The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

by David Halberstam

  At the airport members of the newly formed Peace and Freedom Party were handing out mimeographed sheets of paper quoting from MacBird. MacBird, the play written by Barbara Garson, accuses Lyndon Johnson of murdering John Kennedy with the aid of Robert Kennedy. It is considered a fashionable play in radical and even some liberal circles, though if Mrs. Garson had been a right-winger instead of a left-winger, and had written the exact same words, it probably would have been considered a less respectable play. The lines from the play went:

  We must expose this subtle bobcat’s claws

  He even now collects the straying sheep

  And nudges them so gently toward the fold.

  O sheep, awake and flee this fenced corral

  He’s just like all the rest. They’re all alike.

  But it would get worse that night, at a rally at the University of San Francisco auditorium. The audience, though composed of different parts, was dominated by the Peace and Freedom kids. They were well-organized, angry, bitter, and they hated someone like Kennedy more than Johnson or Rusk, because to them Kennedy was more dangerous, he was the chocolate coating which might lull the others back to the system. When he entered they were screaming and chanting, Victory for the Vietcong; Free Huey Newton (a Black Panther currently in prison charged with killing a policeman and thus a local radical hero); Victory for the Vietcong. A kid rushed up and spit in his face, screaming “Fascist Pig.” The face went cold. Kennedy put away his prepared text, it was the only thing to do, and tried to answer questions. Did you work for Joe Kennedy, someone shouted, getting the name wrong in his excitement, and Kennedy, released from the ugly shouting, laughed. Joe Kennedy, Yes, I worked for Joe Kennedy; he’s my father.

  Why are you running, someone shouted, and Kennedy traced his involvement in government, the Cuban Missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs. He thought he could make a contribution, he said, trying to save the peace. He wanted to keep America from being involved in other Vietnams.

  Victory for the Vietcong, a kid yelled.

  Victory for the Vietcong? Kennedy said, somewhat surprised, No, I don’t agree with that.

  Victory for the Vietcong, the kid repeated. (Later Kennedy told a reporter: those people, the ones who yell Victory for the Vietcong, I can’t help people like that, someone who hates this country. Someone who comes up to me, and says, look, this and this and this are wrong, we’ve got to change it—I can help them. I can understand that, and I can understand some of the bitterness. I can understand the alienation and the eighteen year old black kid who comes to me and says this country means nothing to me, I’m outside it; prove it to me, prove that it’s worth it. I can understand that. What has this country offered to a kid like that? Someone like that can be helped. But not the ones who hate it and want to destroy it. How can you help them? It’s psychological with so many of them. I can’t be their psychiatrist.)

  Another kid asked a belligerent question, a question filled with hate spilling over so that in the end one forgot what the question was about and remembered only the hatred and the edge and the bitterness. Kennedy, a little tired, answered, “What we need in this country is to cut down the belligerence. If we let this hatred and emotion control our lives, we’re lost.”

  “It’s our lives,” one of the kids yelled.

  He continued to talk and it got worse; they shouted and booed and yelled for the Vietcong. It was a nightmare evening; he handled it well. Later, when the Kennedy people left, some of the Peace and Freedom kids threw pebbles and apple cores at the motorcade. Bright, upper-middle-class kids, children of affluence, they believed in the doctrines of the New Left, that if a society is wrong you can do anything you want to redress it, and if someone says something you don’t like, you can drown him out and deprive him of his speech. It was an ugly hour, for one sensed that it would get worse, that this was not going to be the last such evening in American life. Later Kennedy would talk with a reporter about it, and talk about the cycle of extremism and violence; that violence and extremism on one side beget extremism on the other. Each somehow makes the other feel that it is permissible and justifiable to do whatever you like.

  That night on the plane a group of reporters were talking about the evening, how unpleasant it had been, so much hatred.

  “I thought he handled it well,” Mankiewicz said.

  “But it was so goddamn demeaning,” said a reporter.

  “So is politics,” said another reporter.

  A few minutes later someone mentioned the evening to Kennedy. “That was pretty nice back there,” the candidate said.

  “For a fascist pig you did all right,” the reporter answered.

