The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (47 page)

For millions of people, John F. Kennedy’s death destroyed an illusion of invulnerability. Grief became a sort of unction, each person carrying the memory of the moment when he or she got the news. In a suite of rooms at the Beverly Crest Hotel in Los Angeles, where Johnny Rosselli had put her in the days before the assassination, Judy Campbell was alone when the news reached her. Distraught and frightened by the killing of her former lover, she refused to take any of Rosselli’s calls and barricaded herself in her room. Rosselli later showed up at the hotel and persuaded the hotel management to open the locked door. He found Campbell on the verge of complete breakdown. Despite her initial rebuff, “gently, patiently, he persuaded her to join him for dinner.”
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But for Joe Kennedy, blinking in and out of lucidity in his convalescence in Hyannis Port, there was no such consolation. He had awakened from his nap that afternoon and been told that the television would not work.
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Teddy arrived and tried to put on a cheery charade, which the old man seemed to see through. He demanded with crippled gestures that the TV be turned on. Teddy then went and pulled out the plug. The old man pointed accusingly at the dangling cord. Teddy knelt and obediently inserted the plug. As the set began to warm up, Teddy tore the wires out of the back of it.

Bobby Alone

1964 — 1968

September 27, 1964

New York City

O
n September 27, 1964, three weeks after Robert Kennedy resigned the attorney generalship, the Warren Commission released its report on the assassination of President Kennedy. The next day Kennedy, running for the United States senate seat from New York, canceled his campaign schedule and instead remained in his hotel room. Several days later at Columbia University, a student asked him whether he agreed with the commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. Kennedy stood there paralyzed for almost five minutes, saying nothing.
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He turned his back to the audience so they could not see his tears. Finally he said softly that he agreed. Oswald was the sole assassin.

Bobby had dragged himself through the days and months after November 22, 1963, desolate, bewildered, and anguished. Far beyond his loss of power after Jack’s death, Bobby had lost himself. He had given everything he had to promote and protect Jack, shouldered the impossible tasks and ingested all the ugly emotions. He had thought, as he told Ed Guthman shortly after he got the news from Dallas, that “they would get one of us, but . . . I thought it would be me.”
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In the end, Jack was the one who had taken the hit and Bobby could only wonder if he himself had been the real target.

Like a widowed spouse, Bobby tried at times to repress the fatal event. He refused to say “November twenty-second” or “Dallas,” and referred to Jack’s assassin as “Harvey Oswald.” If someone said “Jack,” he would wince and correct the person — “the president” — as if it were less painful to commit a public figure to history.
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He took down portraits of his brother and would go from room to room in friends’ homes, turning over magazines with Jack’s picture.
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Sometimes he would put on his brother’s clothes — an old tweed overcoat and a navy sea jacket from his PT boat days — or would slip into a reverie, his lips moving silently. Kenny O’Donnell at first thought Bobby had taken to talking to himself but then realized he was talking to Jack.
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There was no exit.

Bobby grimly lockstepped through the cascade of oral tributes, the unending references in his presence to the tragedy and the greatness of his brother, and the renaming of parks, boulevards, and airports in President Kennedy’s name. Gradually he learned to speak about Jack in public without breaking down. At a St. Patrick’s Day dinner in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1964, he quoted the lines Jack had often used in reference to Owen Roe O’Neill, an Irish freedom fighter:

We are sheep without a shepherd,
When the snow shuts out the sky —
Oh! Why did you leave us, Owen?
Why did you die?

