The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

by David Halberstam

  Within the Kennedy camp, the division over whether or not to debate McCarthy roughly paralleled that over whether or not to enter the race in the first place. The traditionalists argued against it; the young people, again particularly the Robert Kennedy people, argued for it. Walinsky, the most strong minded (Adamant Adam he was called), argued that you had to take high risks; that they had a quality candidate and therefore they should expose the candidate and take the chances. The others had seen what the debates had done to Richard Nixon in 1960. (At the studio in Chicago, Bob Kennedy had looked over at Nixon’s picture on the monitor right before the first debate and had been appalled by his color and appearance. Nixon saw him looking and asked if he looked all right or whether he should change anything. “Dick, you look great!” said Kennedy.) They saw a relatively unknown Jack Kennedy destroy the front-running Nixon and they read this lesson from it: the well-known and supposedly front-running Kennedy must not give the unknown McCarthy so much exposure. We have the name this time and they don’t; we are in and they are out. Walinsky and the others argued, in turn, that Kennedy had beaten Nixon because he was a higher quality candidate; that, if anything, Kennedy had been too conservative and cautious in the third and fourth debates; that the idea of denying exposure to McCarthy in the year 1968 was an exercise in mythology, the kind of thing the Kennedys normally let their opponents do. Because a fierce two-man race had been going on across the nation for almost two months, the exposure was there, McCarthy was on the news shows every night. McCarthy’s very presence in the race had guaranteed his exposure. What they were doing, Walinsky argued, was helping McCarthy maintain his liberal constituency, since the failure to debate fed the idea that McCarthy was intellectually superior and that Bobby was a tough little prosecutor cashing in on the family name and wealth. Finally, Walinsky felt that McCarthy was overrated intellectually; that most of his speeches were of low quality, and most important, because Robert Kennedy bore exposure well, the very same qualities which drew so many bright people to him on a personal level would become apparent to a much larger audience through the debates. If he could impress people like Moynihan, Charles Evers, Harrington, and George McGovern, then he should also be able to impress the average white middle-class voter of Oregon. There was some extremely sound reasoning, but the essence of it was: to gain something you must risk something.

  As for the traditionalists, they were somewhat older; they had sampled power. They were with a family which had never lost an election, and the long winning streak had made them conservative, protective of what they had, less willing to risk it. Had they little at stake, and no long winning streak, they might have been more willing to risk it. As it was, they held to the view that McCarthy should try and catch them. (In California Walinsky, who had been highly critical of some of the conservative tone of the campaign in Indiana and Nebraska, felt that Kennedy had been liberated by the defeat in Oregon; that he was a fresher, more relaxed man, more himself. He had been defeated and the aura of never having lost, and therefore of being conservative, was gone. He could now simply go out and campaign and be himself.) There was yet another problem here in the failure to debate, almost a subconscious one. These older men were still Jack Kennedy’s people, and they had admired his intellect and Robert’s organizational talent. While they realized that Robert had grown, they still didn’t entirely believe it themselves; they automatically underrated him just a little. It was still hard not to think of him as the Robert Kennedy of 1960. Perhaps if he went on a debate he would be asked questions which he simply wouldn’t be able to answer. Even someone like Dutton—who served as a swing man between the two factions; his ties going back to the older group, his social and political instincts often placing him with the newer one—was opposed to a debate near the end of the primary because he sensed that Kennedy was going to be defeated and he did not want the defeat to come right after the debate. That might be a serious mistake, for that would make it a lingering defeat. A myth would grow that McCarthy had beaten Kennedy only after the confrontation, and something like that might cost them California too.

  Now the pace was wearing the candidate down. He looked tired and drawn. As if in response to his own fatigue, and the negative reports he was getting, he drove himself harder and harder, a longer schedule, smaller towns. His DC-4 landed on tiny airstrips which could barely accommodate it; at La Grande and Baker, he and his press party were deplaned by fork-lift, at Ontario, by a stepladder. He delighted in using such visits in his openings: “Ever since I was a little boy there were two things I wanted to do: Be a ventriloquist and see La Grande. ...” The pace was exhausting and one night, as the plane lumbered back to Portland, the reporters began chanting: “Hey hey, R.F.K., how many reporters did you kill today?” Sometimes the very energy of the candidate seemed to offend the Oregonians; it was all too pushy. Even the innocent things backfired. About a week before the primary Kennedy visited a high school in a Portland suburb. About 4,000 students and parents had gathered to hear him, and they were offended by the manner of the press party: reporters shoving their way to telephones, photographers—cameras first-pushing everyone aside to get the best places. They decided that the press’s manners were Kennedy manners and the next day, in the school’s mock balloting, Humphrey upset Kennedy.

