The Passage of Power (120 page)

E
VEN TO DATE
the change in Kennedy to the assassination may be misleading. It had been during the
Cuban Missile Crisis a year earlier that the men sitting around the Cabinet table had seen the once “simplistic” Robert Kennedy behave “quite differently.” But now, after the assassination, the evolution from Kennedy’s old Manichean “black and white” view of life became, suddenly, much more noticeable.
“It’s
an impressive thing now how well he grasps the gray areas,” an old ally said. When, not long into the Johnson Administration, four Cuban fishing boats were seized just two miles off the Florida Keys, hawks in a
National Security Council meeting wanted Johnson to view the incursion as a “test” of the new President, one that must be met by a show of force. Bobby advised viewing it instead as a mistake, “like a speeding, parking ticket … just tell them to get out of there and go home … if you wanted to fine them a couple of hundred bucks, fine them, but the idea of locking them up and creating a major crisis about it was foolish.” (The fishermen were fined and sent home.)

In other respects, too, the “change” was more the continuation of an evolution.

The hints that there had always existed, beneath the rudeness, the anger, the belligerence, the “mean streak,” the cruel streak; beneath the bottle over a student’s head in the Cambridge bar, and the abandonment of a friend on a boat he couldn’t sail—the hints that there had always been very different qualities in Robert Kennedy had always been just that: hints. Although vanden Heuvel, who went to work for him in 1955, says,
“There
was always something very vulnerable about Bobby,” before November 22 there had been few signs of an awareness in Robert Kennedy that he himself might not be immune to the storms and terrors
of life. Shielded by his father’s wealth and calloused by his father’s philosophy, and thrust at an early age into the roles of prosecutor and political campaign manager, he had lived a professional life more aptly described by the detested adjective “ruthless” than by the one vanden Heuvel chooses. If there was an awareness within him of, or any empathy for, the vulnerability of less protected human beings to the storms and terrors, the signs he displayed of it—tenderness, gentleness—had mostly seemed restricted to members of his family and to children. But now, following his brother’s assassination, the hints began to become broader—in scenes that men and women who witnessed them never forgot.

About a month after the assassination, he attended the annual Christmas party at a Washington orphanage.
Peter Maas, one of his journalist friends, had walked over from Justice with him.

“The moment he walked into the room [at the orphanage], all these little children—screaming and playing—there was just suddenly silence,” Maas recalls. “Bob stepped into the middle of the room, and just then, a little black boy,” six or seven years old, “suddenly darted forward and stopped in front of him, and said, ‘Your brother’s dead! Your brother’s dead!’ ”

The words “knifed to the hearts” of the adults in the room. “You could hear a pin drop,” Maas says. Some of the adults turned away. “There wasn’t any place in the world any of us wouldn’t have rather been than in that room,” he says. “The little boy knew he had done something wrong, but he didn’t know
what,
so he started to cry.” Were there any words that could be said to him? “You wouldn’t have thought so,” Maas says. But then Robert Kennedy, picking him up “in kind of one motion,” and holding him close, said, “ ‘That’s all right. I have another brother.’ ”

There were other hints.

Appearing at the dedication of a Catholic home for the aged in Kansas City, Bobby moved through the wards followed by a throng of television cameras and reporters. Feeling they had enough pictures and quotes, all of them, with the exception of
Ben Bradlee then of
Newsweek,
had left before he walked upstairs to a ward for the terminally ill. “He went from bed to bed, rubbing their hands, touching elbows, putting his head to their foreheads, comforting,” Bradlee was to recount. Then he sat down “alone at the bedside of a woman whose eyes were tight shut, whose death rattle was the only sign [of] life,” and for close to an hour
“I
watched with tears in my eyes as the ‘ruthless’ Bobby Kennedy stroked this unknown woman’s hand, and spoke to her in a near whisper.”

