The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (53 page)

By the spring of 1967 Lyndon Johnson’s war against Bobby Kennedy had taken its toll. For the first time, as we’ve seen, he moved ahead of Bobby Kennedy in national polls as the preferred Democrat for president in 1968. The bugging scandal, the Kennedys’ dispute with historian William Manchester over his authorized book,
Death of a President
— a dispute involving control over the transcripts of interviews a grief-stricken Jackie had given Manchester — as well as the reprise of controversy about the Kennedy assassination had eroded his popular standing. Kennedy now understood that Johnson would give him no quarter. According to Kenny O’Donnell, it was a time of pain and doubt for Bobby: Hoover and Johnson were trying to destroy him — and sully the memory of Jack — and they had the goods to do it. What they were trying to exact from him was silence. Silence on civil rights. Silence on Vietnam.
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Once again he turned to Camus for solace and guidance: “Smiling despair. No solution, but constantly exercising an authority over myself that I know is useless. The essential thing is not to lose oneself, and not to lose the part of oneself that lies sleeping in the world.”

Despite his South Africa speech, despite his work as a senator, Bobby felt that the self that had lain sleeping in these bitter years after Jack’s death was Bobby the combatant, the crusader. With 500,000 American soldiers now in Vietnam — 100 each week coming home in body bags — and President Johnson accusing antiwar critics of perfidy, the only thing left for Bobby to do was to throw caution to the wind, to run against Johnson and the war, to run beyond the shadow of Jack.

He was back on the boat off Nantucket on that long-ago summer day in 1929.

March 16, 1968

Washington, D.C.

B
obby looked unhappy, nervous, and, above all, unready for what he was about to do. “I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States,” he began. “I do not run for the presidency merely to oppose any man” — as he paused, someone giggled — “but to propose new policies.” He stumbled on through the lame counterpoint: paying tribute to Johnson, but not his policies, congratulating Senator Eugene McCarthy in his near-upset of the president in the New Hampshire primary, suggesting that they run “in harmony” (whatever that meant). He was entering late, so late that he would not qualify for the ballot in some primary states. He had no campaign staff and no strategy for a national campaign. But he was John F. Kennedy’s brother and, therefore, the heir apparent.

When he concluded his statement, he called for questions. Most were hostile. One reporter asked him how his candidacy was not “opportunism on your part. . . . McCarthy had the courage to go into New Hampshire while you hesitated.”
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Kennedy’s reply was awkward and unconvincing. Still, his timing may have been terrible, but at least he was entering the fray — his native habitat.

If there was one reason why Bobby was running, it was to end America’s war in Vietnam. In a speech in the Senate a year earlier he had broken dramatically with the Johnson administration regarding the war. At that point, it seemed axiomatic that if the war widened, he would be pushed into running against President Johnson in the 1968 election. Politically, however, this looked self-destructive. A substantial majority of Americans supported the president’s policy. The antiwar movement, though a significant new factor in American politics, was not yet a defining factor. The war itself conduced to self-deception. There were no set-piece battles, no certain terrain to be won or lost, but rather a slow hemorrhage of ambushes and infiltrations by the communists, followed by massive stanching actions by American forces.

The United States had become consumed with the tactic of the war — strategic hamlets, free-fire zones, body counts, bombing defoliation — not one of which would win the battle in the field, and all of which incrementally drew American forces deeper. Like a half-mad captain on a burning deck, Secretary McNamara would dash to the White House with his new numbers and paper Congress with his charts and graphs. In the spring of 1967, President Johnson let it be known that the war would probably be won by “June or July.”

