The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (54 page)

At first glance, Chavez didn’t seem the hero type. He had, as his friend Jim Drake said, a bad back and too many children. Most of the time when he spoke he could scarcely make himself heard. He was uneducated, having never started high school. But in his capacity for sacrifice — traveling all night to join strikers at a picket, walking 300 miles to Sacramento, or even simply finding someone a job — he was matchless. This power of sacrifice, writer Peter Matthiesen said, derived from the complete simplicity and transparency of the man. His voice “comes as naturally as bird song — it is a pleasure to watch him move. He has what the Japanese call,
hara,
or ‘belly’ — that is, he is centered in himself.”
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Arthur Schlesinger thought that for all their differences Chavez and Kennedy were rather alike: “Both short, shy, familial, devout, opponents of violence, with a strong vein of melancholy and fatalism.”
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They shared a love for Saint Francis of Assisi, that most gentle of saints, and believed that acts of faith could change the world.

On the thirteenth day of his fast, Chavez left his cot to travel to Bakersfield to contest a contempt charge in Kern County Superior Court. As attorney Jerry Cohen helped him into a waiting car, they could see through the early morning fog the lights of hundreds of farmworker cars waiting to accompany them. In and around the court building later that morning, some four thousand farmworkers knelt and prayed as the hearing began. The judge ordered the contempt charges against Chavez dropped. The scene made national news. Senator Kennedy sent Chavez a telex. “He asked me to consider the consequences of what would happen if my health failed,” Chavez recalled.
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When Chavez returned to his cot that afternoon, he had to make his way through a mass of supporters who had gathered at the Forty Acres. Along the roads leading into Delano came a steady stream of people, some walking, others in cars or the backs of trucks. The compound filled with tents. Crosses and Virgin of Guadalupe statues were erected. Priests wore vestments cut from union flags and offered mass with union wine. Prayer rallies continued well into the night. Having failed to contain violence in his ceaseless travels, much less organize anything more than a fraction of the farms of California, Chavez had succeeded by the example of his courage and vulnerability in rallying his followers.

By the twentieth day of his fast, Chavez’s body began breaking down. He lost consciousness at points. His weight, normally about 150 pounds, was down to 120. He had fasted longer than Mohandas Gandhi had during his hunger strike of 1924. But his gentle sense of humor remained. Unable now to talk to the people who wanted to see him, he instructed one of his followers to tell those who knocked at the door: “Don’t bother him. He’s eating right now.” In his moments of lucidity, Chavez reflected on the dilemma before him. If he died, the fast would have been fruitless. But if he was to break the fast, how?
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Dolores Huerta, then in New York, had the answer: Bobby Kennedy. He would come back to Delano and at a mass of thanksgiving break bread with Cesar. There wasn’t much time. Most of Kennedy’s staff thought it was a terrible idea. So of course Bobby went.

Kennedy flew from Iowa, where he had given a jumbled speech in favor of Governor Harold Hughes, who was running for the Senate, to Los Angeles, and then in a smaller plane to Delano. With him were Ed Guthman and John Seigenthaler, who had accompanied him that December 1960 morning when he tried to tell Jack he wanted out.

The news of his arrival swelled the crowds to six or seven thousand around Forty Acres. Chavez waited in a happy blur, “getting minute-by-minute details,” as he later remembered, and blessing God for Dolores Huerta. Then the shouts of “Viva Kennedy!” as the car carrying Bobby pulled up.
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Before walking into Chavez’s room, Bobby said to his aide, “What do you say to a guy who’s on a fast?” They didn’t say much, as it turned out, looking and smiling at each other and nodding their heads.
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When they emerged, with Chavez being supported by two aides, Kennedy remarked to the press, motioning toward Chavez: “This is one of the heroic figures of our time.” When Kennedy arrived at the county park for the mass, the crowd of several thousand went crazy. Dolores Huerta remembered:

People were coming up to him, and they would grab him and hug him and kiss him on the mouth! And, you know,
un gran hombre
— great man, Kennedy —
un gran hombre.
People would grab him, and his hands were all scratched up. When he sat down in front of me, his hands were all bloodied.
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The mass was celebrated on the back of a flat-bed truck. Kennedy and Chavez sat side by side, flanked by Chavez’s wife, Helen Fabela, and his mother Juana.

