The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (49 page)

In 1962, Chavez and Huerta had left the CSO and moved to the town of Delano in the San Joaquin Valley to launch a union for farmworkers. Kennedy wasn’t much help as attorney general but he was as senator. His office ran interference for Chavez’s movement, trying to get green cards for some workers, or pressuring the Texas Rangers to stop trying to break the strike in central Texas. By 1967, the farmworkers made what seemed a breakthrough. Schenley signed, and the largest vintners in the country — Gallo, Christian Brothers, Almaden, and Paul Masson — all agreed to negotiate with the farmworkers. But the talks soon stalled. The National Farmworkers Association (NFWA) responded by picketing the offices of the corporate giants. When the police arrested the picketers on technical grounds, Dolores Huerta called Senator Kennedy’s office. On one occasion in New York, she tracked him down at the Puerto Rican Commonwealth building. “Senator, some of our people are in jail.” Kennedy seemed exasperated: “Every time I see you, you have people in jail. They’re either in jail in California, or San Francisco, or Texas.” “Well, now they’re in jail in New York,” Huerta replied.
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Kennedy would always make the call to get them out.

Bobby’s adoption of the farmworker cause was just one of a succession of personal breakouts that led to moral growth. In Washington, amid the white noise and maneuvering, the endless postures and compromises, as well as the intermittent savagery of his enemies, Kennedy felt trapped. On the Senate floor or in committee, “you always had the feeling that Bobby might explode,” Ted Kennedy’s aide Dun Gifford remembered. On one occasion in the course of an endless debate on the floor, Bobby walked up behind Ted Kennedy’s chair — Ted had been elected senator from Massachusetts in 1962 — and whispered, “Is this how you become a member of the club, Senator?”
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Bobby put in long days, manfully performed his duties, but his heart wasn’t in it.

His sojourns outside of Washington drew him into the scarred and wasted places in America — Indian reservations, Mississippi shanties, New York City tenements. There his anger and his empathy, his sense of what we were doing to the least of our brethren, would surge up. When he heard that a baby had died on an Indian reservation during his visit he said, “When that baby died, a little bit of me died too.” He went into the slums of Harlem, sometimes alone, over thirty times. “I have been in tenements in Harlem in the past several weeks where the smell of rats was so strong it was difficult to stay there for five minutes, and where children slept with lights turned on their feet to discourage attacks.”
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Ironically, this moral awakening and the brutal directness with which Kennedy communicated it further complicated his relations with the liberals. It was not enough, he said, to go on marches in Alabama and ignore the race-based decay and terror in the Bronx. Here he was, not calling just for some constitutionally derived vindication of black rights or a raft of new federal programs, but for a conversion of capitalism to a more human-based community of reconstruction. “People like myself can’t go around making nice speeches all the time. We can’t just keep raising expectations. We have to do some damn hard work, too.”
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He spearheaded a huge project to transform Bedford-Stuyvesant, a black and Puerto Rican community of a half-million people in Brooklyn. The focus was to create jobs and reconstruct housing by attracting business investment, a formula Robert Scheer of
Ramparts
magazine later described as more “reminiscent of Ronald Reagan than Herbert Lehman.” With Tom Johnston and Adam Walinsky, staffing the effort, Kennedy brought in leading CEOs to run two nonprofit corporations. The results were slow but impressive. Even William F. Buckley approved.
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Liberals, however, who continued to think that government was the right instrument of social improvement, remained suspicious of Kennedy. The drift of “corporate liberalism,” as E. J. Dionne has termed it, was toward big labor and big government, not self-help and private investment.
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Kennedy did not use the right liberal words or say the expected things, unlike Vice President Hubert Humphrey, for example. He seemed far too blunt, even discordant. The other significant liberal group in the country, America’s Jewish population, was also skeptical. David Halberstam thought that Bobby Kennedy reminded Jews of a “tough little Irish kid who punched you in the nose.”
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Journalist and political activist Jack Newfield recalled a confrontation with the attorney general in June 1963. He described Kennedy’s “hard, Irish face; alert, but without much character, a little like the faces that used to follow me home from Hebrew school, taunting, ‘Christ killer.’ ”
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But Kennedy’s problem went well beyond his discomfiting demeanor. In a time of prosperity, he was critiquing America the greedy. Racism, he said, was a form of economic abuse anchored in an amoral capitalism. The money culture dehumanized people, made them into economic beings, and cast off the infirm, the black, and the uneducated alike. In one speech Kennedy went so far as to question what material richness had gotten America:

