The Last Patrician (21 page)

This Bobby, the passionate pilgrim, the earnest seeker, the Bobby whom we so easily picture walking along a desolate Western airport tarmac, against a background of great mountains, with his little dog, or kneeling, in the midst of a remote orange grove, with Mr. Chavez and a group of migrant farmworkers, or bending to grasp the hand of one of those little children with whom, like the Lord, he felt such instinctive sympathy: this Bobby is familiar enough to us.
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It is the Bobby whose purity, whose compassion, and whose peculiar sweetness of nature made him seem like a secular saint. But we are suspicious; we do not trust secular saints. We wonder what he was
really
about. A sentimental fool? A cynical manipulator? An expert purveyor of modern melodrama? And what about Marilyn Monroe? We wonder whether his sense of charity was not misplaced. Brother Ted is beginning to drink his life away; the kids are getting into drugs; sister-in-law Joan is freaking out. Shouldn't we be tending to the home fires?

Of course, there was always more to it than medievalism and Mrs. Jellyby. Bedford-Stuyvesant was as much about politics as it was about compassion; the documents in the Kennedy archives make the political purpose of the project abundantly clear. In a confidential 1966 memorandum to Bobby, Adam Walinsky argued that Bedford-Stuyvesant, not Vietnam, was the issue that would enable him to usurp the heights, would propel him to the highest places in the republic. Bed-Stuy, Walinsky said, was a “job which only you can pull off,” a “job which will pay dividends to you” in the future. “If you can make this work,” he told Bobby, “it will be the ‘Kennedy Plan' everywhere.” The word would get out; it could “be spread, among other things, by the subcommittee of which you are a member,” a subcommittee that, under the leadership of Senator Ribicoff, was about to begin landmark hearings on the question of urban poverty. Bed-Stuy, Walinsky predicted, would dramatically boost Bobby's popularity in New York, where he found himself in competition with the energetic Rockefeller and the handsome and proverbially charismatic Lindsay. Success in Bed-Stuy, Walinsky said, would emphasize the “contrast between what [Lindsay] has done in a year and what you [can] do in a month.” And it would raise Bobby's national stature. Johnson, Walinsky said, had dropped the ball on urban poverty; there was now “a complete vacuum of poverty leadership” in the United States. “You can seize the lead,” Walinsky told his boss.
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No surprise there. Like every other United States Senator who pledges to do something about a problem, Bobby pledged to do something about Bedford-Stuyvesant only after he and his aides had carefully weighed the political implications of such a promise. Politics played a part—a large part—in the decision to take on Bedford-Stuyvesant. But it was politics of the highest and boldest sort, politics characterized by an audacity rarely found in the Senate. Here was a Senator who, in a year in which he attained new and extraordinary heights of popularity, was willing to wade into the morass of the ghetto and gamble his career and his future on the chance that he could do something about it. Senators are not in the habit of doing things like this. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who today occupies the Senate seat that Bobby then held, privately warned his friend not to make the attempt.
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Doubtless many other Senators would have taken Moynihan's advice.

Practical politics, the fashion of radical chic, even a kind of false charity all played a part in Bobby's pilgrimages in pain, and all contributed to his decision to come to Bedford-Stuyvesant. But more than anything else Bobby's pilgrimages were exercises in an ongoing attempt to explore the relationship between compassion and self-confidence. They were Bobby's way not merely of immersing himself in the facts and metaphysics of human suffering, but of understanding the way in which the compassionate act nurtures a person's confidence in himself.

12

In November 1962, James Baldwin published “Letter from a Region in My Mind” in
The New Yorker.
In it he told of ghettos where

the wages of sin were visible everywhere, in the wine-stained and urine-splashed hallway, in every clanging ambulance bell, in every scar on the faces of the pimps and their whores, in every helpless, newborn baby being brought into this danger, in every knife and pistol fight on the Avenue, and in every disastrous bulletin: a cousin, mother of six, suddenly gone mad, the children parceled out here and there; an indestructible aunt rewarded for years of hard labor by a slow, agonizing death in a terrible small room; someone's bright son blown into eternity by his own hand; another turned robber and carried off to jail.
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Baldwin told of watching old friends degenerate, of finding them, “in twos and threes and fours, in a hallway, sharing a jug of wine or a bottle of whiskey, talking, cursing, fighting, sometimes weeping.”
2
He told of a past, “the Negro's past, of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it.”
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Tame stuff, perhaps, compared with the sentiments expressed by groups like the Black Panthers a few years later. But in 1962 Baldwin's was as powerful a statement of black rage as most
New Yorker
readers had ever encountered. It shocked genteel liberals out of their paternalistic complacency; something, they said, had to be done.