Jack was now becoming in death what he had never been in life — a saint — but a saint with a past. Bobby knew that if he challenged Johnson and Hoover, they had the motive and the means to desecrate the Kennedy shrine. Within days of the assassination, Hoover was supplying Johnson with damning material about Bobby’s alleged plot to unseat him. It fueled Johnson’s worst fears, and he turned demonic. Kennedy aide Ralph Dungan was working late in his office in the West Wing several days after the burial when suddenly he heard a noise at the door. Dungan looked up and there was President Johnson, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and boxer shorts.
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Johnson said, “Ralph, I want to talk to you,” and motioned for Dungan to follow him. The president led Dungan into the Oval Office. Johnson seemed agitated and paced around. Finally he walked over to where Dungan was standing in front of a sofa and put both his hands on Dungan’s shoulders and forced him down onto the sofa. He then turned and started to walk away. Suddenly Johnson turned back and said in a low voice: “I want to tell you why Kennedy died.” Dungan was stunned and sat there numbly, looking at the floor. Johnson, his face contorted, pointed his finger at Dungan. “Divine retribution,” he said grimly. Dungan remembered feeling ill when he heard this. The president said it again: “Divine retribution. He murdered Diem and then he got it himself.”

It wasn’t long before the president was probing into the Cuban connection. In a conversation with Hoover on November 29, 1963, Johnson — clearly in search of ammunition against Bobby — asked Hoover “whether [Oswald] was connected with the Cuban operation [Mongoose] with money.” Hoover was guarded in his reply: “That’s what we’re trying to nail down now.” He pointed out that everything indicated that Oswald’s associations were with pro-Castro causes and groups.
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But Johnson was not persuaded.

Bobby, while sure that Oswald did the shooting, told Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on December 9 that “there was still argument if he had done it himself or as part of a larger plot, whether organized by Castro or by gangsters.”
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As Schlesinger suggests, Kennedy had reached no conclusions, but his instincts led him to consider the likelihood of a conspiracy. If there had been a conspiracy involving gangsters, anti-Castro Cubans, and renegade CIA elements, and if this were revealed, Bobby must have sensed that it would be fatal to the reputation of his beloved brother and to himself. He held his silence. Perhaps the most damningly perceptive observation about Kennedy came from his hated rival Jimmy Hoffa, who told a reporter: “Bobby Kennedy is just another lawyer now.”
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Bobby became increasingly consumed by his own suspicions. His comment to Schlesinger revealed as much. But he never acted on his suspicions or caused anyone else to. Perhaps his silence stemmed from his paralyzing grief, perhaps from the realization that no investigation would ever bring back his beloved brother. But it also must have been evident to him that any investigation of the violent nexus among the Cubans, their CIA handlers, and the Mafia could well reveal one of the darkest secrets of the Kennedy administration and his own preeminent role in it.

The assassination investigation commissioned by President Johnson was a further agony. When a
Paris Match
reporter asked him for a comment on the work of the Warren Commission, Bobby cut him off.
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Did Kennedy realize, as Majority Leader and Warren Commission member Representative Hale Boggs put it, that “Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission, on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it?”
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All we know is that Kennedy asked his old friend and aide Walter Sheridan to look into Jimmy Hoffa’s reaction to the murder.

With Hoover back in command (he ordered his secretary to get rid of the phone on his desk that linked him to the attorney general), the organized crime operation came to a halt. As Bill Hundley, head of the Organized Crime Section, put it, “The minute that bullet hit Jack Kennedy’s head, it was all over. Right then. The organized crime program just stopped, and Hoover took control back.”
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Marcello had been right: cut the dog’s head off and the rest of it would die.

President Johnson meanwhile kept Bobby off balance by blending occasional affirmation with abusive treatment. In January of 1964 he sent the attorney general on a diplomatic mission to Indonesia, but Kennedy heard reports from O’Donnell and others that the president harbored destructive sentiments. Seeing one of his Secret Service detail still wearing a JFK PT-109 tie clasp, Johnson tore it off the agent and threw it to the ground.
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For all his fear of the Kennedys, Johnson understood that to win the 1964 presidential election, he had to cast himself as the steward of JFK’s unfinished business. He kept on Kennedy’s team of advisors and appointees, was solicitous of Jackie, and even dangled the possibility of making Bobby Kennedy his vice presidential running mate. But Johnson recognized that ultimately Bobby was the heir apparent to his martyred brother. He also knew that Kennedy regarded him as a usurper. Beyond their history of “mutual contempt,” Johnson saw the Bobby Baker investigation, which had been delayed by the assassination, as a time bomb.
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As attorney general, Kennedy still had the power to break open the rotten nexus of payoffs, kickbacks, and mob-connected deals surrounding the Baker affair, which could reveal Johnson’s own corruption. The fact that such an investigation would also uncover JFK’s philandering, both while on the Hill and in the White House, might have calmed Johnson’s worries, but, as Bobby Baker himself later noted, Johnson was practically “paranoiac” on the subject of Robert Kennedy. He claimed that the attorney general was holding off-the-record press briefings on the scandal. There was no truth to this but it gave Hoover, who hated Kennedy possibly more than Johnson did, the opening he needed to send the president concocted reports that Kennedy was conspiring to undermine him.

