Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (52 page)

But Kenny O’Donnell never fully recovered. “He just lived the rest of his life with a heavy heart,” said his son. He ran twice for the Democratic nomination for governor in Massachusetts, in 1966 and 1970; but his political talent was as a behind-the-scenes man, not as a campaigner, and he lost both times. Bobby’s assassination was the final blow. Kenny Jr. was with his father the night he heard. His father had just spoken to RFK on the phone about the California primary results. “It’s over,” his father told him after hearing that history had repeated itself. “That’s all he said,” recalled Kenny Jr. “That was the absolute end.”

When O’Donnell died in a Boston hospital in September 1977 at age fifty-three, his family requested that the cause of death be withheld, but the press reported he had succumbed to a liver ailment. There was no more Bobby to tell him to put down the bottle. His memorial service was held at St. Matthews Cathedral, where he had escorted Jack’s casket fourteen years before, walking slowly up Connecticut Avenue from the White House. At the Irish wake held afterwards at the Mayflower Hotel, a Boston pol reminisced about his fallen friend. Without the Kennedys, he said, “O’Donnell was the music without the harp.”

ONCE AGAIN, ED GUTHMAN
was worrying about his friend Bob Kennedy’s life. It was fall 1964. Kennedy’s campaign for the Senate was under way and everywhere he went, the candidate spiked into deep wellsprings of emotion. The people strained against police lines, they lunged to touch him. Whites, blacks; the young and old; men, women. It was a longing that went beyond politics. Americans needed to feel that not all hope had died on November 22. Here he was in the flesh, a living reminder that the Kennedy dream was still alive. After the long months of mourning, when nothing seemed right anymore about the country, the very sight of Bobby set off explosions of ecstasy.

But Guthman knew that passions about Kennedy ran in opposite directions. As he marched along the New York campaign trail, less the happy warrior than an ashen penitent, Bobby also stirred darker thoughts. Guthman, who had left the Justice Department with Kennedy to work on the Senate campaign, heard about the constant stream of death threats. The FBI would call nearly every morning with another warning about their campaign destination that day. Were they all real? Was Hoover exaggerating the threats to disrupt the campaign or make his bureau seem more vigilant than it was in protecting his brother? Guthman took the threats seriously enough to talk to Jim King, the NYPD detective who was traveling with the campaign. But both men knew it was useless to say anything to Bobby; he would never let security precautions dictate his campaign style. The people needed to touch him; he needed to touch the people. It was the only thing that seemed to bring him alive.

On September 29, the campaign rolled through Rochester. It was the hometown of his incumbent Republican opponent, Kenneth Keating, but as usual, the Kennedy crowds were boisterous. Still, Guthman felt that dark undercurrent.

Earlier that day, a man with a rifle who had asked about Kennedy’s motorcade route was arrested by the police. (They released him after he convinced them he was a deer hunter on his way home from a gun shop and was trying to avoid traffic.) But Kennedy did what he always did—he went into the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods, including the ghetto that had been torn by rioting in July. He climbed onto car hoods to speak to the surging, grasping crowds—alone, with no guards. In Rochester, he reminded people what America should stand for.

It was the day after the Warren Report’s release, but Bobby came out of the gloom that had descended over him when he was asked at a press conference to define his foreign policy differences with his opponent. Keating was a genial, white-maned, ruddy-faced uncle figure with a progressive record on civil rights. But he had played a provocative role during the Cuban Missile Crisis, using information leaked from the CIA to goad the Kennedys into a combative stance. Bobby told the press that day he stood for a strong military. But, he immediately added, America’s military prowess must be coupled with “the inner strength and wisdom not to use that military strength precipitately or indiscriminately.” He said that in the end communism would only be defeated “through progressive practical programs which wipe out the poverty, misery and discontent on which it thrives.” He suggested that true national security would come from strongly supporting the United Nations—“mankind’s noblest experiment”—and helping lift the world’s two billion poor from their wretched fate. Finally, he declared, America would only command the world’s respect if it practiced what it preached at home, upholding democratic principles and working towards racial equality.

