Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (64 page)

Salinger’s euphoria was probably premature—there was a lot more campaigning and political maneuvering before Kennedy could finally claim the nomination. But with victory in California assured, Kennedy clearly had the look of a winner. He also looked, for the first time in his political life, like his own man. Kenny O’Donnell, who was planning to fly to California the next morning to join his old comrade’s campaign, later said, “He had arrived. He had won the biggest state in the Union—not as Jack Kennedy’s brother, not as Bobby Kennedy, but as Robert Kennedy.” Observing the candidate in his increasingly boisterous hotel suite, Newfield jotted down the word “liberated” in his notebook. “That’s how Kennedy seemed to be that last night.”

Late in the evening, Kennedy began to let his imagination roam. He sat on the floor, smoking a thin cigar with Newfield, Hamill, and his friend, screenwriter Budd Schulberg, and began to dream out loud about the kinds of new programs he envisioned for the country. He asked Schulberg about the Watts Writers Workshop that he had started for promising young blacks. “He was saying, ‘I’m going to replicate that all over the country, we’ll make a federal writers workshop program,’” recalled Newfield.

And then it was time to go downstairs and declare victory. At quarter to midnight, he rode down the service elevator and walked through the kitchen, shaking hands with the workers. The ballroom was hot and blindingly bright as he entered, overheated by the TV lights and the densely packed bodies of his screaming supporters. On the platform, Kennedy kept his speech short and upbeat, knowing how sweltering the room was becoming. The film footage of his beaming face and loose, wisecracking demeanor is still too awful to bear for those who watched his victory speech that night and are forever tormented by what came next. “Mayor Yorty has just sent me a message that we’ve been here too long already.” He smiled, tweaking the conservative Los Angeles mayor, whom he had turned into a running campaign gag. “So my thanks to all of you, and now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there.” Those were his parting words to his supporters. Then he flashed a V for victory sign—which in those days was also a peace sign—and brushed his forelock off his brow one more time, and he was gone.

The moments afterwards are a flash of searing images now iconic in American history. After conferring with Bill Barry, Dutton had decided that Kennedy should exit the back way, instead of wading into the ballroom crowd, which, he later said, was “rather unruly. Some people in the crowd had too much to drink.” Stepping down from the stage, Kennedy made his way back toward the hotel kitchen, the quickest way to a press room where print reporters were waiting for the candidate. In the crush of people—who were loudly chanting, “We want Bobby! We want Bobby!”—Kennedy became separated from Barry and Dutton. As he headed toward the kitchen—led by the hotel’s assistant maïtre d’, Karl Uecker—the candidate was about to violate several fundamental security rules, a rueful Joe Dolan said years later, as if he still wanted to grab Kennedy by the shoulders and make him stop. “He wasn’t with his security guy, Bill Barry. He was always supposed to stay right next to the guy who was carrying him. We used to say to each other, ‘Who’s got the package?’—meaning who was responsible for moving him around. But we lost him that night. Another rule was don’t go through the kitchen. And the third was don’t reach into the crowd.”

Barry rushed to catch up with Kennedy—along with Rafer Johnson and former Los Angeles Rams star lineman Roosevelt Grier, who were also providing the candidate with muscular, but untrained, protection that night. But, slowed by the swarm of people, they had not reached him yet as Kennedy entered the kitchen pantry—a “long, grubby area,” as Hamill later described it, that “was the sort of place where Puerto Ricans, blacks, and Mexican-Americans usually work to fill white stomachs.” The service area was lit by the dull glow of fluorescent lights and there was a rusty ice machine on one wall and a steam table stacked with dirty plates and glasses along the other. A row of cooks and busboys in white uniforms lined each wall, eagerly waiting for the chance to shake Kennedy’s hand as he made his way through the gauntlet.

One of them, a seventeen-year-old Mexican-American busboy named Juan Romero, had met Kennedy earlier, after the candidate’s entourage checked into the hotel. Romero had offered to pay another kitchen worker if he let him take a room-service cart to Kennedy’s room. The busboy was not politically involved, but he was intrigued by the famous politician. Romero had seen photos of the Kennedy brothers in people’s homes back in Mexico and he knew that Bobby had rolled up his sleeves for California’s farm workers. When he pushed the food cart into Kennedy’s room that day, the candidate shook his hand “as hard as anyone had ever shaken it. I walked out of there twenty feet tall, thinking, ‘I’m not just a busboy, I’m a human being.’ He made me feel that way.”