  “Yes,” he said, “as one fascist pig to another.” Now he was back in California, and all along he had counted on this state to save him. There had been times when it had seemed as if he would be able to take 60 percent in California, though that had been while Johnson was still in the race. Now hopes for sixty were gone, but perhaps in the fifties, the mid-fifties. He had a good base, the Mexicans and the Negroes, but he had to work on the liberals; he was in serious trouble there. Some reports were that he was around 35 percent in middle class liberal districts.

  Not among the Mexicans and the Negroes, however. The new complexities, the subtleties of the new politics, were far from their minds. Their issues were survival issues, they were involved in the kind of politics that went back to the early days of the New Deal. Robert Kennedy symbolized to them that America might care. His relationship with the Mexicans was unique; other politicians had courted the Negroes, but no other major political figure had made the cause of the grape pickers his own. That was a special act, for the grape owners are very powerful in the Democratic party. Robert Kennedy, baited a little by his young staff, had finally gone out there, had been moved, and had returned to go to Mass with Cesar Chavez. Could there have been a more symbolic moment? It was the kind of political symbolism which had passed from most of America in our new affluence, the dramatization of a relationship with an ethnic group. Going to a synagogue with Arthur Goldberg would not get back the Jews. It was a momentous occasion; within hours after it had happened, every Mexican American in the area knew of it—it was history. Kennedy had visited the strikers in 1966, had visited the fields and then had held hearings on the strikes. The local sheriff had testified that they were making preventive arrests because they were afraid of violence on the part of the pickets or on the part of the local people who did not like the pickets. The sheriff was very benign about this, pointing out also that he took photographs of all the pickets, and finally Kennedy had looked at him, all the coldness and the controlled anger there, and said: “I just want to ask you one thing. Have you ever read the Constitution of the United States?” The Mexicans had not forgotten. Now in 1968 they would say again and again that he had visited them in 1966; a great man come to honor their little cause, and now wherever he went, the crowds were enormous. His speeches were terribly simple. Decency is the heart of the matter, he said to them. The death and maiming of young men in the swamps of Asia is indecent. For a man to work with his hands in the valley of California with no hope of sending his son to college, that is also indecent. I think we can do better in America. It was simple enough, but the question had always been whether the Mexicans would vote. Mexicans are bad voters. But they did turn out. In Mexican districts that morning, in house after house, workers came around saying very simply: “Cesar says this is the day to vote for Robert Kennedy.” It was the biggest turnout in their history. They voted roughly 15-to-l over McCarthy, and turned the towns, where anti-Mexican feeling went to McCarthy, into Kennedy camps.

  The Negroes would do the same. Kennedy had the Negroes, there was no doubt—it was one of the few remaining love affairs in American politics. In part it was the product of the John Kennedy years. At the beginning of the campaign a poll showed that while only 39 percent of the general population believed that Robert Kennedy “has the same outstanding qualities of his brother,” 94 percent
of the black people felt that way, an astonishing and quite revealing statistic. It was of course helpful that in an inordinate number of American homes the photographs on the wall were of Jesus Christ, the Pope, Martin Luther King and John Kennedy—but it was also Robert Kennedy himself.

  He was drawn to them, felt their cause was the most important thing in America. He did not think one had to go through formal channels to talk with the anointed leaders, but rather he made himself available to a vast variety of black spokesmen. He had listened, was not bored, was not condescending, and they knew this, and were touched by him. He would campaign in the ghettos, always going beyond the allotted time, teasing with the youngsters, asking them what they studied in history, whether they liked school. Who’s your favorite president? he would ask. You, you you, they’d shout. No, no, that’s not what I mean. He’d grin, he was touched by them. He said to Jimmy Breslin one day in Watts, “These are the best-looking people in the country until they’re twelve. You look at the faces. They’re alive and have such expressions. What is it? These kids growing up face so many challenges right where they live that it shows in their faces. A character. Then when they get to about twelve, the challenges become too much for them. They get overwhelmed. Then the faces change. They become these masks. But until they’re twelve they’re marvelous. Much better-looking children than these kids you’d see on Fifth Avenue with their maids walking them.”