The gentleness and tenderness, the vulnerability, had always been present in Robert Kennedy, and yet had been subordinated to other, conflicting qualities, and had been hidden—“his most tenaciously maintained secret.” But now he had had to look at that face that had once been so vibrant and charming but on which “not a good job” had been done—how could he not have learned more about vulnerability, realized that no one was invulnerable? How could he not identify more deeply than before with the injured, the wounded, of the world, after feeling
himself such terrible pain? And, in a way, powerful though he still was, with the powerless of the world as well? His power now, though still considerable, was nothing beside his former power—much of that had vanished in an instant, in the moment he picked up the phone that day at Hickory Hill and heard
J. Edgar Hoover’s voice. He was still attorney general, he noted. “I have influence … but the influence is just infinitesimal compared to the influence I had before.” After his return from Aspen in January, the deep wellsprings of compassion in Robert Kennedy, always present but heretofore only intermittently visible, began to rise to the surface in the objectives he pursued in government.

Some of his old objectives, ends to which he had devoted years of obsessive pursuit, seemed to interest him not at all. In March, a harpoon would sink into
Jimmy Hoffa at last; found guilty of conspiring to fix a jury, the Teamster boss received an eight-year sentence. Bobby sat silent, melancholy, at the “Get Hoffa” team’s celebration. Ken O’Donnell felt he understood.
“There’s
nothing to celebrate,” he said. “He had [had] enough tragedy of his own now.” Several members of the team felt that he was, one says,
“unhappy
” that the Teamster boss had received such a long jail term.
“He
didn’t like the idea of eight years,” another says. From time to time thereafter, he would ask,
“How’s
Jimmy doing?” Otherwise,
“he
had lost all interest in Hoffa,”
Murray Kempton was to say. “I never heard him say anything about Hoffa that really indicated much more than boredom with the subject in the last years of his life.” The same was true of the
Mafia. When the telephone rang at Hickory Hill that day, he had just been planning offensives against the underworld with District Attorney Morgenthau.
“I
saw him often after that, but he never mentioned organized crime to me again,” Morgenthau says. Those intent on finding clues speculate that the subjects of Hoffa and the underworld were avoided because of an unwillingness
“to
go where the facts might lead,” but Kennedy himself had a simpler explanation:
“I’m
tired of chasing people.”

Even before the assassination, he had begun to take a more active role in the pursuit of social justice rather than of criminals, and it was to social problems, such as juvenile delinquency, that he turned now.

In part, he couched his interest in terms of his brother’s legacy, of programs begun but not fulfilled because time had been cut short. Talking in his office with Arthur Schlesinger and
Richard Goodwin that December, he explained why he wanted them to stay in their jobs.
“What’s
important is what we were trying to do for this country. The thing is we worked hard to get where we are, and we can’t let it all go to waste. My brother barely had a chance to get started—and there is so much now to be done—for the Negroes and the unemployed and school kids and everyone else who is not getting a decent break in our society. This is what counts. The new fellow doesn’t get this. He knows all about politics and nothing about human beings.… A lot of people in this town … didn’t come here just to work for John Kennedy, an individual, but for ideas, things we wanted to do.… I don’t think people should run off.” The power of the “Kennedy wing” of
the party, he said, “will last for just eleven months”—until the election. Until that time, Johnson would need its support to win re-election. “After November 5th, we’ll all be dead.” But until November 5, he said, they would have enough power so that “when I talk to him, I am ready to be tough about what we must have” in return for that support.

His brother’s programs would certainly have passed if he had lived: if they weren’t passed during the remaining years of his first term, had he not been killed, they would certainly be passed during his second term. That was the mantra Bobby Kennedy repeated to his brother’s men; that was the mantra they would repeat, in oral histories and interviews and speeches, as long as they lived. That was the mantra they would repeat in books—memoirs, biographies, scores of books. Those who wrote the books that originally influenced history, that set the template for the image of John F. Kennedy that has endured, would be reinforcing it in the books they wrote more than forty-five years later.