“Well, how goes the boycott, Cesar?”

“How goes running for president, Bob?” Chavez replied, and both men laughed.

At the conclusion of the service, Kennedy took a homemade Mexican bread loaf called
semita,
broke off a piece and gave it to Chavez. The ABC cameraman did not get the shot and said to Kennedy: “Senator, this is perhaps the most ridiculous remark I’ve ever made in my life. Would you mind giving Cesar another piece of bread so we can get a picture?” Kennedy declined.
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Reverend Jim Drake then read a statement written by Chavez, too weak to read it himself, first in Spanish, then in English:

Our struggle is not easy. Those who oppose our cause are rich and powerful, and they have many allies in high places. We are poor. Our allies are few. But we have something the rich do not own. We have our bodies and spirits and the justice of our cause as our weapons. When we are really honest with ourselves, we must admit that our lives are all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us be men!
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Kennedy then stood up and briefly spoke, with Huerta providing the interpretation:

I am here out of respect for one of the heroic figures of our time — Cesar Chavez. I congratulate all of you who are locked with Cesar in the struggle for justice for the farm worker, and in the struggle for justice for Spanish-speaking Americans. . . . There are those of you who question the principle of nonviolence. Let me say to you that violence is no answer.
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Bobby then attempted two phrases in Spanish. The result was impenetrable. “Am I murdering the language?” he asked Chavez, who was laughing. “Yes. Go ahead.”
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The effect was nonetheless thunderous approval. When Kennedy finished speaking, the crowd surged toward him. As his chair was knocked forward, Chavez, still dazed and dizzy, said to Kennedy, “We’re pretty lousy in controlling crowds.”
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Dolores Huerta noticed that the senator was staring at a man standing at the edge of the circle. The man was wearing blue jeans and a blue-jeans jacket. His hair and eyes were gray.
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“Who is that man?” Kennedy asked her. She said she didn’t know and approached the man, asking him in Spanish if he were a member of the union. It was evident from his reaction that he didn’t understand what she was saying. As Kennedy tried to make his way back to the car, he was again mobbed by well-wishers. Mack Lyons, a black union leader who was trying to escort the senator through the crowd, remembered Kennedy saying to him, “That man is trying to kill me.” He was referring to the man Huerta had approached.
¹¹⁷
Chavez meanwhile had been carried back by supporters to a station wagon and placed on a mattress in the back. He could hear the crowd cheering and shouting to Bobby in Spanish, “Run! Run!” as he dozed off.

When he got into the car, Kennedy turned to Jim Drake. “Well, I might just do that.” Suddenly Bobby jumped out of the car, climbed up on the roof, and shouted to the crowd: “
Viva la Causa
!”
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By the time he got on the plane, he was more emphatic about running for president. “Yes, I’m going to do it.”
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He called Ethel and she, in turn, called Arthur Schlesinger with jubilation in her voice to relay the news.