[W]e have a great gross national product, now soaring beyond $800 billion a year. But that counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear out highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and equipment for police to put down riots in our cities. . . . The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.
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The reactionaries, who had always reserved a special hatred for Bobby, regarded such statements as treasonous. The great mass of white Americans, on their way to safety in the suburbs, were simply not listening. But this seemed to have no effect on Kennedy.

At one point Bobby suggested that network television move a camera into the tenement of a single black woman and her family so that Americans could see the violence all around her, the rat bites on her children’s faces, and the complete dilapidation of her apartment. But TV was busy beating its path toward its viewership and preferred more happy and simple-minded imagery.

In April 1967, Kennedy went to Mississippi for Senate Labor Subcommittee hearings about the displacement of black labor by reductions in federal subsidies for cotton farming. After a day of hearings, Kennedy asked Charles Evers, who had befriended Bobby after his brother Medgar was shot in 1963, to take him out to the Delta. The next day they visited, as Evers later put it, “one of the worst places I’d ever seen.”
Des Moines Register
reporter Nick Kotz, who accompanied them, later described the dark, windowless shack reeking of mildew and urine — the “odor was so bad you could hardly keep the nausea down” — out of which a half-naked woman walked out. When she learned that this was Senator Kennedy, she “just put her arms out and she said, ‘Thank God,’ and then she just held his hand.” When Kennedy went inside the shack, he found a child playing on the floor with pieces of rice. “His tummy was sticking way out just like he was pregnant. Bobby looked down at the child, and then he picked him up and sat down on that dirty bed. He was rubbing the child’s stomach. He said, ‘My God, I didn’t know this kind of thing existed. How can a country like this allow it?’ ” He tried to evoke some response from the boy by caressing and tickling him, but the child seemed to be in a trance. “Tears were running down [Kennedy’s] cheek and he just sat there and held that little child. Roaches and rats were all over the floor. ”
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Kennedy’s sense of outrage, once directed at Mafia thugs, southern sheriffs, and indolent performers in his brother’s administration, was now turned upon generic evils — violence, cruelty, poverty, and arrogant indifference to human suffering. He often quoted Camus:

We are faced with evil. I feel rather like Augustine did before becoming a Christian when he said, “I tried to find out the source of evil and I got nowhere.” But it is also true that I and few others know what must be done. . . . Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
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Bobby had undergone a transformation whose proportions he could never have imagined in November 1963. “What do you think of Che Guevara?” he asked civil libertarian Roger Baldwin one day. “I think he is a bandit,” replied Baldwin. “I think he is a revolutionary hero,” Kennedy said. When journalist Stanley Tretrick suggested that maybe Bobby belonged in the hills with Fidel and Che, he replied, “I know it.”
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This from the man who less than four years earlier had spearheaded the move to eliminate these men. Even his attitude toward the now-imprisoned Jimmy Hoffa, about whom he would inquire from time to time, had softened.
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Bill Hundley thought that one of the first things Bobby would do if he ever became president would be to pardon Hoffa.

