The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

by David Halberstam

  All of this became clear one night in Omaha when Kennedy went before a Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. It was a Friday, and Kennedy had enjoyed an excellent day; he had visited a dozen towns between Lincoln and Omaha, and his crowds had been good and his receptions warm. He had seemed to get stronger as the day went on, enjoying himself, relaxed. Then came the dinner. It was awkward to start with because Humphrey was to be the main speaker, and thus Kennedy seemed an interloper. Kennedy was to speak first and then leave. When he first walked into the hall (journalistic applausemeter: Kennedy polite applause; Humphrey warm applause), he already looked different, tense, his hands knotted. The band played the national anthem, the soloist sang, Bobby sang, and no one else sang. It was the kind of thing he loved. His speech was to be brief, but the prepared text was a good one. It was short, sharp, one of his best: “Too much and for too long we have confused our achievements with wealth, and measured our greatness with the statistics of the Gross National Product. But the Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife and television programs that glorify violence—the better to sell goods to our children.” Yet when he spoke he was terrible. He rushed through the speech, lost the balance and the cadence of it, dropped his lines, garbled his thoughts. He seemed in a hurry to leave; indeed the moment he finished he did.

  Later, talking with a reporter about it, he was highly critical of his own performance. He had not turned them on, he said, and he had really blown the whole thing. A cold evening. Just cold. Then he added: “They’re just not my kind of crowd.” It was a curious thing for a candidate to say about other politicians.

  A brief respite in Nebraska. His mother, campaigning on the west coast, had replied to criticism of Kennedy wealth by saying, “it’s our money and we’re free to spend it any way we please.” Teddy Kennedy, asked about this quote, had partially saved the day by saying, “That’s why we didn’t make mother finance chairman.” Now the candidate was being asked by a wire-service reporter about the quotes. He read Rose Kennedy’s remarks and Teddy’s reply and paled noticeably. No comment, he said. Not even an off-the-record comment? asked the reporter. Okay, said the candidate, “That’s why we did make her finance chairman.”

  The day of the debacle with the Omaha party officials, he was relaxed again. It was a warm sunny day in the suburban areas of Omaha and the crowds were bigger than expected, more receptive. He spoke well and answered questions at length, in no rush to go anywhere on this lovely day. Was he worried about the population explosion? “I think every individual should work out his own arrangement. I’ve worked out my own arrangement, but obviously it won’t work for everybody else.” Would he lower the voting age? “Yes, to six.” Then at the back of the crowd there was a disturbance. A heckler was being hauled off by the police. But he had been a curiously muted heckler, a mumbler really; no one had heard him, and the police were carting him off to protect him from Kennedy partisans. The candidate became interested. “Don’t take him away,” he shouted, “he has as much right to speak as I have.” The police started to release the heckler, but the heckler refused. He was a proud heckler and he would not be freed by the word of a Kennedy. “Let him go,” said Bobby. But he clung to the police. “Okay,” said Kennedy, “if that’s the way you want it. But I promise that if I’m elected President of the United States, one of the first things I’m going to do is get you out of jail.”

  There was, he thought, something comic about him, a Kennedy, in Nebraska. He would tell audiences, “When I first talked to my advisers about whether I should make this race or not, they said I should. I asked why. They said that if I did, I could come to Nebraska. To run in the Nebraska primary.” Later that week at a rally, when a piece of paper fluttered off the lectern and into the crowd, he said, “Give me that back quickly. That’s my farm program. I need it.” He sensed he was running well, and it was picking up—the results were astonishing. Nebraska, the state they had feared the most, had given him 53 percent of the vote against two opponents. He ran well everywhere, with the Negroes, with blue collar and stunningly well among the angry farmers. (One Kennedy aide believed that the farmers went for Kennedy and not McCarthy because somehow McCarthy was identified with the Democratic party farm establishment, a Midwestern colleague of Humphrey and Orville Freeman. Kennedy, on the other hand, was clearly an anti-establishment figure. This was borne out, at about the same time, by a poll taken jointly in South Dakota by three local newspapers. The poll, which seemed astonishing at the time, showed Kennedy beating Johnson and McCarthy, in that order, 52-to-24-to-17 among farmers and ranchers; 51-36-11 among inhabitants of towns up to 2,500 people, and running only 34-34-17 among city inhabitants.

