The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (48 page)

Suddenly, at Columbia University in the first week of October, there was an interesting development. After his stump speech, Kennedy spent two hours sparring with a group of antagonistic students who had accused him of opportunism, of running on the Kennedy name in a state where he had never lived. The tape was so good — Bobby laughing at the abuse and razor-sharp in his replies — that the campaign bought a half hour of statewide television on prime time and ran the exchange, later distilling 30-second ads from the tape. During the final weeks before election day, the Kennedy campaign hired a film crew that followed Bobby everywhere, feeding the unedited tape each evening to every TV station in the state.
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In a business in which control over imagery and sound bite is critical, this seemed like a strange strategy: put your man in an unknown and sometimes explosive crowd scene and watch him go. But because the technique went straight to the character of Robert Kennedy, it worked.

On October 20, in a bid to reverse Kennedy’s gains and recapture the Jewish vote, Keating accused him of having made a “deal” as attorney general to turn over General Aniline & Film Company to “front” for I. G. Farben Company, a “huge Nazi cartel.” Kennedy repudiated the charge: “If this charge were true, I wouldn’t deserve to be elected to public office. The charge isn’t true. . . . I lost my brother and brother-in-law to the Germans. The idea that I would turn over money to the Nazis is ridiculous.”
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Once on the attack, Bobby quickly ran up the score against Keating, defeating him by more than 719,000 votes in the November election. The victory celebration that night turned into a mob scene, as if the Restoration were about to take place. Campaign aide Bill Barry finally caught up to the senator-elect to congratulate him. “Well, if my brother was alive,” Bobby said to Barry, “I wouldn’t be here. I’d rather have it that way.”
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March 24, 1965

Mount Kennedy, Yukon Territory

J
im Whittaker, the first American to scale Mount Everest, later described it as “an anxious moment.” About 500 feet below the 14,000-foot pyramid-shaped summit of Mount Kennedy, named for the late president by the Canadian government, Bobby Kennedy and the other eight climbers prepared to ascend a jagged, windswept 65-degree slope. Whittaker, went first, using both his ice ax and crampons to scale the face of the mountain. At the top of the steep slope, he slammed the shaft of his ice ax deep into the snowpack, wrapped and tied his nylon rope around its neck, and bent over the top of the ax with his 200-pound frame to hold it in place.
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Kennedy, with Whittaker’s rope tied around his waist, was next. He was about 60 feet below Whittaker; beneath Bobby, 6,000-feet down, was the Lowell Glacier. The fact that Bobby had insisted on carrying what everyone else was — a 45-pound pack — didn’t help.

“You’re on belay,” Whittaker yelled down. “Now you climb!”

Kennedy hesitated a moment. Then he struck his ax into the snowpack, gouged a hole for his foot with one crampon as he had been instructed, and hauled himself up a couple of feet. He repeated the procedure again and again. As he talked Kennedy up the slope, Whittaker pulled up the slack in the rope. “Remember to breathe,” Whittaker shouted down to Bobby, who was now panting heavily. “You’re doing fine. Keep it up.”

When Kennedy finally pulled himself over the face, Whittaker pointed out the 150-mile vista, with the bright sun sparkling against the pinnacles, ice falls, and rock cliffs. “What do you think of it?” he asked Bobby. “I don’t want to look at anything,” Bobby said. “I just want to stay right here.” Face drawn, head splitting from the thin air, Kennedy waited until the other climbers joined them. Whittaker then told Bobby to go first to the summit of the never-before-scaled peak. Bobby slowly made his way up the 20-degree spine toward the summit, planting one foot on one side of the ridge and one on the other.

Whittaker watched him make the final steps. Bobby reached back over his shoulder into his backpack and pulled out a pole around which the Kennedy family flag was wrapped. He jammed it into the snow and made the sign of the cross. He stood there a long time, head bowed, watching the flag whip in the wind. Whittaker moved up to him and gave Kennedy a hug. “You did a tremendous job,” he told Bobby. “Your brother would be proud of you.”

