The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (57 page)

It was in the blue-collar neighborhoods of Lake County that Kennedy for the first time bridged the distance between black powerlessness and white ethnic fear: “This is your country. You have a right to work, to be cared for. And I’m not going to let them take it away.” Dick Goodwin felt Bobby had found his message at long last: “His inner urge toward defiance — of unjust privilege, indifferent power, concentrated wealth — which provoked so much fear and even hatred among some, was also the source of his greatest strength, arousing the hopes and expectations of millions who felt themselves victimized.”
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On election day in Indiana, Kennedy seemed possessed by a strange, cathartic joy. Out on the lawn of the Indianapolis Holiday Inn he played a full-contact game of touch football, in which two men left the field injured. He spoke to reporters about his deep respect for the authenticity of the tens of thousands of Hoosiers he had met, contrasting them with the “neurotic, hypocritical” people in New York and Washington. By nine that evening it was obvious he had won impressively — by a margin of 42 percent to Branigan’s 31 and McCarthy’s 27 percent. Before there was time to savor the victory, however, the television networks converted the result into Kennedy doing less well than expected. He was furious. When Walter Cronkite asked him, with McCarthy on the other side of the split screen, about the level of his campaign expenditures, Bobby attacked the networks, saying they made enough profits to give all the candidates free airtime.
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It was the sort of impolitic dismissal that had always cost him dearly and reminded the high priests of the press of the old accusation — ruthlessness.
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Kennedy and McCarthy moved on to Nebraska, while Humphrey zigzagged across the country locking down former Johnson delegates. Benefiting from the statewide organization of Phil C. Sorensen (the former lieutenant governor of Nebraska who had run unsuccessfully for governor in 1966) and deep local organizing, Kennedy gained an early lead. He kept up the level of banter. In Tecumseh, when the wind tore a scrap of paper from his hand, Kennedy quipped, “That’s my farm program. Give it back quickly.” Low on money and still searching for higher ground, McCarthy abandoned the state after a single visit, giving Kennedy a win, although one that gained him little national momentum.

The candidate who was really winning in these Kennedy-McCarthy battles was Hubert Humphrey, who had not entered a single primary. By the third week of May,
Newsweek
reported that Humphrey was already within striking distance of the nomination, with 1,280 “committed or leaning” delegates out of the 1,312 needed to win. If Bobby could not knock McCarthy out of the race and pick up his delegates, and then subsequently stampede some of Humphrey’s “leaners,” his race for the presidency would be over.

In Oregon McCarthy, perhaps sensing that Kennedy could not afford to retaliate without losing McCarthy voters and delegates later in the campaign, stepped up his attacks. He brought up Bobby’s role in getting America into Vietnam to bait him to deny or even denounce his own brother’s policy. But Kennedy refused to respond — or to accept McCarthy’s challenge to debate him. The result was disastrous. Kennedy never found his message, lecturing white suburbanites outside Portland on the horrors of Native American life and sparring with gun patriots in Roseburg.

J. Edgar Hoover did his part to trip Kennedy up. He leaked a report to Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson that the former attorney general had authorized the FBI to wiretap Martin Luther King in 1963. For a critical period of days, the charge, and Bobby’s halfhearted denial, swirled around in the press, reinforcing that old accusation of ruthlessness and dulling his final run of media in Oregon.
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Four days before his defeat in Oregon, Bobby suggested to Jack Newfield that he would not make it as the nominee: “I can accept the fact that I may not be nominated now. If that happens, I will just go back to the Senate, and say what I believe, and not try in ’72. Somebody has to speak up for the Negroes and Indians and Mexicans and poor whites. Maybe that’s what I do best. Maybe my personality just isn’t built for this.”
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The near-hopelessness now of the race seemed to release Bobby from any constraint, and his campaign became even more spontaneous and freewheeling. But behind it was still a fear of the past. There was a surprise birthday party for bodyguard Bill Barry on-board the plane with Barry and Kennedy’s faces painted in frosting on the cake. Champagne was being served all around when suddenly a balloon popped loudly. Kennedy’s hand rose slowly to his face, covering his eyes, and the gaiety stopped cold for ten seconds. Then the party resumed. In Los Angeles Bobby got off the plane for a rally, leaving most members of the press and his staff behind to continue to party with Ethel. Reporters soon began singing all the songs they knew — folk songs, patriotic marches, and Christian hymns, including “What a Friend We Have in Bobby.”

