In a sense the strategy probably worked. Some of the Kennedy people thought it was a waste of manpower, and that the guests didn’t reach enough people, but the general feeling was that they had made ripples beyond expectation for Kennedy. McCarthy still carried the liberal areas, but by a much narrower margin. The problem, of course, was California’s rootlessness. The California experts remained dubious about the idea of the imported speakers. Yes, sure, they spoke to a group of fifty people, and those fifty people had fifty wives, and fifty friends to whom they could say, “Well, you know, I had a pretty interesting talk with that Pat Moynihan, and he told me some things about Kennedy I didn’t know and I want to think about this election a little longer.” But finally, even those many converts, if they were all converted, would be too few. The Unruh regulars, of course, wanted a more traditional campaign, and had more confidence in the efficiency of their organization than the outsiders; but they were all bewildered by the same question: how do you reach the people?
The people had come to California and lost their roots, their dependence on one another, their knowledge of and ties with their neighbors. They no longer lived in the neat little neighborhoods in which they had grown up. California was a long way from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, another country. (One wondered what Wilder would do with the new America of California; would he sound more like Harold Pinter?) Now their new relationships came from the media—it existed, it was dependable, it was there every night, and had certain known, identified, friendly characteristics. They knew and felt at ease with the talk shows—Merv, Johnny, Joey—and inevitably California politics became media politics; it was the only way of reaching into those great disorganized scattered neighborhoods. So Kennedy now turned, for guidance on how to run a media campaign in California, to Dutton, the expert on California politics who had helped run those surprisingly successful early Pat Brown races. Dutton, not a close friend at the start, had grown closer and closer to Kennedy as the campaign developed. He had always been one of the brightest men that the Kennedys had brought to Washington in 1961, bright, talented, honest but modest. He lacked a capacity for self-glorification and dramatization and he was not nearly as widely known as he should have been. Dutton fashioned a television campaign which everyone in the Kennedy camp agreed was the most brilliant ever done in California—until afterward, when they realized what McCarthy had done, and realized that he, a rank outsider, had done it better.
There are three major television markets in California: the San Francisco area, the Los Angeles area, and the San Diego area. Traditionally a candidate would arrive in California, spend a day in Los Angeles, then the next day on to San Francisco, and then the next day on to San Diego. But Dutton had changed that; jet travel was so simple these days that they would begin in San Diego in the morning, fly to another market in the afternoon, and finish in the third market area in the evening. That way they would touch all three major markets in one day, and the local television stations would all rush out and get the scene: candidate arriving, jet coming to a halt, candidate shaking hands, jostling of the airport crowd, into town, five words from his speech; it was free television time in all three areas each day. They were all pleased with this. The candidate told people often Fred Dutton had the best political judgment of anyone he knew, and they were very pleased until they realized what McCarthy had done.
McCarthy could not draw crowds the way Kennedy could. Where Kennedy would draw 15,000, he would draw 1,500, and he knew this, and the press knew this, and nothing would irritate him more than to read the stories the next day where the press would judge him for his crowd gap. The crowds bored him anyway; he did not like the grabbing and the thrashing; and so rather than be judged badly on something he didn’t like in the first place, wearing himself down, burning up his time and energy, he skipped crowd stops as much as he could and went instead on the radio shows and the television talk shows. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them in California, and there is a great secret to getting on them—show up at the studio. The proprietors, of course, are delighted, and by and large it is the sweetest kind of questioning in the world. Good morning Senator, could you please tell us what a hell of a good guy you are and what your fine record is. Then, fifteen minutes later, Thank you Senator for taking the time to come by and explain to us what a terrific guy you are. And this was McCarthy at his best, witty, sometimes gentle, being a little nasty about Robert Kennedy. Suddenly the Kennedy camp realized what had happened. There would be two minutes on television each night of Robert Kennedy being mauled, losing his shoes, and then there would be fifteen free—that was painful—minutes of Gene McCarthy talking leisurely and seriously about the issues. That Gene McCarthy, the people would say, is a serious man; and the quiet man had turned a liability into an asset. Kennedy could draw crowds, it was one of his special strengths, and he was tied to doing the crowd thing. McCarthy was not able to do the things of the past, such as draw crowds, and thus was freer to take advantage of the new things. Now the Kennedy people realized that McCarthy had run, perhaps not by intention, a better television campaign in California.