It was the first time Bobby had ever scaled a mountain. His preparation, he said, was to run up the stairs in his Hickory Hill home and shout, “Help!” Between the lines of his and Whittaker’s published accounts of their five-day ascent of Mount Kennedy, one senses his fright. He had never been a man with sangfroid — only daring. Skiing at a breakneck pace down expert slopes, shooting Colorado rapids in a kayak, or setting off in a rainstorm at night into an unknown tributary in the Amazon were Bobby’s dares with death. Dancing along the edge, he could feel the pulse of life.

The scene in late August 1967 off the coast of Maine was typical. No sooner had Bobby’s rented pate-blue yawl pulled out of the harbor of Camden on a three-day sailing venture with friends, than he stripped off his clothes and plunged into near-freezing swells for a swim. Bobby’s cruises always seemed to have a madcap quality to them. He never charted a course before setting off, often getting lost miles off the coast in open sea. Friends who knew nothing about sailing usually served as crew. Kay Evans, the wife of journalist Rowland Evans, remembered being unable to sleep one night out of pure fright.
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She came on deck at 3 or 4 A.M. to find Bobby’s friend Dean Markham at the helm. Asked what his course was, Markham could only reply, “I’m steering just a little bit left of the moon.” Michael Forrestal remembered coming upon the Kennedy boat in Muscle Ridge, off Rockland, Maine. “It seemed as if there were a circus on board. There were not only a great many people on the boat, some in costume, but also a menagerie of animals.” Kennedy shouted across the water at Forrestal’s perfectly crewed boat: “I’ll bet you rather wish you’d never met us, Forrestal.” On that particular trip, there were hardly any provisions and the stove didn’t work, so they subsisted on doughnuts. Most everyone by the end of the second day was exhausted; some were seasick. “But Bobby just loved it.” Exposed to the natural elements — wind and water, snow and sun — Bobby came alive. Danger was a beckoning, a reminder of the fickleness of life. “Living each day,” Bobby often said after Jack’s death, “is like Russian roulette.”

To brave those odds was what Joe Kennedy had imbued in his sons, but he himself began to have second thoughts. When he saw the TV footage of Bobby in mountain gear, readying himself for the climb of Mount Kennedy, the old man exploded in monosyllabic wrath, “Naaaa!” He tore out newspaper articles about the climb and threw them on the floor. “Bobby didn’t know,” Lem Billings said, “that his father was trying to stop this thing that had gotten started — this Kennedy thing of daring the gods. ”
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Bobby himself thought it was too late. His fate was set. He plumbed Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies and found an emotional sanctuary in their depiction of the cruelty of life and the price of arrogance. He now saw himself and his family in a tragic light. When the poet Robert Lowell once suggested that Kennedy could be cast as Falstaff, Kennedy said that instead he should be Henry the Fifth. Lowell thought this “trite” and reminded Kennedy of Hal’s misadventure: he died young, failed on the battlefield, and his son was murdered. Bobby walked over to a collection of Shakespeare’s historical plays and turned to Henry the Fourth’s death speech, which he read, including the line, “The canker’d heaps of strange-achieved gold.” When he’d finished, Bobby said, “Henry the Fourth. That’s my father.”
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Bobby recognized that he was doomed — and this became the basis for his rebirth.

March 15, 1966

Delano, California

S
omething about the farmworker struggle “touched a nerve” in Bobby Kennedy, as his legislative aide Peter Edelman later put it. In September 1965 over two thousand farmworkers, a low-paid, itinerant, and largely Mexican group of field hands based mostly in California, went on strike. In December, farmworker leader Cesar Chavez called for a boycott of the products of Schenley Industries, a liquor producer with the second-largest grape ranch in the region. The growers struck back, trucking in strikebreakers from Arizona, Texas, and Mexico. The local sheriff of Kern County began making preemptive arrests of anyone distributing pro-strike literature or even using the Spanish word for strike,
huelga.
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J. Edgar Hoover suggested that the farmworkers might have communist ties.

