The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (56 page)

MCCARTHY: No.

LOWELL: Well, that’s a loophole.

MCCARTHY: Do you suppose we could get some bishop to give all our student supporters minor orders?

Whatever his self-indulgences, McCarthy proved tough and resourceful. First against Johnson and then Kennedy, he mastered the guerrilla strategy of underplaying his chances, waiting for his opponent to make a mistake, and then basing his appeal as much on contrast as on message. In a divisive and disordered time, his cool juxtaposed Bobby’s pure heat. Tom Wicker thought that it was McCarthy, not Kennedy, who “had broken with the past” and who represented the “new politics.”
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His aloof disposition, his tart treatment of the press, his communication that Washington had betrayed the people — this was the beginning of anti-politics. In the face of Kennedy money and organization, the McCarthy tactic was to dodge in and out of the primary states in search of high ground. In Oregon he was to find it.

Within a few days of LBJ’s announcement, another hammer-blow struck the country: the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Kennedy got the news that King had been shot as he flew from Terre Haute to Indianapolis. After the plane landed, he was informed that King was dead. He seemed “to shrink back as if struck physically,” gasping, “Oh, God. When is this violence going to stop?” He was scheduled to go to a rally in the black section of Indianapolis but several people in the campaign, including the usually indomitable Ethel, thought they should all go immediately to the hotel. Bobby decided he would go, despite a warning from the chief of police that it would not be safe. As Kennedy’s car entered the ghetto, the motorcycle escort pulled off.
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When the car reached the large, unpaved parking lot where the rally was to take place, it was clear that the crowd had not heard the news. Kennedy climbed up onto the flat-bed truck that served as a dais and grasped a portable microphone: “I have some terrible news for you. Martin Luther King has been shot.” A gasp went up from the crowd as Kennedy, “hunched in his black overcoat, his face gaunt and distressed and full of anguish,” continued:

Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice for his fellow human beings, and he died because of that effort. In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black — considering the evidence . . . that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. . . . Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love. For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed . . .

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black. . . . Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness in man and to make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and our people.
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At King’s funeral at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on a hot spring day, Kennedy and McCarthy sat in pews one behind the other, part of a scattering of other white politicians and progressives amid a vast crowd of poor southern blacks. Allard Lowenstein remembered the singing of the hymn, “Earnestly, Tenderly Jesus Is Calling,” which concluded with the words, “Come home, come home, ye who are weary, come home, come home.”
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In the pall of shock and grief surrounding the assassination, every presidential candidate except Kennedy waited for the temperature to cool down before dealing with the rage caused by King’s death. The day after the murder, Bobby spoke to a largely white audience in Cleveland and delivered what would become his essential message for the balance of his campaign. He decried not only America’s dark habit of political and social violence, but spoke of:

another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter. This is the breaking of a man’s spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among men.

Kennedy asked Americans to recognize “in our own hearts . . . the terrible truths of our existence,” truths that could not be vanquished with a program or a resolution. “[P]erhaps we can remember — even if only for a short time — that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short movement of life, that they seek — as we do — nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.”
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Bobby had already sensed the shadow of his own fate. King’s murder only quickened this sensation and sharpened his outrage at the bitter plight of millions of Americans. He had always had a deep need to find definition by contending with evil. It no longer mattered that the country wasn’t ready or wouldn’t listen. He would strike the bell.

As the Kennedy campaign headed into the primaries in Indiana and Nebraska, the exhausted candidate would fly home and spend Sunday with his family at Hickory Hill. A reporter observed him one such day in the dining room, eating a sandwich as he listened to a briefing on hog prices. Each time one of his various children would wander by, Bobby would reach out, his eyes never leaving the face of his interlocutor, and squeeze the child’s hand. After lunch he played with each of his children. At times, he openly wondered at the path he had taken, commenting to a reporter: “I think — I think — I would make this one effort and if it fails I would go back to my children. If you bring children into the world, you should stay with them, see them through.”
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Gene McCarthy thought he saw a new counterpoint in the race for the nomination. “It’s narrowed down to Bobby and me,” he remarked. “So far he’s run
with
the ghost of his brother. Now we’re going to make him run
against
it. It’s purely Greek: he either has to kill him or be killed by him. We’ll make him run against Jack. And I’m Jack.”
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Whether McCarthy was Jack or not, Bobby’s candidacy, as Victor Navasky wrote during this period, was bumping into “a ghost, a shadow, an image, and a specter. The ghost is the idealized memory of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. The shadow, cast by the ghost, is what gets in the way of the voter trying to see Robert as a man rather than as a Kennedy. The image of Robert’s ruthlessness is at least partly a legacy of his service to his brother. And the specter is of a Kennedy dynasty.”
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Bobby was facing the same old problem. The more people saw of him, the less he looked like Jack — and Jack was what people wanted to see. In this sense, McCarthy was right: the ghost Bobby wanted to run with would always be against him. John F. Kennedy, now gloriously ensconced in the Camelot myth, could never be beaten. At the same time the press, fueling expectations of how Bobby would have to perform in primaries to win, also criticized him for his constant references to his brother in his speeches. By the second week of May, Bobby stopped quoting Jack altogether. In private, however, he reminisced more openly than ever about him, as if, Louis Oberdorfer later said, “he could see Jack and wanted to be with him.”
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As in JFK’s do-or-die effort in West Virginia in May 1960, Bobby needed a primary win and took the gamble of entering the Indiana contest. With both McCarthy and popular Indiana governor Roger Branigan on the ballot, Kennedy risked the real possibility of coming in second. The Kennedy message of social and racial reconstruction was potentially too radical for the largely white conservative electorate. The strategy that emerged in the Indiana campaign was the one Kennedy forces had perfected in 1960: divide the state into districts that represented key parts of the electorate and bring in out-of-state coordinators to run those districts; distribute several million flyers; schedule appearances by local officials and celebrities supportive of the senator, along with Kennedy family members and national celebrities, to boost visibility and persuasion; outhustle the opposition; by doubling the number of appearances by the candidate via tight scheduling and fifteen to eighteen hours a day campaigning; spend as much as you had to.

