioned, their intellectual judgment no longer so valued. There was, in some places, a Camelot black-lash. Robert Kennedy would be in a position where his enemies would be armed and his supporters disarmed. Other younger men coming along, viewing his candidacy, would deliberately stand a little further back: no one was going to inhale them. He was not going to get the benefit of the doubt.
It would always be a point of dispute: whether the dominant force was Kennedyism, the Kennedys first, right or wrong, or whether it was issues, those particular causes he came to articulate, which formed the real pull. To some journalists and critics resisting the pull and the glamour, there was a feeling that the Kennedys, starting back before 1960, had always practiced manipulation with issues; that the basic inner ideology was simpl
y The Family, right or wrong; and that many in the inner circle were motivated not so much by causes and social issues, as simply by the fact that this team was a winning one—it had won once before and now there would be a restoration. Thus there was a feeling among many reporters, particularly in the early and mid-sixties, that it was not enough to like the Kennedys part way, to be partially sympathetic but still to write about their warts (though they had fewer warts). One had to go all the way with them. (Laura Bergquist of Look, a sympathetic journalist-friend of the family, recalled asking the then Attorney General a tough question about bombings in the South at a magazine writer’s luncheon. Kennedy, unhappy with the subject, fumbled the question. Later an angry Ethel Kennedy grabbed Miss Bergquist in the ladies’ room and said to her fiercely, “I thought you were a friend of my husband’s.”) This all led to a feeling that the Kennedys were overzealously policing up their image, and finally a belief that the Manchester affair, messy and demeaning as it was, was exactly what they had long deserved. (Even though Manchester did violate his contract, and Robert Kennedy, caught between his sister-in-law and his own political career, behaved honorably, if perhaps unwisely from a political point of view.)
The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy Page 14