The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (51 page)

Late on the evening of June 7 Kennedy received word at his hotel that the South African government would permit him to visit Chief Albert John Luthuli, the 1961 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who had been banned and was confined to his home in Groutville, some forty miles inland from Durban. At dawn the next morning, he and Ethel were flown by helicopter down the Valley of a Thousand Hills. Kennedy later described the visit with Luthuli:

He is a most impressive man, with a marvelously lined face, strong yet kind. My eyes first went to the white goatee, so familiar in his pictures but then the smile took over, illuminating his whole presence, eyes dancing and sparkling. At the mention of apartheid, however, his eyes went hurt and hard. To talk privately, we walked out under the trees and through the fields. “What are they doing to my country, to my countrymen,” he sighed. “Can’t they see that men of all races can work together — and that the alternative is a terrible disaster for us all?”
⁶¹

Bobby played the speech Jack had given about civil rights on June 11,1963, on a portable record player he had brought. The old chief was “deeply moved,” Kennedy later wrote. Later that day in the huge, seething township of Soweto, standing atop the limo, he told crowds that he had seen Luthuli and that together they had listened to President Kennedy’s message to American whites that summer of 1963. He quoted the passages by heart, his eyes teary at points: “We face a moral crisis as a country and a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. . . . It cannot be quieted by token moves to talk. It is time to act.”

His presence, his bold statement, the sight of him standing on the car, sent a shock wave through the township. Soon a huge cavalcade of Africans were running behind and alongside, shouting, “Master! Master!” Kennedy asked them not to call him that, but it made no difference. Later that afternoon at the American consul-general’s reception for Kennedy in Johannesburg, hundreds of black South Africans broke “pass laws” by walking to the house, located in a rich neighborhood, and filling both it and the two-acre backyard. There wasn’t much more to say, so Bobby, Ethel, and Tom Johnston, their backs to the fireplace, began singing, “We Shall Overcome. ”
⁶²

That evening, before seven thousand people at the University of Witwatersrand, Kennedy turned his rhetoric up another notch. Efficiency had led to Auschwitz, he said. Only love would allow us to climb the hill to the Acropolis. “It was not the black man of Africa who invented and used poisoned gas and the atomic bomb, who sent six million men and women and children to the gas ovens and used their bodies as fertilizer.” He spoke of all the excuses given for continuing the subjugation: “Everything that is now said about the Negro was said about Irish Catholics. They were useless, they were worthless, they couldn’t learn anything. Why did they settle [in Boston]? Why don’t we see if we can’t get boats and send them back to Ireland? They obviously aren’t equipped for education and they certainly can never rule.” Kennedy smiled at this. “I suppose there are still some who might agree with that.”

The next morning the Kennedy party left South Africa for Tanzania. The newspapers fairly rang with encomia. The
Rand Daily Mail
wrote, “It is as if a window had been flung open and a gust of fresh air has swept into a room in which the atmosphere has become stale and foetid.”
⁶³
The
Johannesburg Star
called the visit “unquestionably one of the most important political events in South Africa for many years.”
⁶⁴
Back home, the
Washington. Post
commented that his trip was “serious, free of self-righteousness and finally, revolutionary.”
The Nation
thought the trip converted Kennedy into “an international figure. Now, with the continuation of nerve and verve, he is in a position to capitalize on it in United States politics.” The Johnson White House fretted and calculated just what the impact of Kennedy’s play might be.
⁶⁵

But beyond the trip’s political impact in the United States and South Africa, it was a personal triumph for Bobby. It was the sort of thing Jack would never have done. The percentages were wrong. Tom Johnston later described Bobby’s virtuoso performance:

He was initially in a position of being very much the intruder, the man coming to exploit the South Africa situation for his own short-term political benefit, with a lot of self-righteousness and preaching . . . and yet he came out of it five days later, just terribly close to as popular a person and as widely and warmly acclaimed by all sorts of people in that country as you can imagine .
⁶⁶

The
Rand Daily Mail
compiled a pamphlet with articles about the visit and the text of four of Kennedy’s speeches. It immediately sold out and was reprinted. Several thousand found their way into white offices and black shanties. In June 1986, twenty years later, in a simple bookcase in the office of Cyril Ramaphosa, the leader of the Congress of South African Trades Unions (COSATU), the author found this same little collection, a parable of a beautiful interlude, or maybe even a foreshadowing of the impossible dream.