“We cannot expect an African to believe we are on the side of equality and human dignity when his own ambassadors are not served in our restaurants. We cannot expect countries with far lower standards of living to respect our belief in human dignity if their aged are venerated and ours are neglected. We cannot expect nations to join us in combating poverty if in the midst of unprecedented wealth, six million families live in poverty.”

Giving voice to these New Frontier ideals lifted Kennedy from his doldrums of the previous day, as if borne aloft by his brother’s soaring rhetoric. But if Bobby was conjuring his brother’s spirit, Guthman was concerned with keeping this living, breathing Kennedy safe from bodily harm. “I was with him that day in Rochester,” he recalled, “and it appeared to me to be a kind of dangerous situation. So I went up to these news photographers who were covering the campaign and I asked them to gather around him, to give him some protection.”

It’s astonishing in today’s political climate to consider a media pack agreeing to do this—to put themselves in the line of fire for a candidate. But that’s precisely what the photographers did, said Guthman. “Look, a
lot
of people would have taken a bullet for Bob Kennedy any day of the year.” Would Guthman have done so? “Absolutely, without hesitating.”

Robert Kennedy’s 1964 Senate campaign rolled forward on a wave of popular sentiment, a yearning that he realized had more to do with his brother than with him. After a hectic day of campaigning, Guthman rejoiced in the clamorous receptions that Kennedy had received. “I’ve never seen crowds like you’re getting, they’ve got to be a good omen,” he told Bobby.

But Kennedy looked at Guthman with a melancholy expression. “Don’t you know?” he said. “They’re for him—they’re for him.”

Kennedy’s race for the Senate was the critical first step in his strategy to regain the White House, where, he had vowed, he would continue his brother’s policies. But Bobby’s heart was clearly not in the campaign. He had announced his Senate candidacy at the last moment, on August 25, after declaring he would not run just two months earlier. The decision came after an overwrought process, in which he first considered running for governor in Massachusetts (finally rejecting this option out of concern he would be stepping on brother Teddy’s turf) and then allowed himself to be briefly pushed forward by supporters as Lyndon Johnson’s vice presidential running mate. Both men knew it would be a disastrous match and LBJ summoned Kennedy to the White House on July 29 to make his decision official. The meeting was deeply awkward for both men. As Bobby later recounted to Kenny O’Donnell, Johnson told him that “he wanted a vice president who could help the country, help the party, and be of assistance to him…and he concluded by saying that person wasn’t me.” Kennedy, who knew that Johnson needed to establish an independent political base, took the decision in stride. “Aw, what the hell,” he laughed, after telling his Justice Department colleagues what happened, “let’s go form our own country.” From then on, Bobby and his circle would be “the government in exile,” as Ethel accurately jested.

Kennedy’s outsider status would be driven home at the Democratic Party convention in late August. Bobby announced his Senate candidacy the day before the convention began in Atlantic City, but Johnson was so fearful that his rival would spark a delegate stampede for the vice presidential—or even presidential—nomination that he took the unprecedented step of ordering the FBI to keep Kennedy under surveillance. Cartha DeLoach and a thirty-man FBI team swept into Atlantic City to monitor every move of the attorney general of the United States—the man who was officially still their boss. The FBI spies, who flashed fake NBC News press passes and other bogus credentials, had special instructions to look for any contacts between Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.—a charismatic combination that could have swept the convention hall. Johnson’s chief of staff, Marvin Watson, even instructed former JFK advance man Jerry Bruno to keep a close eye on Bobby. “We are not going to let Bobby and Jackie Kennedy steal this convention,” Watson told him. Bruno, a Kennedy loyalist, was stunned by the order. He would stick with RFK at the convention, but as a friend not a spy.