  The affection was there. Every time the candidate entered a ghetto it would begin again, black hands reaching for white hands, a rare enough sight in the America of the late sixties, and he would be very gentle, occasionally admonishing an extra body guard to be more gentle, “Easy, Jimmy, your hands are white and theirs are black.” But the question always was, Would they reciprocate, would they really go out and vote? There had been a smear campaign at the end. Drew Pearson, who wrote favorably about Humphrey, had written a column saying that Kennedy had authorized the bugging of Martin Luther King’s telephone. That King’s telephone had been tapped was not exactly news. Everyone in the country, it seemed, knew the FBI had bugged King’s phone. The FBI had the tapes and would play them for reporters and for Southern congressmen. It was one of the finer smears in America since there was no way of combatting it; it was the old Communist throttler at his best, saving Democracy for future generations. The column had been picked up by the McCarthy people, and there were radio spots, in a heavy Negro voice, saying, “I used to be for Robert Kennedy, but then I learned about how he bugged my brother Martin Luther King’s phone.” For a while Kennedy was a little nervous, but then Charles Evers, who was in California speaking for Kennedy, went around Watts sampling barbershop opinion and reported back that it was nothing to worry about. Most Negroes, he said, felt they did not need Drew Pearson to tell them how to vote. One man told Evers, “It’s like someone comes to you and tells you your wife is cheating but you love her so much anyway you just don’t care.”

  The mythology of black politics is that Negroes too are bad voters. But there were people in the Kennedy camp who felt that just the reverse was true, that they are very good voters, simply more sophisticated than white people realize. Often they don’t care; the choice of two white politicians normally doesn’t move them very much and they see marginal differences. Given two candidates whom they measure in degrees of hostility, they will not vote in opposition to the slightly more desirable man. They just will not vote for him either. Thus in Los Angeles they have traditionally voted about 15 percent below the county turnout for whites, with the exception of the 1936 Roosevelt campaign, and the 1950 Helen Gahaghan Douglas Senate race (she had been badly smeared on the race question). In 1968 the turnout would prove to be staggering; they would not only vote up to the white level, but in many sections went 5 and 10 percent about it. It is very easy to keep the pressure on in California to get out the vote. There are lists of voters at every polling booth and every hour the list is posted, with those who have voted scratched out. Thus a poll watcher with phone numbers can tell exactly who has voted and who hasn’t and can contact those who haven’t.

  The California people working for Kennedy could not believe the enthusiasm or number of Negroes working for him. In 1956 Dutton, working for Pat Brown and needing precinct workers, had called a number of domestic agencies and hired workers at ten dollars a head; for this election there were about 5,000 volunteers. Later, after the vote, after the assassination, Jesse Unruh would understand what it all meant. He would turn to a friend and say that that was the Negro vote for this year. “We can’t get them out again. They’ll never come back like that.”

  But there was a strategy battle over where to make the effort among the whites. There was so little time, so little organization. They were already annoyed with Unruh; they liked him, but they decided his machine was typical of California, he was a boss without a real organization. “Jesse was a real poor boy. Came out of the dust bowl. He was very bright and very ambitious; in fact he reminded us a lot of a young Lyndon Johnson,” one Kennedy staff member said. “But we had a hell of a time convincing him to broaden the delegation out. His idea of it was his immediate family, a few of their friends, his staff people and a few of their friends. That’s not exactly the way to win in California. We liked him a lot. There’s something good there. But sometimes I think we’d have been a lot better off without him, just going in there by ourselves.” Now, late in the campaign, they were regretting their early confidence and dependence on him.

  In Indiana and Nebraska they had realized they didn’t have the local organization and as such they had no illusions; they had gone in and done the whole thing themselves, made the tough decisions, put their own people in from top to bottom. But in both Oregon, where they had what they thought was Edith Green’s organization, and now in California, where they had the Unruh organization, they had picked up more illusions than anything else. In retrospect, an Edith Green organization just does not exist, or if it does, it is a highly nontransferable apparatus (except for the enemies), and they felt afterward that they would have been better off going in on their own and creating their own organization. Now in California it was worse, because there was more illusion and less organization than anywhere else. Unruh, whom they considered a good man (“one of the most humane professional politicians in the country,” one Kennedy man called him), had nevertheless been feuding with the liberals, and they picked up all those animosities. In addition, he simply did not understand the breadth and intensity of a Kennedy campaign. “Jesse was always trying to keep everyone out but his own people, without realizing it he was really narrowing our base. His theory was a small operation, and our theory always was that if five people could do the job, and twenty-five showed up, you found places for the twenty-five.” The California situation, which had been very good at the start, slipped badly, and by May the Kennedys had been forced to send Steve Smith and John Seigenthaler in full time, and had even detached Mankiewicz from the traveling party to work full time in Los Angeles, his original home.

