The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (58 page)

Around midnight, Bobby decided to go downstairs to the packed ballroom. He asked once again for Chavez to walk with him, but Chavez could not be found, so instead Bobby asked Dolores Huerta to join him. On the way down the elevator, she told him that in several Mexican precincts that day the turnout had been 100 percent. He reached out and gave her a hug and then she returned it.
¹⁸⁰
They went first to the kitchen, where Kennedy shook everyone’s hand, including that of Juan Romero, a busboy, and then proceeded to the ballroom, where he mounted the podium. The crowd roared. As Bobby was thanking a list of supporters that included Freckles, Pete Hamill saw a young man try to get onto the platform through the drapes, but Barry shooed him off. Was it Sirhan? Hamill was later uncertain. Kennedy, uncharacteristically relaxed and smiling, now switched from his wry recognitions to the reason for his cause:

What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis, and that what has been going on in the United States over the last three years — the division, the violence, the disenchantment with our society; the divisions, whether it’s between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups or on the war in Vietnam — is that we can start to work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country and a compassionate country. I intend to make that my basis for running.

As the crowd cheered, there was a brief discussion about how to get to a press conference in the Colonial Room. Someone proposed a shorter route through the kitchen. As Kennedy made his way through the crush of people, both Barry and Ethel were pushed several feet behind him. Security guard Thane Eugene Cesar got hold of Bobby’s right elbow to escort him through the serving pantry when Sirhan opened fire. He had been standing more or less in front of Kennedy. The shots wounded Kennedy and five other people. According to eyewitnesses, the muzzle of Sirhan’s .22 caliber gun was never less than two feet from Kennedy. The fatal bullet, according to Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi, was fired “less than one inch from his [Kennedy’s] head” and from behind the senator.
¹⁸¹
The precise manner of his death would never be firmly established.

Kennedy was visibly conscious for a period of seconds, as he lay face up on the gummy pantry floor, blood pooling around his head. “I’m hurt,” he whispered. “I’m hurt.” And then, “No, no, no.” As several men rushed to subdue Sirhan, Juan Romero, the busboy whose hand Kennedy had earlier shaken, knelt next to him and looked up pleadingly. Someone put some rosary beads in Bobby’s hand. He gripped them tightly. As Ethel struggled to get through the crowd to him, a friend saw his lips moving, leaned down next to him, and heard him say, “Jack. Jack.”
¹⁸²

Epilogue

A
fter Jack was killed, Jackie Kennedy said that she had once thought of history as something that “bitter old men” wrote. “Then I realized history made Jack what he was. You must think of him as this little boy, sick so much of the time, reading the
Knights of the Round Table
, reading Marlborough. For Jack, history was full of heroes. . . . Men are such a combination of good and bad.”

Jack was that combination of good and bad, but always with the heroic pose. His was not the Catholic view of the hero — one engaged in sacrificial penance, struggling in a moral kinesis. His was, rather, the Greek view of the hero, celebrating the possibilities of self as an aesthetic pursuit. JFK’s pose was egocentric, but he found balance in the ironic. If he could take it over the edge, as he did at the Orange Bowl on that dangerous day in December 1962, or at the Berlin Wall the following summer in his instant of histrionic glory, he could also mock his pretense for the heroic. “This is the night I should go to the theater,” he had said to Bobby at their moment of triumph in the missile crisis (referring, as we have seen, to Lincoln’s assassination at the Ford Theater). Bobby had replied, of course, “If you go, I want to go with you.”

Jack Kennedy could never have been the hero that he wanted to be, or celebrate himself in so dramatic and imaginative a way, were it not for his soldier-brother — advising him, protecting him, and imparting discipline in the ranks. Asked in his final press conference how he regarded the presidency, JFK replied, “I have given before to this group the definition of happiness of the Greeks, and I will define it again: it is the full use of your powers along the lines of excellence. I find, therefore, the presidency affords some happiness.” But Jack wanted more than that: not just mastery of the presidency during the day but the Dionysian interlude at night; and Bobby, like a sleepless watchman on the rampart, made this possible too.

To be heroic in the Greek view was to die willingly. Jack had always been romanced by death. He read about it, talked about it, had visions of it, and coolly went into it. “His high noon kept all the freshness of the morning,” as Jackie had written a few days after his assassination. Death preserved his youth.

It was for Bobby to contemplate their murderous reversal of fortune and recognize his place in it. In his desperate search for some reference point, he underlined a passage from Aeschylus: “All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears. God calls men to a heavy reckoning for overweening pride.” The book Jackie gave him at Easter 1964,
The Greek Way,
became his guide through the wilderness. He could not admit, and probably did not know, just where his family had paid the blood price for this harvest rich in tears. Was it his father’s dealings with the underworld? Was it his scourge of the Mafia at a time when he had countenanced the use of Rosselli and his confederates in the vendetta against Castro? Was it renegade CIA paramilitaries who he himself had unleashed? Had Jack’s hedonism somehow exposed him to retribution? He had no answers and could permit himself no answers. One goes back to that moment when Robert Lowell asked what character in Shakespeare Bobby would choose to be, and Bobby chose Henry the Fifth, then read to Lowell the death speech of Henry the Fourth, whose bitter legacy to his children includes “[T]he cankered heaps of strange-achieved gold.”

“Henry the Fourth. That’s my father,” Bobby had said to Lowell. There would be no exit, only further pain and destruction.

