The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (55 page)

A schedule was thrown together as Kennedy loyalists converged on Washington with chaotic results. One such loyalist, Arthur Schlesinger, summarized the state of things in a memo with the capitalized inquiry: “IS ANYONE IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING, ANYWHERE?”
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On May 17, Kennedy flew to Kansas for appearances at the two major universities in the state. The next morning, before 14,000 students in Kansas State University’s Ahearn Fieldhouse, Kennedy began reading his speech, stammering at points, his right leg shaking behind the lectern. When he read a quote from William Allen White about the imperative of youth to rebel, even riot, for their beliefs, the “wholesome, corn-fed prairie faces,” Jack Newfield wrote, “let out a happy roar.”
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The intensity of the response seemed to stir him to a new level of projection. He acknowledged his own responsibility for the American presence in Vietnam: “I am willing to bear my share of responsibility, before history and before my fellow citizens. But past error is no excuse for its perpetuation. Tragedy is a tool for the living — as in the Antigone of Sophocles: ‘All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only sin is pride.’ ”
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Suddenly — as earlier in South Africa — the crowd sensed in this slight intense figure with his jagged delivery the voice of authentic emotion. The response in the field house was deafening.

Over the next fourteen days through fifteen states, Kennedy spoke to or greeted 250,000 Americans in person and reached several million more on television. Except for Alabama and Arizona, where the crowds were merely positive, the reaction, as one reporter termed it, was “explosive, uproarious, shrieking, and frenzied” everywhere he went.
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The reception in California was the most intense of all. Bobby was literally besieged by supporters in Los Angeles, his clothes torn, his motorcade waylaid for an hour. The
Los Angeles Times
described Kennedy’s speeches as hitting a “live nerve” of revulsion over the war and fear about racial strife, as well as stirring “the ashes of Dallas” that brought back memories of the beloved president. Everywhere he went, Kennedy spoke of the horror of Vietnam and the suffering of the poor and the forgotten. At the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles he opened up on President Johnson, accusing him of “calling upon the darker impulses of the American spirit.”
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But Bobby himself was also stirring up poisonous emotions. The hatred his candidacy inspired in many corners of the country was “practically chemical,” in the phrase of James Reston. The aspect of personal risk was obvious and troubling. The comedian Alan King told Bobby on one occasion, “They’re going to hurt you.” Kennedy replied, “Well, so many people hate me that I’ve got to give the people that love me a chance to get at me.”
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Only Bill Barry, a burly former FBI agent, provided a small semblance of security for the candidate. When Kennedy stood in the back seat in motorcades, Barry would simply hang on to his waist to prevent him from being pulled completely out of the car. “They’re here because they care for us and want to show us,” he told Barry at one point. But it was Bobby as much as the rampaging crowds that wanted it this way. There was much about public life he dreaded or did badly, but this he loved. Stung and repudiated in Washington, awkward and uneven in interviews and prepared remarks, he could touch and be touched by those who, like him, were searching for something. In Kansas Jimmy Breslin asked him if he could see the faces. “I saw them,” Kennedy replied. “I saw every one in the building.”

Lyndon Johnson, bedeviled once more by the myth of the invincible Kennedys, watched all this with a mounting sense of dread. He elected initially to go toe to toe with Kennedy, and delivered a podium-pounding, finger-jabbing declaration on March 18 against “surrender and cowardice” at the National Farmers Union in Minneapolis. The reaction was muted.
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A few days later came more bad news for the president: a Gallup poll placed Kennedy ahead of Johnson and indicated that Johnson would probably be beaten by Eugene McCarthy in Wisconsin on April 2. LBJ told presidential intern Doris Kearns that he had had a dream in which he was all alone sitting in a straight-back chair in a vast plain, cattle stampeding toward him, unable to move. He fretted about his health, particularly his heart. Both awake and asleep, he imagined himself paralyzed, lying conscious but stricken like Woodrow Wilson. At times, drenched with sweat, he would get up from his bed to walk downstairs with a flashlight and touch Wilson’s portrait.
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In the third week of March, the White House announced that the president would address the nation on the evening of March 31.