In those months, Kennedy was reading and occasionally copying out passages from Camus’s
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.
One such passage quoted Pascal: “A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.” Bobby felt he had done this. In response to a question a student asked him at Witwatersrand about how difficult, if not hopeless and fatal, it was to fight against institutionalized evil, Bobby had said: “The only alternative is to give up, to admit that you are beaten. I have never admitted that I am beaten.”
⁶⁷
He had come a long way from the black-and-white days of McCarthy and McClellan, of Castro and Marcello. He carried around a small book Jackie had given him at Easter 1964 —
The Greek Way
by Edith Hamilton. He underlined passages that depicted notions such as “tragic pleasure” and memorized one particular passage from Aeschylus: “God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
⁶⁸

November 2, 1966

New York City

B
obby spent the day campaigning for Frank O’Connor, who was running against incumbent Nelson Rockefeller for the governorship of New York. At the four street corner rallies in Midtown Manhattan that day the crowds were disappointingly small. Kennedy said almost nothing about the merits of O’Connor’s candidacy except that he would win. Instead Bobby criticized Rockefeller’s program of mandatory treatment for drug offenders, pointing out that California’s system of voluntary treatment at community clinics and shelters worked far better. It was not exactly a rallying cry, but at least he had fulfilled a political obligation. At the last rally, Bobby spotted two nurses who had served as volunteers in his 1964 Senate race. He invited them and journalist Jack Newfield back to his UN Plaza apartment for a drink.

Newfield would later describe it as an awkward scene. Bobby would talk to his former volunteers about their jobs, their families, asking them what they thought of the speeches that day, and then turn to Newfield and discuss the St. Louis Cardinals’ backfield. The young women soon left. Bobby asked Newfield with some embarrassment if he liked poetry. Newfield said he did.

“Can I read you some poetry by a poet I like very much?” Kennedy asked. He disappeared into the bedroom and returned with a thin, dog-eared volume. Silhouetted against a neon Pepsi-Cola sign in Queens, he began to read a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

He pays too high a price
For knowledge and for fame
Who sells his sinews to be wise,
His teeth and bones to buy a name,
And crawls through life a paralytic
To earn the praise of bard and critic

Were it not better done,
To dine and sleep through forty years;
Be loved by a few; be feared by none;
Laugh life away, have wine for tears;
And take the mortal leap undaunted,
Content that all we asked was granted?

But Fate will not permit
The seed of gods to die
Nor suffer sense to win from wit
Its guerdon in the sky,
Nor let us hide, whate’er our pleasure,
The world’s light underneath a measure

Bobby knew the poem’s last stanza by heart. His eyes focused on the middle distance as he recited it:

Go then, sad youth, and shine,
Go, sacrifice to Fame;
Put youth, joy, health upon the shrine,
And life to fan the flame;
Being for Seeming bravely barter,
And die to Fame a happy martyr.
⁶⁹

February 6, 1967

Washington, D.C.

L
yndon Johnson now had him in his sights. For the first time in two years, he was ahead of Bobby Kennedy in the polls — by no fewer than 22 points. “I’ll destroy you and every one of your dove friends,” he told Bobby bluntly during a face-to-face meeting. “You’ll be dead politically in six months.” Johnson accused Kennedy of leaking to the press a “peace feeler” from Hanoi that Bobby had supposedly received while in Paris. Kennedy told the president that the press report wasn’t true, he had done no such thing, but Johnson pressed on. Stop talking about a bombing halt, the president said. Kennedy ignored the threat and enjoined Johnson to stop the bombing. “There is not a chance in hell I will do that,” the president replied. He added that Bobby and his friends were giving comfort to the enemy. They were encouraging Hanoi to keep on fighting and keep on killing American boys. Bobby, he said, had blood on his hands. Kennedy stood up. “Look, I don’t have to take that from you,” he snapped.
⁷⁰