Bobby became a man on fire. He would make of his curse a romance. “The fullness of life is in the hazards of life” was a passage from Aeschylus he had underlined. “To the heroic, desperate odds fling a challenge.” Archibald MacLeish, on that golden late October day in 1963 in Amherst at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library, had described such a hero, Oedipus. Blinded and alone for his father’s sins and his own, he was yet able, as MacLeish put it, to “face his dark pursuers. By embracing his tragic fate, Oedipus had shown us self without self-pity.” Bobby Kennedy used his rage to make amends. His presidency would create a new basis for power — the poor and minorities — that would renew our humanity.

Here the Kennedys, with all their romance and irony, finally unite in an aesthetic comparable to the Greeks that they read about and quoted: they were daring and they were doomed, and they knew it and accepted it. They would die and make their deaths into creative acts of history. They would be heroes. And they would give their country an imperishable poignancy in its heart.

Notes

Abbreviations

Crusades: 1951 – 1959

1
  David Halberstam,
The Best and the Brightest
(New York: Random House, 1972), p. 119.

2
  Trip file, September-November 1951, PPP, JFKL.

3
  Edmund A. Gullion, in an interview, set the scene. At the time, Gullion was second in command in the American legation in Vietnam. In 1962, he became President Kennedy’s ambassador to the Congo.

4
  Interview, Edmund A. Gullion. See also Norman Sherry,
The Life of Graham Greene,
vol. 2 (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 359-78.

5
  Quoted in Herbert S. Parmet,
Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy
(New York: The Dial Press, 1980), p. 210.

6
  Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman, eds.,
Robert Kennedy in His Own Words
(New York: Bantam, 1988), p. 436.

7
  Characterization of Professor Carl J. Friedrich as quoted in Parmet,
Jack
, pp. 69-70.

8
  Oral history of Joseph Spalding, JFKL.

9
  Quoted in Parmet,
Jack,
p. 321.

10
  Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.,
A Thousand Days: John F
.
Kennedy in the White House
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 96.

11
  Quoted in Parmet,
Jack
, p. 190.

12
  Quoted in Schlesinger,
A Thousand Days
, p. 87.

13
  John F. Kennedy, ed.,
As We Remember Joe
(privately printed), pp. 3-4.

14
  Parmet,
Jack
, p. 56.

15
  Robert E. Thompson and Hortense Myers,
Robert Kennedy: The Brother Within
(New York: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 62-63.

16
  Arthur Krock,
Memoirs: Sixty Years on the Firing Line
(New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968), p. 354.

17
  Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), pp. 68-69.

18
  Ibid., p. 69.

19
  Interview, David F. Powers.

20
  Thompson and Myers, p. 45.

21
  RFK, untitled journal, RFKP, JFKL.

22
  Guthman and Shulman, eds.,
In His Own Words
, p. 439.

23
  Ibid., pp. 436-39.

24
  Ibid., p. 438.

25
  Advance report on his trip to the Middle and Far East by Hon. John F. Kennedy, Mutual Broadcasting Network, 14 November 1951, PPP, JFKL.

26
  Sherry,
Life of Graham Greene
, pp. 368-71.

Mon enfant, ma sœur/ Songe à la douceur/ D’aller là-bas vivre ensemble.

(My child, my sister/ Dream of the sweetness/To go down there to live together.)

27
  Ibid., pp. 398-434.

28
  Interview, Kenneth P. O’Donnell.

29
  Interview, O’Donnell. See also Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers with Joe McCarthy, “
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye”: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), pp. 92-93. O’Donnell’s version of this story is somewhat differently told in Stein and Plimpton,
American Journey: The Times of Robert Kennedy
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) pp. 40-42. Also Helen O’Donnell,
A Common Good, The Friendship of Robert F. Kennedy and Kenneth P. O’Donnell
(New York: William Morrow, 1998), p. 80.

30
  Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
, p. 106.

31
  
New York Times,
14 August 1956, p. 2.

32
  O’Donnell and Powers, “
Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye
,” p. 133.

33
  Sorensen’s pre-presidential papers contain copies of JFK’s correspondence with his father that summer.

34
  Gore Vidal, “Eleanor Roosevelt,”
New York Review of Books
, 18 November 1971, p. 13.

35
  Interview, O’Donnell.

36
  Parmet,
Jack
, p. 372.

37
  Interview, O’Donnell. In his book with Dave Powers, O’Donnell observed that Joe Kennedy’s “blue language flashed all over the room.” “
Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye
,” p. 138.

38
  Ibid., p. 139.

39
  Anderson,
Jack and Jackie
(New York: William Morrow, 1996), pp. 168-71.

40
  Ibid., p. 171.

41
  Interview: Francis D. Flanigan. Flanigan later became chief counsel to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

42
  Edwin O. Guthman,
We Band of Brothers: A Memoir of Robert F
.
Kennedy
(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 17.

43
  Thompson and Myers,
The Brother Within
, pp. 105-16.

44
  Joseph P. Kennedy to Robert F. Kennedy, 21 July 1955. RFKP, pre-administration personal correspondence, JFKL.

45
  Clark Mollenhoff and Thomas B. Morgan, “The Dizzy Descent of Dave Beck,”
Look
, 15 April 1957.

46
  Robert F. Kennedy,
The Enemy Within
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. 8.

47
  Arthur Schlesinger quoting Jean Kennedy Smith. See Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times
, p. 153.

48
  Quoted in Peter Collier and David Horowitz,
The Kennedys: An American Dream
(New York: Summit Books, 1984), p. 220.

49
  Kennedy,
The Enemy Within
, p. 17.

50
  Interview, Kenneth O’Donnell. The proper name of the McClellan Committee was the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field.