  Election night in Omaha, the camp was pleased and relaxed. Pierre Salinger was announcing that McCarthy was dead as a candidate, and Tuck was only mildly annoyed when he heard a network television man announcing “... and again it was the classic Kennedy coalition: Negroes, blue collar.” “Negroes!” shouted Tuck, “one goddamn percent of the state is Negro.” The truth was, and it did not strike them immediately, that they had done well once again in a conservative state. Now on to Oregon.

  V

  OREGON, THE KENNEDYS WOULD decide in retrospect, was a giant suburb. In disdain, Pat Moynihan, one of their very talented intellectuals (indeed, one of their few intellectuals who actually was an intellectual) would say that Oregon didn’t even have crab grass. That was Oregon. Everything that could go wrong for the Kennedys went wrong in Oregon. McCarthy, on the other hand, would be at his best there; his advantages minimized, his assets maximized. The result would be that a Kennedy would be defeated for the first time in an election.

  The Kennedys had looked forward to Oregon early in the campaign. It had seemed sweeter and more natural than the seemingly hostile road stops along the way, Indiana and Nebraska. Oregon and California had seemed, in contrast, God’s country: liberal, more sophisticated. His staff was sure that Kennedy’s liberalism would work well in both places, the staff members after all had been drawn to Kennedy because he was liberal, modern and urbane. They did not, at the beginning, take Gene McCarthy seriously. He was viewed as someone who flowered at a time when he was the only game in town. Now with the real man in the race, McCarthy would wither. But it was not so easy. During the campaign two patterns in white communities had developed: Kennedy was getting the blue-collar people, but McCarthy was running very well among the middle- and upper-class whites. Many of those who were for Kennedy were borderline backlashers who thought the choice in American politics narrowed to George Wallace or Bob Kennedy. They sensed that Kennedy was a tough little Irishman, someone they could understand. One Kennedy aide noted that both Kennedy and McCarthy were Irish Catholics, but they were not the same kind, particularly to Jews. Robert Kennedy was the tough little Irish kid who had punched you in the nose when you were little, while Gene McCarthy was the nice gracious English teacher who said, Yes, Mrs. Goldberg, your son writes very good essays. The Jews felt and sensed this. So did the poor whites; they liked his toughness and combativeness. They felt they could even understand the thing he was doing with the blacks, that was just something politicians had to do. McCarthy had somewhat petulantly remarked, after the first two primaries, that Kennedy could take pleasure in the fact that the least educated members of the society had voted for him.

  If the Kennedy trend was true, so was the McCarthy trend. He was running well in the suburbs among both Independents and Republicans. Indeed he and Nelson Rockefeller had a strikingly similar constituency among white Americans. (Rockefeller was much stronger with blacks. He was the governor of a state with a sizeable Negro population, he had run several national races and he possessed a good physical ghetto-style. McCarthy came from a state with a minimal Negro population and he was too fiercely proud a man to make the kind of gestures to Negroes that might have won him their allegiance.) That constituency was middle cl
ass and moving up. It was white and it was above blue-collar. Questioned by pollsters about which party it favored, more and more it liked to answer that it didn’t vote by party; it reacted to the man. McCarthy appealed to people who were worried about the war, and a little uneasy about the blacks, not exactly against them, but worried about them. To them he was quietly reassuring; he was intelligent; he had done the right thing—he had entered the presidential race and by doing so, he had been above politics whereas when Kennedy had entered it, he had been playing politics. To McCarthy’s constituency the war was the crucial issue; otherwise they thought American life was all right. The race issue was something else. They had been for voting rights for Negroes, for integration, for the March on Washington, but they were worried and uneasy now. In the old days they had turned on their television sets and seen the white Alabama cops-slack-jawed—beating up those nice clean-cut Negro students, and they had known what they felt, and that what they felt was right. Now it was more difficult; the riots, the anger, black people calling them racists—who me? Someone shot Martin Luther King and that was bad, but then there was all that rioting and that was worse, and baffling. McCarthy was reassuring to them; he did not seem to represent the divisions. But one looked at Robert Kennedy and he looked a bit discordant—maybe, just maybe, he encouraged them a little, stirred them up.