The fact that Bobby’s old enemy, the Teamsters Union, had moved in with money and muscle to displace Chavez’s union with locals amenable to the growers may have also galvanized him. Although Hoffa was now in federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Einar Mohn, former executive assistant to Dave Beck and now director of the Teamsters Western Conference, and several of Kennedy’s old nemeses were actively maneuvering against Chavez. So too was Sidney Korshak, an attorney and friend of Johnny Rosselli who represented the Chicago Mafia in Los Angeles as well as the Teamsters and Schenley Industries.
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Korshak was also the majority owner of the Associated Booking Corporation, whose main office Jack Ruby had visited in New York City on August 5, 1963.

On March 15, 1966, Kennedy flew out west for the hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. Chavez and his supporters gave him a tour of the organizing hall, their strike kitchen, and the picket lines around the Di Giorgio grape farm. At the hearings, after Chavez had testified, Kern County sheriff Roy Galyen explained his efforts to keep order, including photographing everyone on the picket line.

KENNEDY: Do you take pictures of everyone in the city?

GALYEN: Well, if he is on strike, or something like that.

KENNEDY: Is this a preventative measure?

GALYEN: Well, if I have reason to believe that there’s going to be a riot started, and somebody tells me that there’s going to be trouble if you don’t stop them, then it’s my duty to stop them.

KENNEDY: You go out there and arrest them?

GALYEN: Absolutely.

KENNEDY: Who told you that they were going to riot?

GALYEN: The men right out there in the field that they were talking to said if you don’t get them out of here we’re going to cut their hearts out.

KENNEDY: This is a most interesting concept, I think, that you suddenly hear talk about somebody’s going to get out of order, perhaps violate the law, and you go in and arrest them, and they haven’t done anything wrong. How do you go arrest somebody if they haven’t violated the law?

GALYEN: They are ready to violate the law, in other words.

KENNEDY: Could I suggest that in the interim period of time . . . that the sheriff and the district attorney read the Constitution of the United States?
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This exchange brought down the farmworker-packed house. At the back of the hall, Chavez supporters waved crudely imprinted placards: “Kennedy for President in ’68.”
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Kennedy took it a step further. He left the hearings and went straight back to Filipino Hall and publicly declared his support for the grape strike. Even Chavez thought it was an unnecessary risk. Finding, as always, concept and purpose in the battle zone, Bobby then accompanied over one hundred pickets to the Di Giorgio Fruit Corporation’s 4,400-acre ranch and manned a picket line in front of one of the farm’s entrances. Both the growers and the farmworkers were stunned. The next morning, March 17, Chavez and his followers set out on foot to make a
peregrinación
, or pilgrimage, to Sacramento. The distance was 300 miles. The objective was to reach the state capital on Easter Sunday.

Bobby Kennedy had first met Cesar Chavez in late November 1959 in East Los Angeles, where Chavez was executive director of the Community Service Organization (CSO). In the course of his travels with the Stevenson campaign in 1956, Kennedy had noted the growing influence of the Mexican-American vote in states like Texas and California. Chavez remembered the first meeting as involving a vigorous dispute between those advocating a high-profile media blitz to register Mexican-Americans and CSO activists like Chavez, who wanted to continue the door-to-door approach they had perfected in ten years of grass-roots work in the barrios. The meeting went late — until around 3 A.M. — and Kennedy walked in toward the end, saying little and listening. He finally sided with Chavez. “Well, if he’s been here for ten years, why can’t he do it the way he wants to do it?”
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He seemed “very young” and “all business,” Chavez told the author.
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Jack Kennedy lost California by a slim margin to Nixon, but the Hispanic turnout was exceptionally high. In a statement quoted in
Time
, the Kennedy campaign gave credit to established Mexican-American politicians rather than to the CSO. Dolores Huerta, Chavez’s two-fisted lieutenant, got Cesar’s permission to let Kennedy know about who really got the vote out. She fairly broke into his office with a copy of
Time
in her hand. “Bobby Kennedy was standing there; he was talking to a lot of people. I think he saw this wild-eyed looking person coming toward him, and he threw up his hands, ‘I know, I know.’ ” He promised Huerta he would correct it.
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