Regardless of the mantra’s validity, however (and like so many other issues it must remain to be evaluated in the last volume of this work, for it is during the course of the years to be covered in that volume that the extent of its validity will become clear), the passion that lay beneath it—Robert Kennedy’s passion for social justice—was genuine. With every month that passed after the assassination, his indignation at injustice seemed to rise. Even a newsman like
Ben Bradlee, whose relations with him had been cool, saw the genuineness, realizing that the scene in the Kansas City home for the aged had been an accurate measure of something significant in Robert Kennedy’s character, hidden and largely unrecognized though it had been. In an article he wrote after Robert’s assassination in 1968, Bradlee said that during the years between the assassinations,
“I
had been slowly coming to sense this man’s passion, his building rage at the persistent inequalities that plagued America, his readiness to embrace the homeless and enlist in their cause.” During those years, Bradlee would write,
“Bobby
Kennedy’s [almost] romantic determination to make a difference had deeply impressed me. There was no need to compare him with JFK, they were so different, except for that last name and that father. JFK was more intellectual, urbane, sophisticated, witty. RFK was more passionate, more daring, more radical.”

R
OBERT
K
ENNEDY’S
more pragmatic qualities, the ones that had earned him the adjective he so resented, would never disappear. “Anybody who writes that he looks like a choirboy should burn in hell,” says a congressman who opposed one of his initiatives in 1967. His evolution would be a gradual one, and it was, at the time of his death at the age of forty-two, not so complete that the word “ruthless” would no longer apply. More than one of his intimates feel constrained to point out that the portrait was, thanks to another bullet, never finished, that, as one of them says, “Bobby Kennedy was always
a
work in progress.” Unfinished though the portrait may have been left, however, its dominant tone had changed.
Having said he was “tired of chasing people,” Bobby Kennedy had stopped chasing them. Was he tired of something else as well? In addition to “ruthless,” “hate” was a word often applied to him in the past.
“Bobby hates like me.” “When Bobby hates you, you stay hated.”
But had the hatred for
Jimmy Hoffa stayed? Perhaps not. Some people who knew Robert Kennedy well speculate that perhaps the death of his brother, combined with his father’s helplessness, had altered that aspect of his character also.
“Before
that, perhaps the father and [the] brother had been the controlling forces in his life,” vanden Heuvel says. “Before that, well, you know, the father had said, ‘Bobby’s like me’—and up to that point, he probably was.” After his long talk with him in February,
Murray Kempton wrote that “Robert Kennedy
knew
how to hate; he hated on his father’s behalf; he grew up to hate on his brother’s; but these last weeks that he has endured have now left behind a man we recognize as being unskilled at hating on his own.” Examining Robert Kennedy’s life following the gunshot in Dallas, it is possible to feel that, with one exception, that might be true.

With the exception of Lyndon Johnson.

There had been no change in Robert Kennedy’s feelings toward him.

In conversation with other people, he
never called him “the
President.” Whenever, for the rest of his life, all four and a half years of it, he used the phrase “the President,” he was referring to John F. Kennedy. He called the new President “Johnson” or “Lyndon Johnson” or “the new fellow” or “this man.” He couldn’t bear to think of him sitting in his brother’s place, a satyr to Hyperion. Some of the remarks he made about him showed a fundamental misunderstanding of his background.
“What
does he know about people who’ve got no jobs?” he asked Goodwin not long after the assassination. “Or are uneducated. He’s got no feeling for people who are hungry. It’s up to us.” Johnson’s success fed his bitterness.
“All
those things he’s doing, poverty, civil rights, they’re things we had just begun,” he was to say to Goodwin some years later. “We just didn’t have the time.”

If, for reasons of politics, he covered up his feelings in public, he could not always contain them, even when he knew they were being recorded for history (or perhaps
because
they were being recorded for history). During the spring of 1964, he sat for a series of oral interviews being conducted for the
John F. Kennedy Library by sympathetic friends like Arthur Schlesinger and
John Bartlow Martin, and in these interviews his feelings poured out.

He tried to justify them.
“There
were three or four matters that arose during the period of November 22 to November 27 or so which made me bitter—unhappy at least—with Lyndon Johnson. Events involving the treatment of Jackie on the plane trip back and all that kind of business—when he lied again and where he treated Jackie, the whole business, very badly.”