The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

by David Halberstam

  My own feeling was that this sense of Kennedyism had begun to ebb in the last two years of Robert Kennedy’s life; that it was one more reflection of the change in his viewpoint; that in the post-assassination period, issues and human grievances began to consume him and that he judged people not so much on how they related to the Kennedys, but on how they related to issues. Hence some of the differences between the old Kennedy advisers and journalistic friends, and the newer more issue-oriented Kennedy friends and journalistic friends: George Smathers, the Florida Senator who led the fight against minimum wage for migrant workers, was an old Kennedy friend; Cesar Chavez was a new Kennedy friend.

  But the symbol of the conflict between the Kennedys and their critics was the uneasy relationship between the candidate and The New York Times. Kennedy got on reasonably well with the reporters, but the editors were another thing; there was a tension going back to the early Jack Kennedy days when John Oakes, the editor of the editorial page, had once implied that Sorensen, not Jack Kennedy, was primarily responsible for the writing of Profiles in Courage. Jack Kennedy went to considerable length to point out that this was false. That tension had never eased. The great strength of The Times is that it will stand alone; it can and does resist fad, idol, and even president of the United States. Hence an almost inevitable clash between two powerful contemporary institutions—The New York Times and the Kennedys. The Kennedys, because they were liberals, assumed The Times would be in their hip pocket, or at least sympathetic, which it clearly was not. It was as if this very assumption of the Kennedys brought out a stronger sense of The Times’ independence, a conscious desire not to be swept away. (Thus Kennedy would be annoyed with what he felt was The Times’ instinct for publishing photographs of the handsome young Mayor of New York, John Lindsay, playing tennis or riding a bike, rather than of the handsome young Senator from New York. He once asked Mankiewicz to call The Times to suggest that the paper photograph Kennedy playing handball in the Senate gym. Mankiewicz did. The Times was not amused. The Times editors, for their part, felt the Kennedys were manipulative on issues and manipulative of the press. I remember being with the young publisher of The Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, in early 1966 when his wife criticized him sharply for the abundance of Bobby stories in his paper; she insisted that he was going to be responsible for making Kennedy president. At the end, during his last campaign, there seemed finally to be a certain justification to the Kennedy complaints that there was a double standard against them, that The Times was viewing Robert Kennedy more on the past than on the present, and lent credence to the old attacks on Kennedy for ruthlessness and spending too much money. (The Oregon campaign, The Times wrote, was “too relentless and too aggressive in its single-minded pursuit of power.”) There was some bitterness later in the year when Nelson Rockefeller, running belatedly for the Republican nomination, began spending money, in the words of one Kennedy aide, “like a drunken sailor”—with the enthusiastic support of The Times.

  That time of excitement ended with the assassination. In those post-assassination days, Robert Kennedy was like a man in shock. He had devoted everything to his older brother, had thought little of himself, and now it was all gone, insanely destroyed. He was also without a political base, for Lyndon Johnson was now President and Robert Kennedy and Johnson had always been opponents. The sharp things Johnson had said about Jack in 1960 rolled off Jack’s back, but not off Robert’s; and Robert Kennedy had reciprocated by ignoring Johnson during the years in office. There was deep hostility and suspicion. Robert Kennedy offered himself as ambassador to South Vietnam and was rejected by the President who thought it too dangerous. He wanted the vice-presidency. Some of his advisers, like Kenny O’Donnell, suggested a frontal attack—putting so much pressure on through the party organization, which was at that time still more pro-Kennedy than pro-Johnson, that the President would have to yield. But he turned this down and started to campaign.

  He went to Poland where he was greeted by tumultuous crowds. He broke all kinds of protocol and enraged the American Embassy by disregarding its instructions, showing up late for official dinners, barnstorming all over the country. At one point, standing on top of a car, he began to speak to a group crowding around. Inside the car was the patrician ambassador John Moors Cabot who told a Kennedy aide, “Would you mind telling the Attorney General the roof is falling in on us.” This delighted the aides; they took the words and inscribed them on a silver tray which they gave to the Attorney General. Polish officials were furious with his conduct. “Do you know who you shook hands with this morning in the market?” asked an indignant deputy minister of foreign affairs. “My maid.” The trip seemed to rejuvenate him.

  But Lyndon Johnson was unmoved. He did not want Robert Kennedy as his vice-president. Kennedy of course knew this would happen, that he would be the last person Johnson wanted “... because my name is Kennedy, because he wants a Johnson administration with no Kennedys in it, because we travel different paths, because I suppose some businessmen would object and I’d cost them a few votes in the South.” Eventually the President called Kennedy in to break the news. It was a relatively pleasant meeting, Johnson praised Kennedy’s past service, said he had a bright future, wanted him to run the campaign, but did not want him on the ticket. As the Attorney General left he turned and said almost wistfully, “I could have helped you a lot.” But it did not end well; a few days later Johnson called in three reporters and over a very long lunch regaled them with the story of how he had broken the news to Kennedy. He told how Kennedy had gulped when he heard it. Kennedy was furious when he learned of this; the already bad feelings between the two became even worse. At the convention Johnson was still nervous about his own hold on the party, and the Kennedy electricity. A film on John F. Kennedy had been carefully censored and just as carefully scheduled by the President. There was no mention of Robert Kennedy in it, and it was not shown until after the vice-presidential nomination was completed. Robert Kennedy introduced the film and it was the most dramatic and emotional moment of the entire convention, fifteen minutes of wild cheering. Finally he spoke, quoting from Romeo and Juliet:

  When he shall die

  Take him and cut him out in little stars,

  And he will make the face of heaven so fine

  That all the world will be in love with night

  And pay no worship to the garish sun.