For all the energy and electricity of its first days, the Kennedy campaign had serious weaknesses. The surfeit of campaign leadership, without job titles or rank order at Bobby’s insistence, imperiled quick and authoritative decision making. “The worst problem I’m going to have,” Kennedy predicted, “is putting together the men who were with my brother with the men who have been with me.”
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It was actually more complex than that. There were the JFK men — Sorensen, O’Donnell, Ted Kennedy, Schlesinger, Salinger, Smith, Bruno, and later Goodwin and O’Brien; the former attorney general’s lieutenants — Marshall, Nolan, Oberdorfer; Kennedy’s Senate staffers — Edelman, Dolan, Walinsky, Mankiewicz, Jeff Greenfield, and Bobby’s indispensable secretary Angie Novello; and a cohort of Ted Kennedy aides and advisors — Richard Drayne, Dun Gifford, and Milton Gwirtzman.
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On the flights and in the campaign appearances a steady stream of personalities came and went simply on the basis of their friendship with the senator. They included journalists-cum-activists such as Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield, an assortment of Kennedy family members, athletes such as Rafer Johnson and Rosey Grier, the occasional crooner (Andy Williams), an astronaut (John Glenn), and an Irish cocker spaniel called Freckles. The most important new member of the traveling team was Fred Dutton, who had worked in the Kennedy White House and been a key aide to California governor Pat Brown. Dutton became to Bobby what Kenny O’Donnell had been for JFK, the close-at-hand strategist and scheduler who remained constantly at his side.

Several of the senior staff members, Sorensen and Gwirtzman to name two, thought the “win it in the streets” strategy made Bobby’s candidacy, with its mob scenes and wild motorcades, look like a “mobile riot” to people watching on TV.
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A lot of the so-called jumpers and screamers who enlivened these appearances were not even voters. Many of Kennedy’s advisors, moreover, thought his message needed to be broadened beyond Vietnam and the poor and targeted more toward the white middle class. In his first national swing, Bobby nonetheless resisted any change in his message and consistently vetoed image-driven campaigning. He continued going to where his heart was, spending over half his time during a two-day visit to Arizona and New Mexico on the Navajo Indian reservation.

In Albuquerque on March 29, Kennedy visited a Native American boarding school and, in remarks that brought the normally taciturn Indians to their feet, blasted the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs for spending 22 cents a meal on the children. “When I was attorney general,” he said, looking at school superintendent Dr. Solon Ayers, “we spent more than that on the prisoners in Alcatraz.”
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Later that night in Window Rock, Arizona, the Navajo capital, Kennedy took leave of his prepared text and cut loose with an even stronger attack on the BIA, claiming that it was a form of “American colonialism.” The idea, he said, of sending five-, six-, and seven-year-old children thousands of miles away to school was barbaric. “You have your culture. You have your history. You have your language,” Kennedy said. The Navajos responded with war whoops and earrending applause. On his way out of the Navajo tribal hogan, William P. Mahoney, who was leading the Arizona effort for Kennedy and who had grown up near the reservation, was stopped by a Navajo, who told him, “I have waited all my life for a white man to say that.” When Bobby heard this, he was deeply moved.
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The next day, Kennedy presided over several hours of a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education, which was being held in Flagstaff. Back in Washington senior staff members complained that Bobby was wasting time with people who were politically irrelevant. “You sons of bitches, ” Kennedy said when he learned about the complaint, “you don’t really care about suffering.”
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The succession of eighteen-hour days, and his practice of plowing the fullest measure of emotion into the campaign, started to take a noticeable toll on Bobby. He flew into Tucson, Arizona, dead-tired, his voice hoarse, his skin burned and peeling in places. Moments before he was to speak, he got up from his seat, hurried to a bathroom, and threw up. During his speech, he stumbled twice over the same word and said, “God, it’s been a long, long day.”
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The next evening in Phoenix at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel he stammered his way through a speech he had given many times before.
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Utterly spent, he left for New York the next morning and, shortly after arriving at La Guardia Airport on March 31, he was informed that Johnson had announced that he was withdrawing from the race.