  The quiet man. That was McCarthy. One heard a lot about the quiet man. The sociologists of American politics, knowing that the new battleground would be in the suburbs, had taken their questionnaires and tape recorders and had gone there, in the last few years, to find out who these people were and what they wanted. At first they had been perplexed. It was an odd thing for there were no easily identifiable characteristics for the new candidate. Perhaps they had been looking for the wrong thing, indeed it might be precisely the absence of certain qualities which was reassuring to these people, particularly because they lived in such a charged up time. That was when the sociologists came up with the idea of the quiet man. The country, uneasy about the new passions being stirred up, the growing divisions, wanted someone to give it quiet confidence. Lyndon Johnson was not the quiet man, not with that bull horn, nor Hubert Humphrey, nor Robert Kennedy. But Gene McCarthy, walking down that street alone, throwing away his best lines, telling everyone how all the experts said his race was impossible because he didn’t raise his voice (they didn’t raise their voices either), scoffing at Washington—one sensed that if elected President he might just abolish the U.S. Government—was the quiet man. In many ways he sensed the mood of America better than almost any other candidate. He was an easy candidate to underestimate, and almost everyone had done it; first the President, then the press, then the pollsters, then the people around him, and finally the Kennedys. McCarthy’s approach was not as haphazard as it seemed, there was a certain subtle calculation to it. He ran his own style of campaign very well, and now here he was in Oregon and Oregon was tailor-made for him. If he hadn’t existed, Oregon would have invented Gene McCarthy. It liked underdogs up against famous rich candidates, and it distrusted Eastern favorites who wouldn’t debate with poor but honest loners from the Midwest.

  Oregon lacked all the Kennedy ingredients. The ghetto, Tuck complained, consisted of “just one block where the Reed professors could bring their kids to show them what one looked like.” The Negro population barely existed; the Catholic population was very small. (There was usually a Catholic vote for Kennedy though the Kennedy people did not like to talk about it.) Oregon was beautiful, affluent, complacent, white, and far from the raw nerve of the rest of America. It was also far removed from the mood of the candidate: the challenge that America must be turned around, that the country was in serious trouble. Seeing Oregon one again remembered Barry Goldwater in 1964, remembered talking with him and suddenly realizing that in his hometown the person who drank or committed a crime was just the oddball. He was the offbeat person from an otherwise decent family who, in Goldwater’s words, “simply couldn’t hack it.” There was no connection between crime and restlessness and social injustice. It was simply a very different life. All the great social problems had settled in the great cities of the Northeast and Midwest There was the migration of frustrated illiterate Negroes from the South, but that problem was thousands of miles from Oregon. “Oh I’m not saying we don’t have our troubles like everyone else,” one Portland resident told a visiting reporter, “but in ten minutes’ time I can be off fishing and forget about them.” Oregon generated few of the ugly problems of modern America, and it neither understood nor wanted to understand them. It did not necessarily like what was going on in the rest of America, but it breathed better air and lived a better life. So Robert Kennedy entered Oregon without Negroes and Mexicans and Poles. He had the peace issue but that was a problem too. As the Kennedys would learn again in California, McCarthy had taken away the peace issue and with it the most dedicated, most activist, peace people. The people who desperately wanted Robert Kennedy to make the race six months earlier were now fighting him just as desperately. When peace people became committed they stayed committed. Only two things might have changed them: one was fear of Lyndon Johnson which might have made Kennedy a mandatory candidate, and the other was an even deeper commitment to the ghetto, and that was missing in Oregon.

  Now the Kennedys had to deal with this new America and it was particularly difficult for them because they had always based their races on shaking people up, challenging them, challenging complacency (a Kennedy runs because you need him in these particular times) and in Oregon they felt frustrated. They found the issues elusive; they could not get a handle on Oregon and what bothered its people. Larry O’Brien would recall visiting Oregon in 1960 and sensing the mood and the worries then; but now it was 1968. It was all different; it was all more affluent and subtle. The people who had been blue collar in 1960 were now making $9,000 a year and living in the new suburbs with one and a half cars and two and three-quarters children. “How do you get a handle on a state like this?” he would ask. Indeed about three weeks before the primary, the Kennedy people had a long strategy session with Edith Green, the Oregon congresswoman who was their campaign manager. They discussed exactly these problems; the affluence, the complacency, the undercurrent of resistance to the hard-driving Kennedy style. Someone had turned and asked her: “Edith, how do we do it? How can we shake them up?” She looked up stupefied. “You can’t shake them up,” she answered.