Kennedy got back on the plane at around 2 A.M. and Ethel told him excitedly, “Oh, Bobby. You don’t know what you have missed.” She told him about their singing for three hours — “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and so on.

Bobby, who liked to sing himself, tried to lead the group — with dissonant results.
Washington Post
reporter Richard Harwood stopped Bobby and told him he would have to listen for a change. After that the reporters sang “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in harmony. Kennedy seemed moved in a sad way. They also sang, “I Come to the Garden Alone” and “Softly, Earnestly, Jesus Is Calling.” Kennedy asked them to sing, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” And then asked them to do it again and again. They sang all the way to Portland, producer Sylvia Wright remembered:

Bobby was sitting down, and some of us were sitting on the floor around him, and we were all kind of huddled together. And then pretty soon, it sort of vaguely started to get light out, and it was about a quarter to five and we all just fell asleep together, huddled up there in the front of the plane. All these great big guys! All the seats were empty in the back of the plane. We all fell asleep lying across each other and huddled up together. Then Bobby got up and snapped the lights off over his shoulder and went off to sleep with the dog in the front.
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The journey, so rude and bitter at the start, was now blessed by song and friendship — and the sense that somehow it wouldn’t last. On May 28, McCarthy defeated Kennedy in Oregon by 6 percent. Bobby’s concession statement had a quiet and easy grace to it. Defeat brought release, and a chance for redirection and new self-discovery. He was now an underdog. In Los Angeles the next morning Kennedy went on a two-hour motorcade and, to his surprise and gratification, the response was thunderous and undiminished. He declared Los Angeles his “Resurrection City.”
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On June 1, he debated Senator McCarthy on national television in San Francisco. The debate turned out to be something of a non-event, with the candidates trading complaints over campaign materials and quibbling over the means to bring a coalition government to Saigon. But the debate served Kennedy well by stemming the slide toward McCarthy in California, and removing the issue of his refusal to debate. With four days to go before election day, there was another marathon dash up and down the state in search of crowds.

After one motorcade, reporter John J. Lindsay saw Kennedy get back on the plane — his tie gone, his cuff links and tie-clip torn off, his shirt stuck with sweat to his chest, limping, with one shoe gone. He said, “Don’t tell me people in this country don’t love me.” Then he paused. “On the other hand, perhaps all they wanted was a shoe.”
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With its huge black and Hispanic communities, California was natural territory for Bobby — if the minorities would turn out. Chavez and his farmworkers by this time had registered in excess of the 100,000 voters they had promised. In the final days they regrouped to get out the vote, moving in groups of three hundred through the endless barrios of East Los Angeles, and in smaller teams through the little towns in the San Joaquin, Imperial, Central and Coachella valleys. The communication was simple, “Cesar wants you to tell everyone to vote for Kennedy,” along with a printed statement detailing Kennedy’s loyalty. It was entitled “
Hechos Son Amor”
(Actions Are Love).
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The off-moments of the final days found a motley humor in the entourage. Freckles the dog had by this time become an important member of the campaign. He slept next to the senator between the seats of the airplane, rode with him in all the motorcades, and gave Bobby the excuse to break off and go for walks. Kennedy drew much pleasure from generalizing about Freckles’s reactions to campaigning. If the crowd was small, the dog would go to sleep and Kennedy would summon Jerry Bruno or Dick Tuck: “The dog’s pretty upset with this crowd. You didn’t do much of a job getting this crowd together.” Tuck pointed out that the dog would only go to sleep
during
his speeches. In Fresno, Bobby asked someone to walk Freckles. Tuck, always the jester, replied: “Ambassadorship to Rome?” Kennedy said yes. Later, when Tuck couldn’t find Freckles, someone said, “You know, it’s just a dog,” to which Tuck responded, “To you it’s a dog. To me it’s an ambassadorship.”