Knowing that it would get back to him, Johnson likened Bobby to a boy he had once known who had misbehaved, done bad things to other people, and gotten away with them. Then one day, the boy crashed his sled into a tree and become cross-eyed. Johnson found the analogy so much to his liking that he referred to Kennedy as “that cross-eyed boy.”
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After excluding Bobby as a vice presidential candidate, Johnson did everything in his power to guard against any apparition of the Kennedy magic at the Democratic national convention in Atlantic City in August 1964. The administration deployed FBI agents and surveillance devices to monitor Bobby — by then a candidate in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat in New York — and rescheduled a televised tribute to President Kennedy to the latest possible point in the convention program. It didn’t work.

By the time Bobby reached the podium to introduce the film, the ovation by the delegates on the convention floor had become a roar. When Kennedy made an effort to quiet them, the applause became even more deafening. He looked down, then up. He bit his lip to keep himself from crying. On and on the cheering went, dipping and cresting for twenty-two minutes. The applause finally subsided. Bobby spoke briefly about his brother, concluding with some lines from Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
Jackie had suggested:

When he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
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.

A week later Bobby received nominations for the Senate seat for New York from both the Democratic and Liberal parties. The Republican incumbent was the popular Kenneth Keating. What began as the foregone conclusion that Kennedy would sweep to the Senate soon began to fall apart. Memories of Jack seemed to waft through Bobby like nerve gas. One moment Bobby was there, another moment he was gone, locked in a deep reverie. When his old political comrade Paul Corbin realized one day that in his Senate campaign Bobby was retracing Jack’s 1960 schedule, he called Kennedy. “God damn, Bob, be yourself,” he told him. “Get hold of yourself. You’re real. Your brother’s dead.”
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At the end of a day of campaigning in Buffalo, Ed Guthman commented to Bobby how good the crowds were. “Don’t you know?” Kennedy said. “They’re for him — they’re for him.”
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The problem for Bobby was that he wanted to be Jack, and wasn’t. When people saw him in person or on television, they wanted the same thing — Jack — but instead they saw a small man, possibly unhappy, definitely uneasy, and not nearly as good-looking, a man who spoke in hard-edged fragments and tended to avoid eye contact. The voice was reminiscent of the president’s but higher and sort of barky. Television had always been JFK’s best friend. For Bobby, it was an enemy that revealed all of his unresolved emotion and the terrible truth that he might not have what it took to live up to his brother’s worshiped image.

His campaign for the Senate revealed these infirmities. He was awkward on the stump (sometimes vomiting before speeches out of nervousness), he quoted his brother endlessly, and he seemed uncertain about the issues. The takes for his 30-second TV ads were endless and awful. The
New York Herald Tribune
described Kennedy as “an adventurer determined to stay in office as a personal necessity.” Ethel thought the campaign slogan should be: “There’s only so much you can do for Massachusetts.”
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Bobby arranged to have his father brought up to New York to play a role in the campaign, and this too miscarried. Disoriented, the old man could only babble. “I’ll make changes, Dad,” Bobby cried out to him. “You know I’ll make changes. Millions of people need help. My God, they need help.”
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Everything, it seemed, had changed; his father and his brother — the very polestars of his existence — were gone. He was alone, and all was now in question. By the first week in October, the fourteen-point lead he had enjoyed over Keating in August had disappeared entirely, and it looked as if he might lose. Trying to get movement back into the numbers, Steve Smith decided to ride President Johnson’s coattails for all they were worth.