The safer route for Kennedy would have been to reiterate the critique of the war set forth by Under Secretary George Ball within the administration and J. William Fulbright in the Senate. Vietnam was, as Ball put it, an “aberration” from America’s containment policy that undermined other security interests. The contest was essentially a civil war in which North Vietnam was stronger. The corrupt elite in Saigon was at war with its own people as much as with the communists. To the extent there was a solution, it was political, not military. “For a guerrilla to win, it is only necessary for him not to lose,” Ball wrote, quoting Mao Zedong.
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This was the reasoned discourse of policy debate — that Vietnam was faulty statecraft — but it was not the tack Bobby took. Rising on the Senate floor on March 2,1967, he began with a pro forma defense of America’s presence in Vietnam. Then, in an abrupt shift, Kennedy went on to describe the horror of war from the standpoint of the Vietnamese. The Vietnam War, he said, had become:

The vacant moment of amazed fear as a mother and child watch death by fire fall down from an improbable machine sent by a country they hardly comprehend . . . a land deadened by an unending crescendo of violence, hatred, and savage fury. . . . Although the world’s imperfection may call forth the act of war, righteousness cannot obscure the agony and pain those acts bring to a single child. It is we who live in abundance and send our young men out to die. It is our chemicals that scorch the children and our bombs that level the villages. We are all participants.

Johnson did everything he could to upstage and discredit the statement in public. He unleashed that Drew Pearson story about Bobby’s role in bringing about his brother’s assassination. Had Johnson been able to force the CIA to reveal Bobby’s association with the Castro murder plots, or had he persuaded Hoover to reopen the investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination, the damage would have been considerable. But these agencies and the men who led them, as Rosselli had calculated, had the motive and capacity to block any serious inquiry.

Beyond the disposition of these secrets, Kennedy faced a continuing predicament: if he took issue with Johnson administration policy or even distanced himself from the president, the press played it as the ambitious Bobby Kennedy starting to make his move. Article after article used that scarlet adjective dating back to McClellan Committee — “ruthless” — and it stung Kennedy to silence.

On November 26, 1967, Kennedy appeared on CBS’s
Face the Nation
. The issue, it seemed the only issue, the press queried him on in those days was whether he would run against President Johnson. In response to a question by Tom Wicker, Kennedy wearily said, “No matter what I do, I am in difficulty. . . . I don’t know what I can do except perhaps try to get off the earth in some way.” But how could he oppose the war, Wicker asked, and not run against Johnson? Bobby’s reaction was an emotional outpouring:

We’re going in there and we’re killing South Vietnamese, we’re killing children, we’re killing women, we’re killing innocent people because we don’t want a war fought on American soil, or because [the Viet Cong are] 12,000 miles away and they might get 11,000 miles away. Do we have the right, here in the United States, to say we’re going to kill tens of thousands, make millions of people, as we have, millions of people refugees, killing women and children, as we have?
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The idea of taking on Johnson seemed foolhardy. Sorensen, O’Donnell, O’Brien, Smith, Salinger, and even Bobby’s brother Ted all told him not to. Johnson couldn’t be beaten, they said; it would ruin the party and elect Richard Nixon; it would finish Bobby’s chances in 1972 and would even undermine the reason why Bobby said he wanted to run — to stop the war in Vietnam. Ted thought their father would have said, “Don’t do it.” And what would Jack have said? Dick Goodwin asked Ted. “Jack would have probably cautioned him against it, but he might have done it himself.”

But Bobby was not Jack. He was not a percentage player. As hard-bitten a political veteran as he was, he was essentially running on emotion. He hated the war, hated Lyndon Johnson, and feared that Vietnam and racial division were killing America. To be president was not a personal ambition so much as a moral ambition. It would have to be a crusade, not a campaign. The people Bobby increasingly looked to for guidance were his key staffers Walinsky and Edelman, journalists like Jack Newfield and Pete Hamill, and liberal activists like Allard Lowenstein. They all believed that he should take on Johnson. The problem was, in O’Donnell’s words, “Bobby had no Bobby. And Joe and Jack were gone.” And so he remained paralyzed in indecision.