  Without a base, anxious to keep his career alive and continue the restoration (“And if anything happens to me Bobby will take my place, and if anything happens to him it will be Teddy,” Jack Kennedy had once said describing how he had taken Joe Jr.’s place as the family politician), Robert Kennedy turned to New York for the Senate seat. It was not something which appealed to him; there was already one Kennedy in the Senate, and besides Robert Kennedy was an activist, a doer, he did not particularly want to be a junior member of a deliberative body. But there was nowhere else to go, and he came to New York to run against Kenneth Keating. To a degree this would undermine even more his credentials with liberals, for Keating was a man who, though leading the league in anti-Communist, anti-Nasser and anti-Sukarno speeches, had an enviable record for domestic legislation. Many liberals would finally vote for Kennedy, but they would do it grudgingly, feeling somehow that they were deserting Keating who had a right to their loyalty. It was a fairly banal campaign. Each ran around the state courting the ethnic vote, particularly the Jewish vote which was regarded as a swing factor. They made every temple breakfast in town; they wore their yarmulkes all over the city. Keating recounted his many speeches against Nasser and said he would make Israel a member of NATO; Kennedy imported Abe Ribicoff to talk to Jews. “The things you are saying against Bob Kennedy are exactly the same things you said four years ago against Jack Kennedy,” Ribicoff told Jewish groups.

  The main issue against Kennedy was that he was a carpetbagger; that plus the fact that no one was angry with Keating. He was white-haired, he was nice, he looked like a Senator and he was virt
uous on the Goldwater issue (his virtue consisted of failing to endorse Goldwater; an endorsement, of course, would have been suicidal). He was not, however, a particularly good target for a young man, a carpetbagger, and a man around whom a good deal of suspicion still swirled. Yet Kennedy was the heir of the great family, and a nation still mourned an assassinated President. “I am for Robert Kennedy,” wrote Murray Kempton who reflected some of the emotion of the times but was to become a bitter critic in 1968, “because he is a decent and talented young man terribly wounded whom I do not want to look upon wounded further. This is like being for Bonnie Prince Charlie; it has to do with commitment to a divine right and there are no reasonable arguments for a divine right.” Two things finally sealed Kennedy’s victory. One was his use of television which was far better than Keating’s. Kennedy’s television spots were fresh and modern; Keating always seemed to be backed by an American flag. The Kennedy radio spots were well done too. Over and over the voice would come: “Think about it for a minute: which of the candidates running for United States Senator has the better chance of becoming a great U.S. Senator ... a great U.S. Senator. ... On November 3, vote for Robert Kennedy.” It was effective, slick stuff; it caught just the right implication for the Kennedy camp, that though Keating was a very nice old man, perhaps he was not really as good as his voting record, maybe he wasn’t a really strong figure. The other asset was Goldwater. In New York State Goldwater was the kiss of death. Johnson would carry New York by 2.6 million votes. Kennedy was aware of this as the campaign progressed. He put greater emphasis on supporting not just Bob Kennedy, but the Johnson-Humphrey-Kennedy ticket; he emphasized that he was the only candidate who was for Lyndon Johnson. In the final days Hubert Humphrey came in to campaign for him. Thus he won, but with the galling fact that he had come in on Lyndon Johnson’s coattails. It annoyed him. The rest of the country might not pay attention to it, but it was something that he and Lyndon Johnson both knew, and that was two people too many.

  Nominally a Senate seat from New York is a weak power base. The senate bestows power by seniority and by security so that the most important and powerful members come from small states with one-party electorates and one-crop economies. They were the men who survived, who worked their way up in the Washington jungle. They would return home briefly to make the pro-sheep farmer speech and then return to Washington where they gained seniority; they played the game and eventually dominated the Washington scene. This was the direct opposite of Kennedy politics, the provocative politics of youth and energy, injecting themselves into issues, speaking out, having immediate media impact on the world outside Washington rather than the world inside. The Kennedys are not known for waiting.