March 16 galvanized Bobby Kennedy. It had had everything: the giving of hope to the forgotten; the act of touching, even to be bloodied by, people who needed him; the beatification of his hero at the mass; and the premonition of martyrdom — in the figure of the man with the gray eyes. The sacrifice, Chavez later thought, was to be consumed by love. By crossing a line “you very seldom cross,” Bobby had entered “a closeness that creates tearing him to pieces, little by little, just wanting him all for you.”
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A few days after the announcement, Schlesinger encountered Jackie Kennedy at a dinner party in New York. She took him aside: “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?” Schlesinger replied that he didn’t. “The same thing that happened to Jack.”
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Several weeks later, an informant for the FBI told his overseeing agent that there was a Mafia contract of several hundred thousand dollars to assassinate Kennedy “in the event it appeared he might receive the Democratic nomination.”
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Presidential candidates in those days received no protection from the Secret Service. As a federal elected officer, Senator Kennedy would have received the benefit of the FBI’s existing surveillance in major American cities, were it to pick up any indication of a plot to kill him. But Hoover had made it clear that Kennedy was a man the FBI would do nothing to protect. Startling his colleagues at an executive staff meeting, Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s office factotum and live-in partner, expressed a darker wish: “I hope someone shoots and kills that son of a bitch.”
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June 5, 1968

Los Angeles

D
olores Huerta would remember the ride down the elevator that night at the Ambassador Hotel. How she had told Bobby Kennedy that several Mexican precincts had voted 100 percent for him that day. How he had given her a hug and how she had hugged him back. She would remember asking herself why he had no security, the way Cesar did. Perhaps she should say something. How Bobby had first waved at the kitchen staff as he got out of the elevator on the first floor and then walked over to shake their hands. Again the thought: no security. She would remember the roar and crush in the ballroom as he entered to accept victory.
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In Bobby Kennedy’s 85-day run for president, the end, it seemed, was always near. The theologian Michael Novak saw “a very fragile, vulnerable person who was absolutely certain he was going to die. I just couldn’t escape the feeling in his eyes.” Novak thought that like Thomas à Becket in T. S. Eliot’s play
Murder in the Cathedral,
Bobby struggled between “his commitment to the pragmatic and the concrete” and “his need to give witness.” In speeches endorsing Kennedy’s candidacy Novak would tell his listeners: “You people just won’t understand Robert Kennedy unless you understand that he doesn’t know if he’s going to live tomorrow. And therefore, he’s got to do it today — he’s just got to act because he can’t care about the consequences.”
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Kennedy became like a soldier in combat: alert, feeding off intuition, and operating freely in a space somewhere between life and death. Jack had looked at his fate and the prospect of glory coldly, but the man a young Mormon student named Kit Christofferson saw at close range in the Joseph Smith Fieldhouse at Brigham Young University on the morning of May 27 was anything but certain. “His eyes were going this way and that, up and down. He looked trapped and wary, not what I expected, until they introduced him. Then he drew up and before long everyone — and these were Mormon Republicans — was screaming.”
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On the ninth day of Bobby’s extraordinary two-week, fifteen-state barnstorm across the country in March 1968,
Los Angeles Times
reporter Robert J. Donovan wrote that “the Kennedy blitz is a spectacle without parallel in the American experience.”
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The strategy was to do what supposedly could not be done — win the nomination “in the streets.” In part, the move across the country was born of desperation. Kennedy was months late in announcing his candidacy. Whatever Johnson’s infirmities, he had a solid lock on many delegations and the support of nearly all the party bosses. Thus, the strategy of stampede. The other crippling problem for Kennedy’s candidacy was the press. His announcement had been greeted with furious denunciations by editorial boards, columnists, and reporters, including those who had once supported him and considered themselves personal friends. Murray Kempton of the
New York Post,
in a column entitled “Farewell Senator Kennedy,” wrote that only a “coward” would come “down from the hills to shoot the wounded . . . he has managed to confirm the worst things his enemies have ever said about him.” Another erstwhile Kennedy supporter, Mary McGrory, raised an old theme: “Kennedy thinks that American youth belongs to him at the bequest of his brother. Seeing the romance flower between them and McCarthy, he moved with the ruthlessness of a Victorian father whose daughter has fallen in love with a dustman.”
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The
Washington Post
cruelly observed that even the men Kennedy had named three of his children after — Maxwell Taylor, Averell Harriman, and Douglas Dillon — refused to support him. Kennedy may have left Washington to take his candidacy to the people, but he also left simply to stop getting hit.