Ethel was urging him to run, and her recommendation was critical. She and Bobby remained inseparable. There was no one whose company he sought and enjoyed so much. In 1951, he had sent her a note containing his paraphrase of the biblical Book of Ruth: “And Ruth said, ”Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after Thee, for whither Thou goeth I will go; and whither Thou lodgest I will lodge; Thy people shall be my people and Thy God my God. When Thou diest then I will die and we will be together forever.“
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Ethel was hypercompetitive and instinctual. Tanned, athletic, and beaming, she wore skirts with hemlines three inches above the knee onstage. Offstage she was a constant cut-up. She was also one of the best campaigners in the entire Kennedy family.
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She shared the Kennedys’ tribal view of the world, referring to Johnson, for example, as ”Huckleberry Capone.’” Without Ethel, Bobby would never have braved his troubled odyssey.

On January 19, 1968, over dinner with Steve and Jean Smith and Pat Lawford, Bobby said he thought he would run. “This is going to cost you a lot of money,” he added and laughed.
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Publicly, however, he was still reticent. Eleven days after the dinner, he released a statement to the press that “I have told friends and supporters who are urging me to run that I would not oppose Lyndon Johnson under any foreseeable circumstances.” Walinsky was so upset by this that he threatened to resign. Meanwhile, Senator Eugene McCarthy announced his candidacy for president and began mounting what looked to be a hapless challenge to Johnson in New Hampshire. Bobby watched, undecided and tormented, while old friends such as Goodwin, Lowenstein, and John Kenneth Galbraith signed on with McCarthy. Kennedy clearly underestimated McCarthy, thinking him lazy and diffident, not recognizing that beyond the antiwar posture, McCarthy’s cool, distanced demeanor offered an attractive counterpoint to the hot and ugly emotions of the day.

In early February, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong unleashed a surprise attack on Saigon during the Tet holiday. Suddenly the war spilled into the living rooms of America though television images of people being shot dead in the streets of Saigon and the American embassy under siege. On February 8, in Chicago, Kennedy denounced in sweeping language American policy in Vietnam. He had now moved into open confrontation to Johnson, but was still uncertain about jumping in. Seeing McCarthy’s numbers rise in New Hampshire, Goodwin advised him: “Declare now.”

In the midst of a furious debate among his lieutenants about whether he should run, Bobby received an unusual request. Embattled farmworker leader Cesar Chavez, in his fourth week without food to protest violence in the vineyards of California, wanted Kennedy to fly out to the San Joaquin Valley to celebrate his fast over mass. His advisors, with the exception of Edelman, were opposed. The idea of a potential presidential candidate attending mass with a starving Mexican labor leader seemed needlessly provocative. When Ed Guthman questioned the idea, Bobby said, “I know, but I like Cesar.”
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In California the Teamsters had unleashed their usual battery of assault troops — lawyers in the courts, lobbyists with checks in hand in the state capitals, and goon squads in the fields. Threats and violence by the growers and Teamsters began to force farmworkers into armed resistance and sabotage despite Chavez’s insistence on nonviolence. Fields and sheds were set afire and water pumps blown up. The NFWA tried to confiscate guns from union members. “No union movement is worth the death of one farmworker or his child or one grower and his child,” Chavez told his followers. “I despise exploitation and I want change, but I’m willing to pay the price in terms of time.”
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But given the level of anger and frustration among his followers, that old Mexican saying —
Hay más tiempo que vida
(there is more time than life) — didn’t seem true anymore.

Another issue ripping apart the Hispanic community was the Vietnam War. Each week, scores of body bags containing the remains of Mexican-American soldiers killed in Vietnam were coming home to the barrios of southern California. The American dream seemed like a treacherous fraud. In an interview, Chavez remembers his followers saying to him, “Hey, we’ve got to burn these sons of bitches down. We’ve got to kill a few of them.”
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Like Martin Luther King Jr., Cesar Chavez was being bypassed by the disciples of violence.

On February 19, 1968, out of desperation more than some vision of renewal, Chavez told his amazed followers that he would not take one more bite of food until the violence stopped. With this he left them at Filipino Hall and started walking down the garbage-strewn highway toward his small windowless room at Forty Acres. No one liked the idea. His wife told him he was crazy. Saul Alinsky, his mentor, was disgusted to hear the news; he thought it too Catholic. Even his fiery deputy Dolores Huerta begged him to stop. But Chavez was unmoved.
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