In a somewhat modified form, this had bothered the Kennedys earlier in the campaign. The TV men covering him would always shoot him with the crowds, good stuff though rarely of substance, and the film clips would come in to the great networks. On that particular day McCarthy would do little because there was little in the way of crowds, but in order to have something, he and the TV reporters covering him might do small-spot interviews so that networks, who would not want to run Kennedy without McCarthy, would have something to balance the Kennedy coverage. So again they would portray a mauled Kennedy and a serious thoughtful McCarthy. A few days later the Kennedy people would want to show a Serious Kennedy and, in the morning, they would summon a TV man and give him a small exclusive, serious interview; then they would all go out campaigning and the crowds would maul Kennedy and the TV men would shoot that too. Both cans of films would come in to the networks and since one can was action, it was also news, and it would be used and the interview would be thrown away. In desperation one of Kennedy’s aides finally told him that if he wanted to be serious and thoughtful he would have to stay in his hotel room all day and be serious and thoughtful there.
But now the campaign was almost over, and he was driving himself relentlessly. Just these few more days and he could ease off, reduce the twenty hour day to a sixteen hour day, a fifteen stop day to a four stop one. He rested only for the great debate with McCarthy; the debate was to be on a Saturday night and on Friday he told an aide: “I’ll have my biggest crowd of the year out here tomorrow.”
“No, no,” said the aide, “you have the day off except for the debate. We canceled everything off.”
“No, it’s my largest crowd of the year,” he insisted. “All my advisers are flying in from all over the country to tell me what to say. It’ll be a hell of a crowd.” He was in a good mood.
The debate, like most highly promoted things in American political life, such as conventions, contained less than met the eye. It was not a debate, it was a love-in; they had no great dispute. They complemented each other: McCarthy would fire Dean Rusk; Kennedy would not deal in personalities. McCarthy wanted only the exposure that went with challenging Kennedy face to face; Kennedy wanted only to soften the ruthless image which had built up against him. It was a mutually pedestrian performance, and as far as convincing people went, it probably had a marginal effect; most people would watch it and see what they wanted to see and hear what they wanted to hear. The New York Times editorial page gave it to McCarthy; I gave it to Kennedy. It seemed to me that the great issue of the campaign, at this point in California, was not Vietnam or ghettos, but Bobby himself. He succeeded in softening the issues against himself; he did not look ruthless and he seemed McCarthy’s intellectual equal that night though even the announcer seemed both men’s intellectual equal that night. But now it was over and there was precious little time left. McCarthy was blitzing n
ow, coming on hard with a strong television campaign. There are only two ways of doing your television programming: either you save up your television money and blitz at the end, or you spread it out evenly. McCarthy, who was less well known, decided to blitz hard at the end, pound away with the name right before the election. It was the right strategy for him, the Kennedy people acknowledged, whereas with Kennedy the problem was different; he was already well known, so they spread it out more evenly to ease the ruthless issue.
The mood in the Kennedy camp was becoming a little more optimistic and more relaxed. Abba Schwartz, who had handled immigration in the state department, came out and helped work with the Chinese and had explained to some of the Kennedy people how to vote the Chinese. Tuck had answered, yes, that was fine, but the only problem was that two hours after you voted them you had to vote them again.
They were convinced now that they would come out of the state running hard, so all through the California campaign they hammered away at Humphrey, the enemy. It was good politics; implicitly it said that McCarthy was not a serious figure, and this was helping to ease some of the Eastern liberal feeling against Kennedy. For McCarthy was slightly trapped; he had to run against Kennedy to stay in and he was doing this, sharply and caustically, but the impression was growing among some of McCarthy’s foremost supporters that he was too hard on Kennedy and too soft on Humphrey. Clean Gene, among some of the kids and some of the intellectuals, was becoming tarnished for the first time.
For some reason Oregon no longer seemed so final; Kennedy’s advisers sensed they were going to come out of California with a real chance. They had already evolved a fairly sophisticated post-California strategy; a national grass-roots television campaign would be mounted, which would be similar in some ways to the one Rockefeller finally used, except much less emphasis would be on newspaper advertising and more on television. They would have five-minute spots five nights a week, right before the 11 o’clock news: This is Robert Kennedy and I want to talk to the people of the nation just as I did to the people in the states with primaries. Then finally one long thirty-minute program, virtually a speech by the candidate, spliced in with documentary shots of the public life of Robert Kennedy. Then an intense travel schedule from California to New York where the New York primary was to be held June 18, and where the Kennedy people were in serious trouble fighting a well-organized peace campaign. (As in California, the best people had gone over to McCarthy, and they had the best slates; he was still fighting the late entry.) Then from New York all over the country, a schedule arranged by Sorensen; twenty-six states where the delegates were still flexible. They would stop by in Chicago. “A good meeting with Daley. We’ll be very respectful, very polite. Here, Mister Mayor, is what we can do, where we run strong, and here’s Humphrey’s strength and McCarthy’s strength. All very polite. Then we’ll go into the ghetto and get one hell of a response.” Then a quick flying trip overseas to show that a major American political figure can still be acclaimed: Robert Kennedy Wildly Cheered in Paris, Rome, Warsaw. All of this, of course, designed for crowds, for publicity, for impact, and mostly to touch the polls and thus the delegates.