But again there were intimations of disaster. In San Francisco’s Chinatown the day before the primary, as Bobby’s motorcade inched through the choked streets, firecrackers went off in sharp bursts of purple smoke. Kennedy’s face froze in a half-smile and a shudder went through his body.
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Perhaps it was scenes such as these or something related to the sunny nightmare of California with all its warring voices and its legions of rootless, gun-angry people, but some around Bobby began to talk openly about the inevitable. French novelist Romain Gary, then living in Los Angeles, told Pierre Salinger, “Your candidate is going to get killed.” When Jimmy Breslin asked several reporters around a table whether they thought Bobby had “the stuff to go all the way,” John J. Lindsay replied, “Yes, of course, he has the stuff to go all the way, but he’s not going to go all the way. The reason is that somebody is going to shoot him. I know it and you know it, just as sure as we’re sitting here. He’s out there waiting for him.”
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One man out there waiting for him was Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan. Sirhan had worked at both the Santa Anita and Del Mar racetracks, popular meeting grounds for mafiosi. At Santa Anita in 1966, Sirhan had become acquainted with Frank Donneroummas, alias Henry Ramistella, who later had gotten him a job at the Corona Breeding Farm, where the two saw each other frequently. Donneroummas’s rap sheet included several arrests in New York and Miami. He was a wiseguy. Sirhan’s notebooks would later show that their relationship was also based on gambling and debt: “happiness hppiness [
sic
] Dona Donaruma Donaruma Frank Donaruma pl please ple please pay to 5 please pay to the order of Sirhan Sirhan the amount of 5.”
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The FBI had been picking up unconfirmed reports of a conspiracy that included an overheard conversation between Hoffa and his cronies in the Lewisburg penitentiary about “a contract to kill Bob Kennedy.”
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Bobby spent election day in Malibu at the beachfront home of John Frankenheimer. He body-surfed with his children (fishing his son David out of an undertow) and napped off and on throughout the day. In the evening, just as the returns were coming in, he went to his suite on the fifth floor of the Ambassador Hotel. Kennedy watched the returns in his own room with Ethel and his close advisors, while in Room 516 across the hall journalists and politicians gathered in an exuberant mood. At around 8 P.M., Bobby stuck his head out of his room and asked if anyone wanted to hear about how the Indians had voted in South Dakota (which was also holding its primary that day). He announced that the returns from an Indian precinct were 878 for Kennedy, 9 for the Humphrey-Johnson slate, and 2 for McCarthy.
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(He won South Dakota’s 24 delegates with 50 percent of the vote.)

The evening drifted on. More heartfelt congratulations from the Kennedy entourage of activists, advisors, and newsmen. More interviews that both heralded the obvious victory in California and the difficulty of winning the nomination, given Humphrey’s lead in delegates. Smoking a small cigar, at points going back to his own room to talk with Ethel, Walinsky, or Sorensen, Bobby seemed uncharacteristically settled. Richard Goodwin noticed “an easy grace, a strength that was unafraid of softness. For the first time since he had announced his candidacy, Robert Kennedy reminded me of his slain brother. If he looks like that for the rest of the campaign, we might win, I thought.”
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In the final count the margin over McCarthy, 46.3 percent to 41.8 percent, was more narrow than expected, an indication of continued electoral resistance among educated whites, particularly Jews, to Bobby’s candidacy. The victory did confirm, however, that Kennedy was attempting something unprecedented (and perhaps unachievable) in modern American political history — not simply to base his run for the presidency on the poor and the minorities, but also to make of their ascendancy the new moral basis for political power. At the hour of his greatest victory, as if to underscore this fact, he kept asking people if they had seen Cesar Chavez so they might go down to the ballroom together and accept victory.

The campaign, in the end, was not a campaign; it was a crusade. It proposed to do what Norman Mailer had once thought Jack capable of doing — linking the “two rivers” that had coursed through the country’s history and deepest consciousness, one of material power and military imposition and the other of myth and moral awakening. JFK had embodied the possibility of that linkage, but it was RFK who consciously proposed his life for it. He recognized “the terrible truths of existence,” as he put it the day after King’s death, but there was the always the adventure “to sail beyond the Western stars until I die,” as he had said so often, quoting Tennyson. To America, the bourgeois imperium, he embodied something very different — what Nietzsche called “tragic pleasure.” He had lived “in the face of death” and found joy in his affirmation of human tragedy.