The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

by David Halberstam

  In Nebraska the train touched tiny towns which had not seen an American presidential candidate since William Jennings Bryan. It was a tour which a lesser candidate, or a less well-known celebrity, might not have been able to make. Had McCarthy made the trip, the crowds simply might not have come. But this was a Kennedy and for days before there had been signs saying, “Yes, Robert Kennedy Is Coming to Ogallala,” or “Meet Robert Kennedy Saturday in Downtown North Platte.” Aboard the train the national reporters could hear the incredibly excited voices of the local radio reporters: “It’s due any minute now, due in a minute. ... Yes, there it is ladies and gentlemen, I see the light, I see the light of the train, it’s coming down Main Street, people are running toward it, the train is slowing down. The children are pushing toward it. The police are fighting to keep the crowd back. Now the train is stopping. I see the press getting off. ... Television crews are getting off. The crowd is surging forward, and Yes, Robert Kennedy is coming back on the platform. He’s waving to the crowd. He looks smaller than you expect. ...” He was in a good mood aboard the train. Earlier the train had gone through Julesburg, Colorado, the birthplace of Fred Dutton (a fact discovered at the last minute), and Ethel Kennedy, not telling anyone, had spent several hours making up posters. When the train stopped, she and friends rushed out and started a Dutton demonstration. “Sock it to ’em Freddy,” “Fred Dutton’s Brother for Attorney General,” “Make Fred, Not War,” read the signs. They demanded a speech and the candidate, now joining in shouted: “Tell us about George Bernard Shaw, Fred.”

  The crowds were good all along the way. The candidate was relaxed, telling the crowds: “Richard Nixon is speaking up in front of the train. We thought that was only fair. He has no crowd at all.” Then he would talk low key, a fairly conservative pitch: that the local people knew more about their business than some bureaucrat in Washington (which went over well; even in Washington no one loves faceless Washington bureaucrats), and a little bit on law and order and the divisions in the country, and then fairly hard on the war. Frank Morrison, the former governor and one of the few Democrats with real statewide appeal, had noted that the war was very simply the issue in Nebraska, the gut issue. People wouldn’t talk about it much, he said, because they think it’s unpatriotic to talk a lot about it, but it’s there. The farmers were angry too, restless in a time of rising costs and low prices, and aware that most of the other whites in America had never had it so good. They were restless and angry and Kennedy told them they were being cheated, that he favored collective bargaining for them, a popular stand.

  But there were still problems, and in some ways the campaign was not jelling the way they had hoped.

  The crowds were still coming, that part of the magic still worked, but the politicians were not. The bosses, and the leaders of the Democratic party apparatus, were still suspicious and unreceptive, and this was being demonstrated by a marked migration to Hubert Humphrey. It was becoming clearer and clearer that Robert Kennedy’s problem with the machines was very deep and serious, and that the apparatus was almost as hostile to him as it was to McCarthy. For the first time in many years, the party machinery, which had traditionally been reasonably sympathetic to the pressures and whims of the party eggheads and liberals, was unresponsive to two candidates representing the intellectual element.

  The relationship between the Kennedys and the party machinery had always been a tenuous one; they were not of it, and yet they had never fought it, even in their earlier years. In Massachusetts, where local politics are particularly venal, they had simply bypassed the apparatus. They had developed their own breathtaking popularity and that meant that the party machinery would not make a frontal challenge. They were able to control the state delegation at conventions, but in return they never really used any of their power, popularity, or resources to clean up Massachusetts politics. Reformers in Massachusetts tend to be somewhat cooler to the Kennedys than reformers in other states; they have seen more of their cool indifferent side. Massachusetts was a quagmire which the Kennedys tolerated and were careful not to step into. In 1960 their relationship with the machinery was guarded, but improved steadily. Mayor Daley of Chicago, the most important and most sophisticated of the traditional politicians, had been for Jack Kennedy, first because of his friendship with Joe Kennedy but also, and equally important, because he sensed a winner. “Daley has sense enough to go with classy politicians, even if they’re men he doesn’t feel at ease with,” said one student of machines. “That makes him different from most machine people who shun anyone they don’t feel at ease with.” But with Bobby Kennedy it was a little different. They sensed in him a puritan; he was not above prosecuting dishonest local Democratic officials and in that sense, he was as dangerous as a Republican. (In Illinois, the Cook County machine cares more about who wins county attorney races than who wins the U.S. Senate race. The power of investigation is a very important negative power.)