Some in the Kennedy entourage wanted to celebrate. Bobby didn’t, sensing that he had lost his target, Johnson, and possibly his issue, the war. The next morning James Stevenson of
The New Yorker
rode in a car with the man who would be president:

When a traffic light changes to green, Kennedy’s fingers twitch an instant before Frank Bilotti can accelerate the car. Bill Barry’s eyes close; he is exhausted. He dozes. Kennedy was up until three o’clock. Carter Burden asks, “Are you tired?” Kennedy shakes his head, murmurs no, no — brushing it off as if the question is not worth consideration. On the East River Drive, a taxi-driver recognizes Kennedy and yells, “Give it to ’em, Bobby!” Kennedy waves, then stares ahead again. He is deeply preoccupied now, at his most private. (When Barry wakes and offers everyone chewing gum, Kennedy does not hear him.) He abandons, piece by piece, the outside world — he puts away the magazines, the cigar is forgotten, the offer of gum is unheard, and he is utterly alone. His silence is not passive; it is intense. His face, close up, is structurally hard; there is nothing wasted, nothing left over and not put to use; everything has been enlisted in the cause, whatever it may be. His features look dug out, jammed together, scraped away. There is an impression of almost too much going on in too many directions in too little space; the nose hooks outward, the teeth protrude, the lower lip sticks forward, the hair hangs down, the ears go up and out, the chin juts, the eyelids push down, slanting toward the cheekbones, almost covering the eyes (a surprising blue). His expression is tough, but the toughness seems largely directed toward himself, inward — a contempt for self-indulgence, for weakness. The sadness in his face, by the same token, is not sentimental sadness, which would imply self-pity, but rather, at some level, a resident, melancholy bleakness.
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Kennedy tried to suture his relationship with Johnson. They met on April 3 at the White House. Bobby asked the president if he would stay neutral in the race. “I’m no king maker and don’t want to be,” Johnson replied.
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But there was little Johnson could do, or wanted to do, to stop Vice President Humphrey from entering the race and picking up the thousand-plus delegates either pledged or leaning to LBJ.
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As David Halberstam put it, Humphrey, a figure of parody as Johnson’s Man Friday, suddenly became the “man of reconciliation” who could bring together the key power bases of the party, all of which opposed Bobby’s candidacy to a greater or lesser degree — the labor unions, the southern governors, the Jews, and the big-city bosses.
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Kennedy was left to fight it out in the primaries with Gene McCarthy, who had just scored an impressive, though largely uncontested, win in Wisconsin.

The Kennedy-McCarthy contest with Johnson in the race had been characterized by a sort of forced mutual tolerance. It quickly polarized after the president’s withdrawal. McCarthy’s essential insight into Kennedy, which he sowed first in encounters with the press and later more openly, was that Bobby was a parvenu, trading on his name and money, and that he had a great deal more ambition than ability. Kennedy regarded the Minnesota senator, on the other hand, as a sort of lazy poseur who had gotten lucky doing the right thing. McCarthy’s odd style made him a figure of fun in Kennedy circles. On one occasion McCarthy arrived early to give a speech to his supporters, delivered it to an empty hall, and walked out as his supporters were filing in. On another occasion, addressing dairy farmers in Wisconsin, McCarthy quoted the ancient Irish bard Caduc the Wise at length. His preferred traveling companion was the poet Robert Lowell. As aides would desperately try to brief or otherwise engage McCarthy with the business at hand, the two men would discuss how the Guelphs and Ghibelines in fourteenth-century Florence might see the race.
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The press at points featured their arcane exchanges, such as this one about deferments from the draft to boost the volunteer ranks:

LOWELL: Can they draft monks?