  Everything went better for McCarthy in Oregon. His television money went further and there was more of it. On the heels of defeats in Indiana and Nebraska, there was no inclination to save for California; if he was beaten in Oregon, he was beaten in California as well. So they spent heavily. One minute of prime time in Oregon cost only $350 whereas in Los Angeles it was about $2,000. One radio minute of prime commuting time in Portland was about $18 whereas it would be $65 in Los Angeles. McCarthy had been used to a disorganized staff, but in Oregon he had his best organization: good people had been available early, and he had a good overall structure. As in New Hampshire—unlike Indiana and Nebraska—he again had, because of the war, the benefit of some of the most intense and dedicated activists in the state. The Kennedy campaign was just the opposite. The Kennedys were paying heavily for their late entry. They had been disorganized in general and in order to get off to a running start they had spent far too much time in Indiana, their first domino, and now there was too little time, and they were disorganized. Normally in a national campaign there should be time to organize slowly, to test out people, to try out ideas, to try out speeches without all the full focus of national publicity. Jack Kennedy had had this chance in 1960, and so had Gene McCarthy in 1968, but Robert Kennedy never had that time. In 1968 when he coughed, ten tape recorders picked it up.

  Barrett Prettyman, a Washington lawyer, was Kennedy’s first campaign coordinator, but that had worked out badly and at a somewhat belated date Bill vanden Heuvel, a wealthy and social young lawyer from New York, was shipped in. This be
came a point of considerable dispute within the Kennedy camp, for the politicians and some of the eggheads considered vanden Heuvel a social friend of the Kennedys and were dubious about him from the start This touched on a fairly sensitive area for the Kennedys: Jack Kennedy who had enjoyed clubby people, whose wife disliked politicians and did not want them in her house, had almost completely separated his political and social worlds. Kenny O’Donnell would do the tough political work, but people like Lem Billings or Red Fay would be invited to the White House dinners—people whom Jack Kennedy, as one Kennedy pro put it, “wouldn’t have trusted to run a dog-catcher race.” There was a certain amount of feeling that this should never happen again. An assistant commented, “When we came back this year some of us were very determined that this time we would be equals and friends, not employees, and there would be no lords and serfs. We talked about it at the beginning, and now, in retrospect, I think we looked pretty silly because Bob Kennedy just wasn’t that way. He wouldn’t separate his lives. But the other half of it was that his social friends would come in on politics.”

  There was always considerable doubt about vanden Heuvel among the pros; perhaps because he considered himself a politician—having managed one campaign for Congress and having had the misfortune to run once himself, against John Lindsay. When things went wrong in Oregon, as they did, the professionals blamed vanden Heuvel. In his defense he claimed that he had been warning the candidate for several weeks that they had very serious problems. But in the eyes of the professionals, Oregon just had not been put together properly: the scheduling wasn’t good, the feel just wasn’t right. While the Kennedy people thought vanden Heuvel hadn’t done enough, some Oregon critics felt that he and his organization had pushed much too hard, made too many phone calls, been too eastern, too pushy. Perhaps if you are going to lose, you are simply going to lose and that’s it. Nevertheless the pros were angry about the Oregon organization. “You can walk into an area and tell whether or not it’s been organized, whether the advance man was any good, and Oregon was a problem,” said one of the aides. “We should have done better than we did. There were too many people at certain levels in the campaign who had titles and slots but weren’t really completing their assignments, weren’t being pushed very hard.” The lack of organization had hurt them but they had probably been hurt even more seriously by their failure to debate. It was one of the ironies of the Kennedy camp that at the same time they both underestimated McCarthy (in what he was doing, how well he understood the media, and the type of appeal he was making) and overestimated his intellectual gifts. Because of this, they failed to debate in Oregon. It was a costly mistake, for Oregon has its own special style of politics. It is somewhat maverick, somewhat intellectually oriented; and for a variety of reasons it wanted the debate. It believed in debates. The Dewey—Stassen debates had been held there, and the failure to debate was a reminder again and again that it was McCarthy who had entered New Hampshire. The primary is a very big thing in Oregon; it is, said one Kennedy man, “the third largest industry in the state.” By failing to debate they were irritating the Oregonians, leaving themselves open to the charges that they had simply muscled people aside with their money and organization, two distinctly non-Oregon attributes. McCarthy played skillfully on the lack of a debate. One of his television clips showed an old photograph of the two men together with the commentary, “This is probably the only time you’ll see them together on television.”