  In New York he had seemed to side increasingly, though sometimes ineffectually, with the reformers in their regular fights with the organization. He preferred to be photographed with the reformers and work in private with the apparatus people. In 1964, meeting with the varying bosses of New York State before deciding to run for the Senate, a photographer happened by the hotel suite and took a number of pictures. He was asked to throw them away. The machine people sensed that in future conflicts this Kennedy would side more and more with their enemies, and they did not like his style and his direction. The machines were dependent upon the old-style control of poor Negro areas. As it was, their own black leaders there (Toms) were being jeopardized by the new angry militants whom the poverty programs were supposed to help, and with whom Kennedy was so publicly identified. The apparatus people sensed that if Kennedy were elected, it would speed them that much more quickly to obsolescence. He was only forty-two and his people were often younger; they were all in their fifties and sixties.

  (When Frank O’Connor was going to run against Rockefeller in New York, the Kennedys had opposed him. He was the best of the old breed, they noted, and they wanted the best of the new breed. If the young reformers did not understand what they meant, the worst of the old breed certainly did.) Kennedy was just very different, and he identified himself with all the new and threatening trends, even long hair. A story put out by Dick Daley’s people tells of Kennedy’s having gone, in 1967—when he was considering the race—to see the Mayor. He had said, my father is not well, and my brother is dead, and I now regard you as an old friend of the family. May I turn to you for advice? The Mayor said yes, that was fine. So Kennedy asked for advice, and Daley gave him some: “Get your hair cut.” The story is perhaps apocryphal, but symbolic nevertheless. If the existing officials of the Democratic party lack a powerful sense of social change, they do have a sense of survival. Robert Kennedy, like Gene McCarthy, threatened that survival. Hubert Humphrey did not

  This had been a year of great surprises, though many of the highly predictable, and perhaps the greatest surprise was the resurrection of Hubert Humphrey. One was surprised by how easily it was done, and how readily the party faithful moved toward a man who had never proven himself in any sort of national election; a man who was closely tied to a deeply unpopular administration, and who was avoiding any primary fights, indeed a man who stood a very good chance of winning a nomination but losing an election (normally a patented Republican strategy). In early 1968 no one had seemed a frailer politician than Humphrey. Had one wanted to do a study of what the war in Vietnam had done to a generation of older American liberals, Humphrey would have been exhibit A. The war was destroying him with his liberal constituency, and as the war progressed, or failed to progress, his own style seemed increasingly out of date. He was a politician of the old school; hot and heavy oratory, never understate when you can overstate, party loyalty above all else (his Democratic arm around the Democratic arm of Lester Maddox)—they were all required qualities in the old politics, but dubious assets in this age. Even the old-
style colleagues of Humphrey were now disappearing; Paul Douglas and Mennen Williams were out, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney and Chuck Percy were in. (Romney and Percy were milestones in American politics. We had formerly trusted sons of very wealthy families in politics so long as they were not conservative—inherited wealth is intolerable in a conservative, for the rich do not need to steal. But now we had gone to trusting businessmen, even self-made businessmen, so long as they didn’t look like businessmen.) Humphrey was markedly, relentlessly, of the old school.