Now, as Kennedy edged his way through the pantry, Romero reached out to shake his hand once more, when suddenly he felt a flash of heat in his face and heard a loud pop. The busboy saw Kennedy fall backwards. As the room exploded in screams and whirling motion, he knelt down on the greasy pantry floor and cradled Bobby’s head in his hand. He felt the warm blood ooze through his fingers. Romero leaned down and asked him if he could stand up. Kennedy was saying something in a faint voice and the busboy bent his ear closer to hear him. “Is everybody OK?” whispered Bobby, the watchful guardian to the end. Then Ethel and others were there, nudging Romero out of the way. “Oh, my God,” she sighed softly, kneeling next to her husband, who seemed to turn towards her with recognition as she took his hand. She crouched over him, in her orange and white party dress, whispering to him and stroking his bare chest and brow. Romero asked her if he could give Bobby his rosary beads, but she didn’t answer so he slipped them into one of the senator’s strong hands, wrapping them around his thumb so they wouldn’t fall off.

Hamill had been a few paces ahead of Kennedy, walking backward and taking notes, when he heard the small, sharp explosions—pap, pap, pap. He saw the young, curly-haired man with the outstretched gun—his first impression was that he was Cuban—and he was one of the first people to slam into the assailant. “Get the gun! Get the gun!” men were screaming. Hamill quickly gave way to the bigger men who were wrestling for the revolver, including Barry, Johnson, Grier, and writer George Plimpton. Barry, who had reached Kennedy just as the shots were fired, hit the gunman twice in the face so hard that he thought he was going to kill him. To control his fists, he threw his arms around him in a stranglehold. The big man who had wrapped his arms protectively around Kennedy throughout the campaign had lost his “package” for just a minute, and now he was locking his arms instead around a man who had shot at Kennedy.

By the time Hamill could get a look at Kennedy, he knew his friend was beyond help. His face “had a kind of sweet acceptance to it,” thought Hamill—he looked like a man who had been released. “His eyes were glassed over, but open. There was a sort of flicker on his face, an ironic smile as if he had been expecting this all along.” Bobby’s last words before slipping into unconsciousness, someone later told Goodwin, were, “Jack, Jack.”

While Bobby lay bleeding on the scummy kitchen floor, a wrenching moan—
not again, not again
—sped like electricity down the grimy corridor, like the shock of recognition that passes down a line of cattle on the way to the killing floor, and then it jolted the still crowded ballroom next door. As the sense of what had happened filled the big, bright, chandeliered room, a wave of revulsion—so powerful it was almost a physical thing—rolled through the crowd. Rick Tuttle was standing near the TV camera platform at the back of the ballroom with another young campaign worker—the woman who would become his wife—when the wave hit. “There’s a literary phrase—‘the room heaved.’ That’s exactly what it did. Something made it heave and then it heaved again, like an undulating ripple. And, of course, it was the word from the pantry.”

The howls from below began rising to the upstairs rooms. Goodwin, still in the Kennedy suite, ran to the TV in one of the bedrooms to see what had happened. There, sitting on the other bed, silently staring at the television’s unwatchable images, was another Kennedy veteran, Ted Sorensen. “We just looked at each other and we both knew that he was dead,” Goodwin remembered.

Outside the hotel, Frankenheimer and his wife, Evans, were waiting in their Rolls-Royce to drive Bobby and Ethel to the victory party, which was to be held at the Factory, the trendy new disco that Salinger co-owned with celebrities such as Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr., and Paul Newman. A policeman suddenly banged on the Rolls and barked, “Get this car out of here.” The director started to explain that they were waiting for Senator Kennedy, when he and his wife heard the screams: “Kennedy’s been shot! Kennedy’s been shot!” Forced by the cop out of the Ambassador driveway, the Frankenheimers drove through downtown L. A., which was desolate at night, frantically looking for a phone booth. The car radio said Kennedy had been taken to Good Samaritan Hospital, and after finally finding a gas station with a pay phone, the director managed to reach Goodwin in the hospital waiting room. Since all the Kennedys’ clothes and belongings were back at the Malibu house, Goodwin advised them to go back there and help gather them.