  There remained the growing dispute over where to make the effort among the whites; among the liberals, who had turned to McCarthy, in the suburbs or among the white backlashers. Unruh and his people wanted to go for the backlashers and the suburbs; it was an area where they were more at ease and, according to one Kennedy man, where they “had fewer enemies; so they were pulled that way.” But the outsiders, the Kennedy people, wanted to make the effort among the liberals because by all the laws of American politics they felt the liberals should be for Kennedy, and they were uneasy about what would happen if he failed to run well among the liberals in California. It might harden and become part of the permanent political and journalistic ethos of Robert Kennedy: liberals don’t like Kennedy and won’t vote for him. Perhaps they would never turn it around. The liberal suspicion had haunted him all during this campaign, and it probably was the one thing that got under his skin. It was a product of many things. The liberals, after all, had not changed very much over the last
sixteen years, since that first exhilarating Stevenson campaign, and Robert Kennedy had changed a great deal; they found that hard to accept. He had carried on his education in public and his mistakes were a matter of record. He had been the tough lightening rod of his brother’s years, handling all the thankless jobs. He liked power, and he looked like he liked power, and many of the liberals, particularly the Stevensonians, drew back from power; there was something inherently evil in power. For the liberal intellectuals, many of them Jews, it was almost an ethnic thing—he looked too Irish-Catholic for them; they believed him more like his father than his brother; and they remained uneasy with him. Their defection hurt him the most. He had gone through it all once before, wearing a yarmulke all over New York City, sensing the strength of their distrust, but finally winning their votes if not their affection. Now in the campaign the Jews were retaining all the old suspicions, and this hurt him. Again and again with friends (at times, half of his advisers seemed to be Jewish) he would ask why it was happening and they would try to explain. But I thought we had established a relationship, and then they did not come across, he said. Some of the McCarthy support he could understand, he said, but now some of these people in New York and California, people who had asked him to make the race, were for Humphrey. Humphrey. Someone said not to worry, that if he got the nomination they would all come home. It’s not the same thing, he said; if they vote for me against Richard Nixon, what does that mean? What kind of consolation prize is that?

  Now in California, his advisers suggested that the major effort be to court the liberals. The Kennedy people thought the Unruh people looked down on the liberals and, more important, underestimated them as a force in California politics. There was a group of people which the Kennedys grouped as intellectual-liberals-academic-professional-people. They were roughly one half Jewish, said a Kennedy aide, and the rest might just as well be; they had the same voter profile. They equaled about 8 percent of the California population, 4 percent Jewish, 4 percent non-Jewish, but since they were almost all Democrats, they equaled about 10 percent of the total Democratic party. But since they voted with a special fervor, they represented roughly 15 percent of the voting Democrats, and since they were respected and influential, they could carry satellites with them, making a total of 20 percent. But in early May they were for McCarthy in roughly a 2-to-1 ratio and so a major effort was initiated to swing it around the other way. A collection of very distinguished liberals was imported to talk to small groups, coffee Matches, synagogues—always looking for groups which were either anti-Kennedy or fence-sitting. In they came, Pat Moynihan, Robert Coles, Arthur Schlesinger, Michael Harrington, Edwin Reischauer, Roger Hilsman, Roswell Gilpatric, Cesar Chavez (for white liberals). On one campus, Moynihan was speaking about the Negroes, and up came the question, What about wire tapping. Moynihan, too busy with the blacks all those years, didn’t really know about the wire tapping. But he happened to look up and there was a sign which said “Alexander Bickel will speak here at 2 P.M.” and he said, well when Bob Kennedy was appointed Attorney General, Alex Bickel had called it the worst appointment in the history of the republic, but when Kennedy left office he wrote in the New Republic that Kennedy had the best record on civil liberties of anyone in years, and now he’s speaking here today for Kennedy and if you have any questions you can ask him.