The man who had once embodied street-tactics warfare was now opening himself up to a whole different form of engagement — and the sight was puzzling to many. “He’s unassimilated, isn’t he?” Robert Lowell asked, observing Bobby at a party. The public didn’t get him, either. A poll comparing RFK to JFK showed this all too clearly. Only 24 percent of those polled in early 1968 thought that Bobby had “the outstanding qualities of President Kennedy.” Compared to his martyred brother, Bobby seemed variously awkward, unpredictable, and extreme. Jack had understood that in the age of mass media, the expression of power should be personal, not simply moral or ideological. Like a great actor responding to the circumstance of the moment, Jack could achieve an equipoise between change and continuity. He could promise change and decisive action while preserving his options. The style was the message.

Joe Kennedy had often observed about Jack that people found it difficult to dislike him. Bobby was just the opposite; he was easy to dislike, even hate. But when people came to know him, including members of the press, they could also become devoted to him. Part of it had to do with the absolute loyalty he required and returned in kind. Part of it was that behind that mask of taut and brusque resolve, people discovered the compassion of a man wholly engaged by life. “A lover,” as JFK speechwriter Richard Goodwin put it.
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He wrote very personal notes to all sorts of people, sat alone petting a dog (his or anyone else’s), and spontaneously hugged children. Jack had been a taker; this man was a giver. Bobby had once hardened himself to his father’s demands and his older brother’s needs. But on his own he refound his acute and tumultuous sensitivities and proceeded through his days in a whirl of polylinear encounter.

June 6, 1966

Cape Town, South Africa

T
he
Washington
Post thought that Bobby Kennedy’s decision to go to South Africa and challenge apartheid was based on his “unnerving compulsion to seek out the excitement of danger.” But what good could it do in a police state with a Nazi-like level of control? What was the point in addressing a student group the government considered subversive?

Kennedy himself had similar concerns as he made his way to the University of Cape Town to deliver the Day of Affirmation speech. A crowd of 18,000 was waiting for him when he arrived at the university, and it took him nearly a half hour to get from the car to the stage in Jameson Hall, where he gave what many consider the greatest speech of his public life. It was as elegant in verse and form as any that Jack had ever given, but the melody of pain and solitude belonged to Bobby.

Kennedy’s Senate office had received the invitation to give the address from the National Union of South African Students in late November 1965. Kennedy called Wayne Fredericks, the State Department Africanist he most trusted, to get his view. Fredericks, a soft-spoken man then serving as deputy assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, was at heart a liberationist. He advised Kennedy to go. On the basis of Fredericks’s recommendation, Kennedy’s office accepted the invitation to go to South Africa and applied for visas. Five months went by with no response from the South African government. Finally on March 22, 1966, four visas were delivered to Kennedy’s Senate office. They had requested twelve. Tom Johnston, an aide to the senator from his New York office, was assigned to do the advance work and immediately left for South Africa. He was not encouraged by what he found there. Bobby, Johnston later said, was going into “a terribly explosive and delicate situation where the government was completely against him and the largest percentage of the white people were against him; and the blacks were in no position to really have any information, or be for him or against him. The whole trip had the makings of one of the major disasters of his life.”
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Security was a wide-open issue with the South African government, which had characterized Kennedy’s trip as private, refusing to help. If Minister of Justice Balthazar Vorster thought this would scare Kennedy off, he clearly had not been briefed about the senator’s November 1965 trip through Latin America. Kennedy had plunged into crowds of screaming and spitting communist students in Chile with a wry smile on his face, walked though Brazilian
favelas
with no security, and dove into a piranha-infested river in the Amazon jungle.
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But South Africa was more treacherous ground. If blacks were in a majority, they weren’t a political majority. Kennedy could endanger their status simply by drawing them out. Were there deaths or mass arrests during his visit, the senator would be blamed. South African students were also enmeshed in a web of informants and secret police. There wouldn’t be the huge crowds of young people as in Asia in 1962 or Latin America in 1965, nor opportunities for the sort of inspired exchanges that played into Kennedy’s emphasis on youth and idealism. Two weeks before Kennedy was to leave, Ian Robertson, the twenty-one-year-old medical student who had officially invited Kennedy, was “banned” or placed under house arrest by the government.