They felt that the delegates could still be wooed. Humphrey was far ahead in delegate strength, but Kennedy did not believe that it was a particularly strong hold; indeed Kennedy and the people around him sensed that Humphrey’s position would go not up but down as the convention approached, and this, his strength, would erode. They believed that much of Humphrey’s resurrection was tied directly to the euphoria of the Paris peace talks and Johnson’s magnanimous gesture. That had taken place on March 31; it would last for six or seven weeks, but then, as June moved along and July arrived, the euphoria would end, the old malaise about the war and about the administration would return. By early July it would be the new Hubert and the old war and the old malaise, for Humphrey was tied directly to things which were outside his control and which looked insoluble. (Although the Kennedy people felt the Humphrey delegate counts were inflated, they deliberately refused to challenge the figures. There were two reasons. The first was that they thought Humphrey’s grip was soft and they did not want to alert the Vice-President’s people to this until after the primaries when it would be too late. The second reason was that they were sure that after the primaries there would be erosion from Humphrey’s total, and they were anxious to create a reverse bandwagon psychology for the Vice-President.) In addition, Kennedy thought McCarthy’s hold on his young people was bound to slip. There were already signs that it was slipping; the Oregon campaign, with its attacks upon Kennedy rather than Humphrey, had given rise to some disillusionment.
So he pushed harder and harder. The Monday before the California primary he put in the final, most bone-crushing day of all. He covered 1,200 miles of the state, touched every ethnic group, and made a triumphant visit to Watts. Teasing with them, he said, Yes, you come out to see me. Are you just going to wave to Mr. Kennedy and then tomorrow when I’m gone forget about me, or are you going to vote? I think you’ll probably forget about me. The exhaustion showed; in San Diego where he spoke to a rally—divided into two sections because there were so many people; 2,500 in the first seating, 2,500 in the second—he collapsed momentarily between speeches. But it was a strong day. The response of the crowds encouraged him, and at one point while discussing why he was running, he said, “My first responsibility is to the United States, not to the Democratic party. It is a responsibility to the country itself. Now, feeling as strongly as I do, I can do nothing other than what I am doing.”
Election day. A good day. Enormous Negro and Mexican turnouts. The results were very good; the day was looking better and better. Early in the evening the results came in from South Dakota, and they were impressive; indeed they may have spelled the beginning of the end for Humphrey. South Dakota, where Kennedy had spent so little time, is Humphrey’s backyard—a rural state and the Vice-President’s birthplace—and now it was giving Kennedy 50 percent, McCarthy 20 percent, and a Johnson slate, which was pledged to Humphrey, only 30 percent. It was astounding news, a staggering victory, and Kennedy knew this would have a powerful effect on Daley. Humphrey could not even run well in his own region, where he is best known. It was one of the least-noticed political events of the year, but a persuasive piece of evidence, and Kennedy immediately and joyously recognized its significance. Earlier in the evening he had talked with Dun Gifford, a young lawyer on Teddy’s staff who was helping to handle delegate counts. He had asked him about the delegate counts and Gifford said they’d be assembled for him tomorrow, “and you’re going to like them.” Curiously, they had gotten better since Oregon; the defeat there had taken the edge off some of the hostility toward the candidate. It was a remarkable thing, Oregon had made him more attractive. “Don’t try and kid me with delegate counts,” Kennedy said. I used to do them myself.” Now the air was expectant and the early results were good; they showed Kennedy winning a major victory. One of the networks said it would be 54 percent, a smashing victory. Not sixty, but with South Dakota it was enough to remove most of the stigma of Oregon. His spirits were buoyant. Earlier in the evening Pat Paulsen, the new television comic, had referred to Humphrey as Herbert Humphrey (“I will debate all of the candidates for President in a place of their choosing. I will even debate Herbert Humphrey in a smoke-filled room”), and that caught Kennedy’s fancy. It somehow seemed to fit Humphrey and now, grinning, he said, “I’m going to chase Herbert’s ass all over the country. Everywhere he goes I’ll go too.” Then he descended to acknowledge his victory, to talk about the violence and the divisiveness, and to let a nation discover in his death what it had never understood or believed about him during his life.
Acknowledgments
MANY PEOPLE ASSISTED IN the writing of this book; a list of everyone who cooperated would be hopelessly long. From Senator Kennedy’s staff I am particularly indebted to Frank Mankiewicz and Fred Dutton; among colleagues, Dick Harwood, Jimmy Breslin, and Pete Hamill for their co
verage of incidents where I was not present At Harper’s Magazine Willie Morris and Bob Kotlowitz provided aid and encouragement; Lucille Beachy of Newsweek was generous in providing material on the campaign. In addition, William Shannon’s The Heir Apparent and Dick Schaap’s R.F.K. were particularly helpful.
The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy Page 20