  But there were lighter moments. Kennedy had his dog, Freckles, aboard now, and Tuck was in charge of the dog. (McCarthy, hitting harder and harder at Kennedy and his refusal to debate, was critical of the dog and the presence of John Glenn—the apple-pie front—saying, “He’s afraid to debate me. He thinks he can beat me with an astronaut and a dog. ...”) Once Freckles got free on an airstrip and Tuck had to retrieve the dog. The reporters laughed and consoled Tuck. It’s a terrible thing, Tuck, that a brilliant political intellectual like you is in charge of a dog. Don’t the Kennedys have any sense of merit? “It may look like a dog to you,” said Tuck, “but it’s an ambassadorship to me.” Hearing this, Kennedy was pleased, and from then on whenever Tuck made a slip, he’d say, “You just lost Madrid, Tuck.”

  There were good days too, and the day before the primary, tired and sensing defeat, Kennedy went into southern Oregon. This was great outdoors land, hunting territory, and he had been told by all his advisers that the only issue here was guns and he was in trouble because of his strong stand on gun control. (McCarthy was playing this one pretty cool.) As Kennedy arrived in Roseburg he saw the signs everywhere: “Protect Your Right to Keep and Bear Arms.” He looked around and asked if anyone from the crowd would like to come up and explain why he opposed gun legislation. After a few moments hesitation, up came a man named Bud Schoon, the owner of a floor-covering business and a director of the Association To Preserve Our Right To Keep And Bear Arms, Inc.

  “Is there anything in this bill which says you can’t have firearms?” Kennedy asked him.

  No, Schoon answered. But then he added, “We think it’s a backdoor bill for registration of guns and it will let the Secretary of the Treasury keep a registry of all firearms sale.”

  Then Kennedy took back the microphone, and with emotion showing in his voice—angered by the fact that there was so much deception on such a basic thing (there had been John Birch literature all over Oregon on the gun bill)—he said, “If we’re going to talk about this legislation, can’t we do it honestly, and not say it does something that it doesn’t do? All this legislation does is keep guns from criminals and the mentally ill and those too young. With all the violence and murder and killings in the United States I think you will agree that we must keep firearms from those who have no business with guns or rifles.” But the crowd was not impressed; it was frightened about losing its guns. One man in a cowboy hat booed and shouted, “They’ll get them anyway.” Someone else yelled, “Nazi Germany started with the registration of guns.”

  “Well I don’t think the registration of cars and the registration of drug prescriptions destroyed democracy,” the candidate said, “and I don’t think the registration of guns wil
l either.” He left shaking his head. It was a part of America where the deepest concern was guns, and a fear of what was happening in the rest of the country, a belief that the authorities would take away their guns but permit the rest of America, the bad America, which raped and stole, to keep theirs. Easterners should not be allowed to take away Westerners’ guns. Kennedy was depressed by the day and he could sense the defeat coming. The last few days had been a disaster. The Saturday before the primary, the day when you really turn out the crowds so that on Sunday everyone in the state can see and read how you turned it on, had been badly botched. A Saturday morning rally had been scheduled late Friday night, at 11 P.M. It had been organized so late that no crowd could be drummed up, and worse, they had no permit for it so it had to be held outside the city limits. The next stop was next to a carnival and he was drowned out by the noise. His face took on that cold icy look and two other meetings were scratched and he went back to the hotel. He was going to be beaten and he knew it. Humphrey would be the big winner in Oregon. He also knew that this would hurt him in California; the people within the party who opposed him would now have a club to use against him.

  The night of the election, as the returns came in, everyone sat around despondently. In the center of the room Edith Green kept watching the early returns and saying over and over again that perhaps it was the lunch-box vote (the non-working class which votes at midday at its leisure) coming in. No one answered her; they all knew they had been beaten. They drafted his concession speech. They were privately bitter about McCarthy’s sharp anti-Kennedy attacks and his strange reluctance to attack Humphrey (“He just likes Hubert better than Kennedy,” said one McCarthy aide), but decided to avoid rancor; they still might win in California and they still wanted McCarthy’s troops. The concession speech was a generous statement; it praised the scenic beauty of Oregon (“one of the most beautiful places in the United States”), congratulated McCarthy on his victory and said that both candidates could take pleasure in the size of the anti-administration vote. Now it was on to California, but he had made a slip there earlier, the kind of slip that more traditional politicians do not make; he had told the Commonwealth Club that unless he won all the primaries he would not be a very viable candidate. Now he would have to campaign in the embers of that statement.