  In the age of cool he was out; in a time of understatement he overstated; in a time when television made brief speeches mandatory, he still spoke with the cadence and length of a radio orator. At a time when the intellectual theorists of his own party were increasingly dubious and pessimistic about the course of American life, Humphrey was incorrigibly ebullient, talking of the politics of joy and happiness. The more he talked, the more it grated. (Intellectuals consider optimism permissible if the times are clearly bad and frightening to an entire nation, i.e., a depression or a world war. Then the optimist who can inject new hope is desirable. But when the challenge seems hidden to much of the nation, as it did in 1968, optimism is unfashionable. The intellectuals demand someone who can convey to the rest of the nation that this is a dark time, and then hold up a glimmer of hope. Humphrey’s optimism had been born during the New Deal days and both it and his style of projecting it had never changed. However, the country had changed a great deal.) Was the new style that of underplaying idealism? Humphrey shouted out. His ear was desperately bad and out of tune. He went on television and talked about himself in the third person, and it sounded like a relic of Fourth of July bombast. There was a quality of true sadness in all this; the liberals had loved Hubert back in the fifties. He was proof that liberalism did not necessarily exist only in the dark alien cities of the nation, but that it could flourish and win in the good clean air of the Midwest. They had not minded his good Midwestern enthusiasms and excesses, for they had been liberal excesses and enthusiasms. But now these excesses had been turned to a dubious cause; he had spoken in Saigon to American State Department officers about their wonderful mission there, God save the piaster, and now it was all ending badly because of the war. Joe Rauh of the ADA, an old friend of Humphrey’s, would listen to all Humphrey’s defenses of the war, and would nod and say yes, Hubert, yes. But don’t you realize what everyone else in America realizes—that if you weren’t vice-president you would be leading the dissent on it. Indeed a meeting had been arranged in December between Humphrey and the leaders of the ADA. Once his close friends, they were now his pickets. Feeling had run so high before he arrived that Arthur Schlesinger took the liberals aside and said, Look, I know we feel strongly, but he’s a good man and he is the vice-president and our old friend. We’ve got to be polite and show restraint. Everyone agreed. Then Humphrey arrived and immediately began by saying that he had just talked with Adam Malik of Indonesia, and Malik had said that it was the U.S. intervention in Vietnam which had saved the Indonesian domino, and Schlesinger had interrupted: “Oh bullshit Hubert!”

  Humphrey at the start of the year had been a badly crippled politician, a symbol of Lyndon Johnson’s ability to take much and give little. (The Reverend Jesse Jackson, one of Martin Luther King’s militant leaders in the North, would say in sadness of Humphrey, “Hubert Humphrey is a grape of hope that has been turned into a raisin of despair by the sunshine of Lyndon Johnson.”) There was a touch of the clown in the tone with which Humphrey talked about the President. He could go on television and say: “I think I know who are men of peace, and the man of peace that I see in this country—but peace with justice and peace with freedom—is President Lyndon Johnson.” It was one of the final victories of Lyndon Johnson that he had made Hubert Humphrey sound like Richard Nixon. But then suddenly Lyndon Johnson had withdrawn from the race and Humphrey had been reborn. Now all those great resources of the presidency which Lyndon Johnson had been unable to use for himself because of the war, could be used for Hubert Humphrey. He suddenly had the advantages of the presidency without the disadvantages. He could barely believe it. He had been out of the country when Johnson had withdrawn and when he came back the first question he asked his staff was whether Bobby had a lock on it. Kennedy did not, and day after day it was Kennedy who was further from the lock and Humphrey who was closer to it. For a moment the war had simply evaporated, the issue had disappeared. To an older generation of liberals he was the good Hubert again, the old Hubert. (It was a generational thing; among important younger members of the party his support was noticeably weaker. The only important young man on his way up who was backing Humphrey was Adlai Stevenson II—a tie bound in part out of family loyalty to his father, and also in part out of family dislike or uneasiness with the Kennedys.) It was back to 1948, all of this had never happened.