Johnson was taking Bobby to task not simply because of Kennedy’s position on Vietnam but because of questions involving the assassination of President Kennedy. In January 1967
Washington Post
columnist Drew Pearson had visited Johnson and told him about a story he was working on — that the Kennedy administration tried to kill Castro, and that Castro retaliated by killing Kennedy. This was called the “turnaround theory” and it gave Johnson fresh proof that the “cross-eyed boy” had caused his own brother’s assassination. On February 18, President Johnson phoned acting attorney general Ramsey Clark. Pearson, the president told Clark, had spoken of “a man that was involved, that was brought into the CIA with a number of others, and instructed by the CIA and the attorney general to assassinate Castro after the Bay of Pigs.” The man Johnson was describing was Johnny Rosselli, the Mafia’s man of masks and adventure, who had once golfed with Joseph Kennedy Sr., bagged money for the Kennedy campaign in 1960 — and who had met in secrecy with Jack Ruby several weeks before the assassination in Dallas.
⁷¹

Two days after Johnson’s warning to stop criticizing the administration, Kennedy used harsh language in a speech at the University of Chicago to question American policy in Asia. A few days later Johnson — through Pearson — struck back. Pearson’s nationally syndicated “Washington Merry-Go-Round” reported that “President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb, an unconfirmed report that Sen. Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother.”
⁷²
Arthur Schlesinger saw Bobby not long after this article appeared. “An indefinable sense of depression hung over him,” Schlesinger wrote, “as if he felt cornered by circumstance and did not know how to break out.”

Bobby’s arrogant zeal seemed to reach out from the past and bedevil him. In May 1966 the bugging issue, long smoldering inside the Justice Department and the FBI, ignited publicly. Fred B. Black Jr., a Washington lobbyist and Rosselli intimate who had been convicted for income tax evasion, made an appeal to the Supreme Court, claiming that the FBI had bugged his hotel suite in D.C. in 1963. The Supreme Court took Black’s appeal. Senator Kennedy called his former deputy and now newly appointed attorney general Nicholas Katzenbach, and asked him to state in the government’s brief that Kennedy had no knowledge of the Black bug or bugging in general. Katzenbach demurred, preferring to leave it vague. Kennedy was furious. Later he called Katzenbach and admitted that he had listened to recordings made by bugs.
⁷³

“The Skimming Report,” which Kennedy had forced the FBI to produce in May 1963 as part of his attack on organized crime, was now being used to block federal prosecution. All over the country Mafia attorneys such as Tom Wadden, Jack Wasserman, and Edward Bennett Williams mounted Fourth Amendment search and seizure defenses for their clients.
⁷⁴
The attorneys for Bobby Baker, who was charged with tax evasion, theft, and conspiracy, did the same, claiming in federal court that FBI bugs had picked up Baker’s conversations with “business associates” at six gambling casinos.

Senator Edward Long of Missouri, a Hoffa loyalist, seized on the government’s brief in the Black appeal and called for an investigation. White House aide Bill Moyers told Dick Goodwin, who was now Johnson’s chief speechwriter, that the president “is egging [Long] on.” On December 10, Hoover let loose, charging that Kennedy had directly approved the electronic surveillance.
⁷⁵
Contacted by reporters, Kennedy refused comment. Later his office issued a statement denying the charge and issued a letter from Courtney Evans (the FBI’s former liaison to the former attorney general) exonerating Kennedy A file in Kennedy aide Frank Mankiewicz’s papers reveals, however, that there was nothing simple about the senator’s defense. Essentially, Kennedy’s claim was that he should have known but didn’t, and had never formally ordered electronic surveillance — an awkward piece of casuistry at best.
⁷⁶