Bobby’s first days on the campaign trail in Indiana went dismally. In a state known for its phlegmatic reserve, people would show up at the rallies to heckle him. The characteristic reaction to his message of racial and economic justice was cold indifference. Bobby sensed he was hitting a brick wall, telling David Brinkley on one occasion, “They
hate
me in Kokomo.”
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On another occasion, he told reporters with his brutal candor, “So far in Indiana, they seem to want to see me as a member of the black race.” One woman who came to a small airport gathering where Kennedy spoke about his farm program was openly scornful, as television correspondent Charles Quinn later told some Kennedy staffers. Bobby overheard the report.

“What did she say?” he asked Quinn.

“I can’t tell you what she said, Senator. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

“Tell me what she said,” he repeated.

“All right,” Quinn agreed. “I’ll tell you what she said. She said, ‘Hmmph. The only reason I came down here is to find out if he looked like Bugs Bunny, and he does.”’

Kennedy laughed loud and long at this, finally throwing himself into his seat, exhausted. “You know what? I
feel
like Bugs Bunny too!”
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At points there were sustained confrontations between Bobby and his audiences. On April 26, at the Indiana University Medical Center, medical students openly scorned his proposals to help the elderly and the poor. One student asked, “Where are we going to get the money to pay for all these new programs you’re proposing?”

“From you,” Kennedy replied icily. “I look around this room and I don’t see many black faces who will become doctors. Part of civilized society is to let people go to medical school who come from ghettos. I don’t see many people coming here from slums, or off of Indian reservations. You are the privileged ones here. It’s easy for you to sit back and say it’s the fault of the Federal Government. But it’s our responsibility too. It’s our society too. . . . It’s the poor who carry the major burden of the struggle in Vietnam. You sit here as white medical students, while black people carry the burden of the fighting in Vietnam.” There was hissing and booing.
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Earlier that year the pollster Richard Scammon had warned Bobby that if he was perceived as an extremist he would get “a one-way ticket to oblivion.” He didn’t seem to care.

Such angry exchanges may have defied every known precept in the art of the possible, but they also sealed the growing regard for Bobby among the fifty or so press traveling with the candidate. The stories they filed depicted Kennedy’s honesty, his self-deprecating humor, and his fantastic drive. An incident in tiny Mishawaka, Indiana — in which cheering youth hurled Kennedy against the side of his car, chipping his front tooth and splitting his lip — actually cost him the votes of most adults in attendance, but in the press it became another instance of “Bobby fever.”
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The candidate and his campaign moved slowly, very slowly, into a winning groove in Indiana. On April 23, the Kennedy entourage boarded a train in north central Indiana on the old Wabash line. At each stop the band would play “The Wabash Cannonball,” before the senator would introduce his wife and speak off the back platform. The press on the train composed their own, seven-stanza version called “The Ruthless Cannonball” and sang it to the candidate at the end of the day:

Now good clean Gene McCarthy came down the other track
A thousand Radcliffe dropouts all massed for the attack.
But Bobby’s bought the right-of-way from here back to St. Paul,
’Cause money is no object on the Ruthless Cannonball.

Kennedy listened to this rendition with his usual deadpan expression, observing at its conclusion, “As George Bernard Shaw once said” — the reporters began to laugh — “as George Bernard Shaw once said,” he continued, “ ‘the same to you, buddy!’ ”
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Kennedy became effective at loosening up Indiana crowds, often employing a sort of comic antiphony.

“Will you vote for me?” he would ask the crowd.

“Yes!” the crowd would respond.

“Will you get your friends to vote for me?”

“Yes!”

“When people say something bad about me, will you say it isn’t true?

“Yes!”

“Have you read my book?”

“Yes!”

“You lie.”

In the final days of the campaign, Kennedy went to his only real area of strength in Indiana, the industrial north. A nine-hour motorcade that began in South Bend took him through cheering crowds in thirteen smaller cities and towns. At the Gary city line, two men got in the back seat to stand with Kennedy — former middleweight champion Tony Zale from Gary and the new black mayor of Gary, Richard Hatcher. There they stood, arms around each other, waving at a city that had been on the brink of a race war. In Miller, six-year-old Sam Vagenas, whose mother was a Kennedy volunteer, felt an electric emotion sweep through the crowd as Kennedy waded into the throng.
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It confirmed his entry into a life of political action.