  Humphrey suddenly started getting a very good press, particularly out of Washington. Washington is a company town and Humphrey was the good company liberal; indeed he was the only company-certified candidate in either race. Humphrey had been gathering due bills in Washington for as long as he had been gathering them among the party workers, and now he was calling them in. For the last year or two he had managed to give the impression to those in Washington, in the inner circle, that he was loyal, but agonized and loyal. He might, knowing that a certain influential columnist was also agonized and loyal, stop by for breakfast with him where they would share their agony, and Humphrey’s confidence would be protected. But his deeper darker side would be properly viewed so that the right men in Washington knew how agonized Humphrey was, even if the rest of the country did not. Now running, he got sympathetic columns from those liberals who liked the war: Hubert really believes in the war, and understands it, and from those liberal columnists who did not: Hubert doesn’t believe in the war, but has been imprisoned by Johnson, just wait till he’s on his own. Indeed if many of the senior Washington commentators were upset by the war, they seemed even more upset by what McCarthy and Kennedy were doing with it. Perhaps it would all end badly, for the Paris peace talks were a dubious proposition under Lyndon Johnson: one did not hire the architect to tear down his own prize building. Perhaps if they dragged on, the old war would reappear and the new Hubert instead of the old would be unveiled at Chicago. But for the moment the Kennedy people were angry; they recognized all the good and hard work Humphrey had done in the party vineyard, but they were bitter about the good press he was getting in liberal quarters (particularly The New York Times editorial page; if one were a former Times reporter one heard about that regularly). They felt that this was giving a respectability to an old outdated system which was trying to protect itself; an alliance of Southern Democrats, big city machines and big labor. An alliance which annoyed the Kennedys primarily because it existed, and secondly because it wasn’t going for them.

  But Humphrey the party man was reaping the party reward. He was like Richard Nixon in more than just speech, perhaps speech was an outgrowth of association and habit. He had been the good party loyalist, speaking at every dinner, eating all those cold green peas, praising all those overweight sheriffs, shaking hands with all those aldermen, remembering their wives’ names, showing up in Kansas in the cold winter when the plane connections were terrible and he had a cold, appearing at dinky fund raisings; always ebullient and finding virtue in every Democrat there. If there was any doubt in 1968 about how well Humphrey had served the country (and there was a great deal of it), there was no doubt at all about how well he had served the party. And, of course, many of the faithful understood the party better than the nation; a good many of them failed to make any distinction at all.

  For the party faithful Hubert was sound and safe and loyal, and loyalty was the most important. The structure of the party is not based on imagination or creativity or social conscience, it is based on loyalty (the honest politician, the joke goes, is the one who, when bought, stays bought). It is based on working your way up one n
otch, not threatening the man above you, for you might be threatened from below. Thus while Kennedy was out working the primaries, Humphrey and his people were very quietly going around and picking up the delegates, cashing in the due bills. Kennedy, campaigning on the road, was in serious trouble. His delegate counts were not good, the delegates were pro-Humphrey though Humphrey’s hold was a very tenuous one. Part of the problem was that as Kennedy plunged more into the campaign and saw more and more of America, of the dispossessed and the under-privileged, the more he was moved by it and the more he identified with it. Accordingly, he identified less and less with the party apparatus and the professionals. He now began to see them as the kind of people who were responsible for the existing system, who were indeed blocking the needed changes, and he was not at ease with them. If they saw him as a threat, they were right, because he saw them as a stumbling block. In city after city he would meet with them. He was not good at the small talk, not good at the little jokes which were a staple of the profession; he could not do the little social things easily, press the flesh. Their stock in trade was small talk and his was not, and when they left they often thought him a cold one indeed.

  During the campaign a curious phenomenon developed. At night when there might have been time to go to dinner with a delegate, or a politician or two, he rarely did. He went out with a few friends, occasionally an assistant, often journalist friends—not because they might write something nice about him, though that helped—but because he seemed almost bored by politics and wanted to talk about something else. One of his great favorites was Jack Newfield, a young radical writer for The Village Voice. Once, invited to Hickory Hill for a great party where all the old friends—Katzenbach, General Taylor, MacNamara—were also socializing, Newfield had balked: “You don’t expect me to go in there and drink and talk with all those war criminals do you?” Kennedy would still meet with delegates and they would talk, but he would withdraw from them; and they sensed this.