  On the plane to California he and Tuck discussed the plan to redistribute the ethnic balance of America so that Oregon could have a ghetto. What can you do about a place like that? Kennedy asked. Airlift in a ghetto, Tuck said. Can you really do it? How many people? asked Kennedy. Tuck did some quick mental arithmetic. Two hundred thousand, he said; with 200,000 the vote will be turned around. He quoted an imaginary headline which gave Kennedy 53 percent of the Oregon vote. “You could airlift in 20,000 a day. But will they like it there?” asks Kennedy. “I mean, it’s Oregon, and all those roses.” “We could have a pre-fab ghetto,” says Tuck, “have the whole thing brought in. Get to an exterminator and get him to save the rats. Soul food. Give Oregon a little class.”

  VI

  HE FLEW TO LOS Angeles from Oregon with the taste of ashes still in his mouth. Before he could spend too much time talking about defeat, analyzing it and being analyzed (the press writing their Kennedy-in-defeat stories: Kennedys take defeat well), he was back in Los Angeles, into a motorcade, and a tumultuous one. All the people who had disappeared in Oregon surfaced again; the faces were different, the jumpers were back, there were Negroes again. The motorcade drove through town and as it went, a fat blonde woman ran alongside shouting, “piss on Oregon, piss on Oregon.” The candidate looked around him and said he felt like renaming Los Angeles Resurrection City.

  California is radically different from other states. It is without traditional organization, rather it is the symbol of the new rootless, restless America; it tells more about what this country is going to be in the future than what it has been in the past. Its suburbs are bigger, and yes, more suburban, than other people’s suburbs; its kooks are kookier than other states’ kooks, and its political extremists more numerous, more extreme. Berkeley exploded four years before Columbia. California is gaudier, more neurotic, more innovative than the rest of the country. The ties that bind the older America, and fashioned its political order, the small neighborhoods, the sense of community; all passed on generation to generation, are changing slowly in the rest of the country, but barely exist in California. The people who have broken with all that, the people who were too restless for the quieter America, for whom the small towns never worked, are here, breaking with their families. Californians have broken with their social communities, their ethnic groups (by the time the Poles arrive here, they will no longer be Poles because they don’t live among other Poles). It is a strange new society; its politics are media politics; its organizational structure is drowned out by the endless waves of new migration into the state, diluted by the countless new people who move in every month, and who are by and large not poor and not dependent on political organizations for jobs, welfare, and housing. California has a tap dancer-actor for a Senator, another actor for its Governor. California’s known, identified political boss, Jesse Unruh, was the first important organization man to urge Robert Kennedy to run and to challenge the sitting President. It is the place where the organization is more fluid and less separated from the political and social turbulence than elsewhere in the country, and where the war was an intense political issue earlier than in most sections of the nation. California has wide-open fluid politics, the least structured in the country. Of California politics it has been said that if you took the 1,000 top Democratic party officials, put them on a barge and sank the barge, all you would lose is 1,000 votes. California is different. It is new politics and Kennedy was glad to be there.

  There is a quality of release to California; one senses that at first newcomers either react against it, or join it. The youth of Indiana do not, for instance, live together as freely and as easily as the youth of California, nor do their somewhat older colleagues advertise themselves sexually in the, say Terre Haute Free Press the way they do in the L.A. Free Press. The good youth of Indiana might not like Robert Kennedy but they would be unlikely to view him as a political opiate trying to trick them back into staying in the system (a device of Lyndon Johnson), a system which they feel has failed completely. If they question the system at all, the good youth of Indiana question it very cautiously. The liberals in Indiana, those who worried about the war and were early doves, might have regretted that Kennedy did not enter the race earlier, might have gone with McCarthy. Once Kennedy entered the race, they might have forgiven him, or perhaps being of a strong moral sense, they might have remained loyal to McCarthy. Whichever, they would not, as many of the peace people in California did, turn on Robert Kennedy with all the vengeance of betrayed lovers. He had wronged them; he had failed to enter, then he had entered and challenged their pure hero. With the peace people in California, it was a blood war; it was emotional, for it is probably true of the new media-based politics that the relationship between candidate and constituency is much more emotional and neurotic. This would hurt Kennedy in California; and if it were true about the parents, then it was even more true among the alienated and embittered kids.

  Kennedy had sampled some of the intensity and neurosis of California’s politics early in the campaign. He had been campaigning in Indiana and had flown out to California for a day and a half—a hectic emotional time. It had started in San Diego when he had arrived; a huge crowd of blacks and whites was at the airport, and among them, a group of young radicals, bitter and hostile. One of them, hearing the rest of the crowd cheer, turned to Pete Hamill, a freelance writer and a friend of Kennedy’s and said, “He’s a fink like the rest of them.”

  Why? asked Hamill.

  “He’s not talking about revolution. He just wants to put Band-Aids on the problems. He doesn’t want to destroy the System.”

  What’s the system, Hamill asked.

  “Finks like you,” the kid
said. Paper revolutionaries, Hamill thought.