  Under normal conditions a junior senate seat, particularly from New York where one must speak for the polyglot of ethnic, business, industrial and labor groups, might have led him to quick obscurity, especially with his party in the White House, or might have saddled him with endless speeches promoting all of New York’s vast and conflicting groups. The Ukrainian speech one day, the Jewish speech the next, then the pro-cop speech and then the pro-parking violator speech. But the Johnson presidency soon became dominated by Vietnam, and the Democratic party became at once the party of power and the party of dissent. Kennedy was thus pushed more and more into a special role; because he was a Kennedy, his constituency was not just New York, his constituency was national. On issue after issue, as Johnson became imprisoned by the war, people looked to Kennedy for leadership. Gradually, through the hearings he held on urban problems in the Senate, through trips to Mississippi and to the grape pickers in California and to the Indians in New Mexico, he became the spokesman for the poor and the restless and the dissatisfied in America. Thus when America suddenly began to go through great social change, all of this heightened by the war in Vietnam (which drained off money and sharpened existing divisions), Kennedy was, by chance and not especially desire, on the outside looking in. He was outside the power establishment and he could feel, himself, some of the futility which the dispossessed felt. His course became one of increased radicalism. “The difference between him and Humphrey,” said one of his friends midway through the campaign, “is that Humphrey started out, in 1948, outside the establishment and slowly and steadily was incorporated into it, step by step until, in 1968, he was an official establishment figure. When the columnists talk about Humphrey being the man of reconciliation because he can bring together the labor unions and the Southern governors, they’re really talking about him reconciling two different parts of the establishment—they may have made it by quite different roads, but they’re both there nevertheless. Now Kennedy began in power, but because of events was thrown out of the establishment and thus has looked at American society from the outside. There is one other difference; one was out in 1948 and the other was out in 1967, and that means a very great deal of difference in outlook.”

  IV

  NEBRASKA CAME AND WENT quickly. It was a triumph of imported organization and style. Indiana had taken all the time and effort, but the Kennedys, it was one of their great assets, had the resources to send yet another team into Nebraska to schedule the candidate properly, to save his time, and to get him the proper exposure. McCarthy was already stretched too thin in Indiana. His eye was on Oregon and California. He lacked sufficient organizational structure; he had virtually forgotten about Nebraska until too late. Then his campaign was a disaster; a hodgepodge of mis-scheduling, wasted time and effort, and long hours trying to get to the wrong town. His frustration built as he sensed that the Kennedys were moving around smoothly, seeing more people, getting in and out of towns quickly, and choosing the right towns. There is occasionally a moment when a candidate finds himself lost in an area, and that happened to McCarthy in Nebraska. Nebraska is a difficult state for a Democrat to campaign in anyway; its population is stretched thin and far. At the outset the Kennedys had been more worried about Nebraska than any other state. It had treated John Kennedy roughly, and it seemed to distrust Easterners; Easterners were different and had too long imposed their ideas, their taste, their accents, and worse, their government on the Midwest. In particular, the Kennedys, Eastern, rich and patrician, had seemed out of place in Nebraska. Jack Kennedy had hated the idea of farm issues. He had once appointed John Kenneth Galbraith, a former agricultural economist, his chief farm expert, saying, “Ken, I don’t want to hear about farm policy from anyone but you—and I don’t want to hear about it from you either.” Orville Freeman, named Secretary of Agriculture under Kennedy, had explained his appointment at the time: “I think it has something to do with the fact that they don’t have a school of agriculture at Harvard.” Now Robert Kennedy would mock that cultural gap between east and west in town after town in Nebraska: “Don’t you just feel it when you’re looking at a fellow farmer? I come from New York, a great farming state,” he would say, laughing at their skeptical looks. “What? You don’t accept that? Well we’re first in the production of sour cherries. ...”

  The scheduling had been good. They had been aided by Phil Sorensen, Ted’s brother and a former lieutenant governor, and they managed to hit all the towns larger than 10,000. The Kennedys rented a train and used it to tie together many of the otherwise isolated towns—towns which had been formed in the first place because of their proximity to the Union Pacific. The Kennedys had reinvented trains as a means of campaigning in Indiana. Trains now had made the complete cycle in American politics, from the only means of transportation to gimmick transportation scheduled by a candidate to give the television crews something extra to cover; remembrances of an America Past. And it had worked. When Robert Kennedy had boarded the Wabash Cannonball he had no less a fellow traveler than David Brinkley himself, there to cover Americana for NBC. That particular ride had gone very well. Indeed when the Kennedy canvassers checked with the public about which of the candidate’s television commercials they like the best, a majority cited the one about the Wabash Cannonball. This irritated Goodwin and the ad
vertising people a good deal, and delighted Mankiewicz and the press staff. The train was cheap, colorful, and easy on the candidate. “We never realized how easy those old-style politicians had it,” Dutton said one day after a train ride. “The trains are very easy. The candidate gets on, and he can rest. He has a whole car in which he can work with his advisers. There’s no bumping around in the clouds, no jumping on and off the plane, no fighting your way through crowd after crowd. The crowds assemble for you; if there’s any shoving, it’s not you who gets shoved. You talk for a few minutes, you quote George Bernard Shaw so you don’t leave any reporters behind, and then you can rest again.”