Johnson did not have to worry. Bobby was in such fragile shape during the convention, where his brother’s ghost hovered everywhere, that he could never have mounted a political rebellion. When he climbed onstage to introduce a film tribute to JFK—a speech that the nervous Johnson had rescheduled from the beginning of the convention to lessen its impact—Kennedy was greeted with a massive ovation. He stood on the podium, while it washed over him in unending waves, for twenty-two long minutes. “Mr. Chairman,” he would begin as the applause finally began to wane. But then it would rise up again from some new corner of the cavernous hall. Wearing the same black suit and tie he had worn almost continuously since the assassination, he fought back tears as he looked over the cheering crowd. His eyes, red and glistening in the spotlights, were filled with the sorrow of the past nine months. Finally he began his speech. There was nothing political about it—he said nothing of the forces that had cut down his brother. But even his sentimental references to the fallen president would be interpreted by his enemies in the Johnson camp as political attacks. “When he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars,” said Bobby, quoting Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
—an addition to the speech suggested by Jackie. “And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night / And pay no worship to the garish sun.” Supporters of the garish Texan were quick to take offense. Other observers interpreted the extended ovation for Kennedy as a slap at party bosses. But after he finished his speech, Bobby simply retreated to the fire escape outside the convention hall, where he sat sobbing for fifteen minutes.

He had been raised to believe that “Kennedys don’t cry,” passing this stoicism along to his own children. But he found it hard to live by on the Senate campaign trail, even in public. At Columbia University, a student confronted him with the dreaded question. Did he believe the Warren Report’s conclusion about a lone gunman? For several minutes, Kennedy stood speechless, while the audience murmured nervously. Finally he responded irritably, “I’ve made my statement on that.” But as he began to rehash what he had said months earlier in Poland, Kennedy’s voice suddenly cracked. He dropped his head and tears began streaming down his face. The man whom colleagues found astonishingly honest could not bring himself to repeat what he did not believe.

With Kennedy unable to shake free of his grief, his desultory campaign was headed for defeat. Paul Corbin—the ruthless political operator whom some called “Bobby’s dark side”—was the only one with the nerve to confront him. “Get out of your daze,” he scolded his boss. “God damn, Bob, be yourself. Get hold of yourself. You’re real. Your brother is dead.”

“It was painful to watch him on the campaign trail—he was depressed and the crowds sensed it,” recalled Justin Feldman, the reform Democrat who first approached Bobby to run for the New York Senate seat and later worked as his campaign coordinator. Feldman urged him to go on the attack against Keating, but Bobby did not have the stomach for it. “He told me, ‘Well, he hasn’t been that bad of a senator, has he? Everybody says I’m so ruthless.’”

Then, as Keating seemed coasting to victory, he made a “fatal mistake,” said Feldman. “And it made Bobby finally come alive.” At the end of September, trying to drive a wedge between Kennedy and the Jewish vote, Keating dredged up the old Nazi appeasement charges that had haunted the Kennedy family. He suggested that as attorney general, Kennedy had settled a World War II–era case in favor of a chemical company with Nazi ties in order to please his father. Bobby, the family protector, was outraged that Keating would use such a tactic. He had lost a brother and a brother-in-law to the war, he reminded voters. Left unsaid was that his family had just given another son to the country. “Bobby went nuts,” said Feldman. “He no longer thought Keating was this benign force in politics. He denounced his charges as outrageous demagoguery. After that, Bobby became a campaigner.”

In the end, Kennedy won by over 700,000 votes. But he needed the coattails of his brother’s successor, who carried the state by two million more votes than Bobby won, to do it. Even in victory, Bobby seemed melancholy. Congratulated by his bodyguard Bill Barry during the raucous election night party, Bobby said, “If my brother was alive, I wouldn’t be here. I’d rather have it that way.” Later, sitting at the Johnson inauguration with his old friend Joe Tydings—who had also just been elected to the Senate from Maryland—Bobby grew teary watching the ceremony that should have ushered in his brother’s final term. “We quietly cried together when LBJ was sworn in,” said Tydings, “when, you know, President Kennedy should have been there.”

UNLIKE HIS BROTHER TED,
Robert Kennedy’s interest was not engaged by the day-to-day business of the Senate. But he quickly seized it as a platform to highlight the national and international issues that he deemed most urgent. “He thought that the way the Senate ran was archaic,” Pierre Salinger recalled. “He didn’t see it as a real action place. And I think he was rather restless with the Senate…. I’d go up and sit in the Senate office for four or five hours at a time. And he would spend most of his time talking to people on problems which were not at all directly related to his Senate duties.” Kennedy met with foreign dignitaries Salinger introduced to him such as French politicians Pierre Mendes-France and François Mitterand. And he would discuss the intractable problems of poverty with activists from Mississippi and the Indian reservations.