Evans Frankenheimer later recounted the ghostly feeling of the house when they arrived. As soon as they got inside, they turned on the row of TVs that Frankenheimer had installed for the Kennedy team to watch the building excitement of Election Day. Instead, there were chilling scenes from the Ambassador and shots of the police cordon outside the Good Samaritan and of sobbing people standing vigil. The Frankenheimers walked into the bedroom where Bobby and Ethel had been staying. All their clothes were still there, including the gaudy pink and green Hawaiian swim trunks that Bobby had worn that afternoon. “Two campaign assistants later showed up to get Bobby’s clothes, and one of them just started throwing them in a heap in the suitcase,” Evans recalled. “John became absolutely apoplectic and said, ‘Fold those! Fold those!’ So they had to take them out again and John stood there helping them fold Bobby’s clothes.

“In the heat of it all, they forgot the damn swim trunks. I found them later. There they were, still wet and blobbed up in the sink.”

At the Good Samaritan, the dark vigil dragged on. A team of six surgeons labored over Kennedy for nearly four hours. But as time wore on, it became clear the vigil was a death watch. Kennedy had suffered three bullet wounds—one grazed his forehead, another lodged in his neck and the final, most serious, shot had struck him behind the right ear and penetrated his brain. As the doctors struggled against the inevitable, family and friends gathered in a hospital suite. When Kennedy was wheeled unconscious into the room after surgery, the doctors’ mood was grim. They took aside Mankiewicz, who had been giving medical progress reports to the press, and told him the truth. “They told me they took some pieces of bullet out of his brain, but they couldn’t get it all. They were as gloomy as doctors can be. It seemed to me this was the end.”

Walking by the bathroom in the hospital room, Mankiewicz noticed Ted Kennedy standing there, bent over the sink and splashing water on his face. He started to say something to the remaining Kennedy brother, but then he saw his face. “I have never seen as agonized a look on anyone’s face in my life,” said Mankiewicz years later. “It just tore me up. I mean it wasn’t like a mother whose son has died in combat or a father whose daughter has been kidnapped. It was something beyond that. I just thought, ‘Oh, the hell with it. I’m not going to say anything.’”

It was Frank Mankiewicz who finally had the task of telling the world that he was dead. The press aide had been at Kennedy’s side nearly every day for the past three years. And now he was walking into a press room for the final time to make an announcement about the senator. The statement came in the haunted early morning, nearly twenty-six hours after Kennedy was shot. “I have a short announcement to read which I will read at this time,” said an exhausted Mankiewicz, in a voice he struggled to keep under control. “Senator Robert Francis Kennedy died at 1:44 a.m. today, June 6, 1968. With Senator Kennedy at the time of his death were his wife, Ethel; his sisters, Mrs. Stephen Smith and Patricia Lawford; brother-in-law Stephen Smith; and Mrs. John F. Kennedy. He was forty-two years old.” He later added the name of his brother, Senator Edward Kennedy.

The country—staggered by Dallas, by Vietnam, by King’s death, by the exploding cities, by the spiraling feeling of chaos and doom—was now forced to make sense of this latest calamity. This second assault on a dynastic family in which so many Americans had invested their hope. One would have to go back to ancient Rome to find a precedent in the stunning back-to-back assassinations of two brothers at the height of their political glory—all the way to the second century B.C., when Tiberius Gracchus and then his younger brother Gaius were viciously hacked to death after each was elected tribune of the people and antagonized the Roman aristocracy with their democratic reforms.

Even in death, Robert Kennedy remained an object of perverse fixation for J. Edgar Hoover. The first autopsy photos of Kennedy’s remains were rushed to the FBI chief, who locked away the grisly trophies in his infamous “official and confidential” files—the only celebrity death pictures preserved like this by Hoover. The gruesome, color autopsy pictures also found their way into the safe of James Angleton—as his CIA successor was repulsed to discover years later when he cracked open the fired spook’s secret vault.

BOBBY’S DEATH SHATTERED THE
Kennedy dream forever. The men who had served the brothers were blown to their separate fates, to try to recover and to find their way down new paths. But none of them would ever reach the same political heights, the same pinnacle where it once seemed they could have changed the course of America.