The article moved Bobby to seek Baldwin out. The two had met before, briefly, at a White House dinner; now Bobby invited him to breakfast with him at Hickory Hill.
4
Though he had in the past ridiculed Baldwin's homosexuality—he and Jack used to quarrel over who had first thought to call Baldwin “Martin Luther Queen”—Bobby now developed a respect for the man, and asked him to arrange a meeting with a group of blacks to talk about the problems of the ghetto.
5
The meeting took place on a late spring afternoon in 1963 at the Kennedy family apartment on Central Park South in New York. Burke Marshall accompanied Bobby. Several black artists and entertainers were present, among them Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, and Lorraine Hansberry. So, too, were two experts on urban problems: Kenneth B. Clark, the social psychologist, and Edwin C. Berry of the Chicago Urban League.
6

Also present was a young man named Jerome Smith, a civil rights worker who had spent time in Southern jails and who had on several occasions been beaten to a pulp by white supremacists.
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He was less prominent than the artists and scholars who had gathered to meet the Attorney General, but he quickly established himself as the dominant presence in the room. He was not famous, Baldwin observed; he “didn't sing or act or dance.”
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But he nevertheless became “the focal point” of the debate.
9
Smith began by saying, in an angry, stammering voice—for he stammered when he was angry—that it “nauseated” him to be in the same room with a man who as Attorney General had been as negligent in the performance of his duties as Bobby.
10
Unprepared for this hostility, Bobby politely ignored Smith and turned to the others in the room, to those whom he took to be the “reasonable, responsible, mature representatives of the black community” present. This was a mistake; the others insisted that he listen to Smith. And Smith was merciless. Kenneth Clark remembered his harangue as “one of the most violent, emotional verbal assaults” he had ever witnessed.
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The atmosphere in the room became, Baldwin said, “very tense, and finally very ugly.”
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Bobby himself, who appeared to Clark to be “extraordinarily insensitive” to the plight of black people in the United States, became, as the meeting proceeded, “more silent and tense, and he sat immobile in the chair. He no longer continued to defend himself. He just sat, and you could see the tension and the pressure building in him.”
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And yet Smith refused to relent, and the verbal pummeling continued. Smith said he did not know how much longer he could remain nonviolent. He said he did not know how much longer he could endure, with patience, with meekness, with humility, the indignity of being spat upon by whites, and of being beaten by them to within an inch of his life. Smith's parting words were blunt: “When I pull the trigger,” he told the Attorney General, you can “kiss it good-bye.”
14

The encounter in New York left Bobby not only shaken, but also profoundly angry. “I think he was always a little mad at me,” Baldwin said afterward.
15
And yet however wounded Bobby might have been by the tongue-lashing he received on that late spring afternoon in 1963, in subsequent years he ritualistically subjected himself to similar abuse; he seemed almost to enjoy the degree of humiliation involved. And these encounters
were
exercises in humiliation, exercises in which Bobby very deliberately abased himself, made himself “low and humble in position,” and bore with meekness and humility the taunts and insults of others.
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After the funeral of Dr. King in April 1968 prominent black leaders, among them Ralph Abernathy, James Bevel, and Hosea Williams, gathered at Bobby's suite at the Regency Hotel in Atlanta.
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There was, Andrew Young recalled, “a whole lot of undirected hostility present.” People were “just angry and bitter and grieving.”
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A quantity of profane language was used, and when “preachers get to cuss,” Young observed, they “cuss good.”
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But Young hesitated to silence his colleagues; he was “impressed” by the way Bobby accepted their calumnies. Bobby “listened,” Young said, “while we blew off steam … he wasn't upset.”
20

A short time later Bobby addressed an angry black audience in Oakland. It was, John Seigenthaler remembered, a “rough, gut-cutting” affair. Members of the audience variously denounced white people, the Kennedy family, obsequious blacks, and “technicolor niggers”; Bobby himself they derided as a talker, a hypocrite, “just another politician.”
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“Look, man,” one participant said to him when he attempted to speak, “I don't want to hear none of your shit.”
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Unperturbed, Bobby “sat there and listened and took it.”
23
Afterward, driving back to San Francisco, he said that he was “glad” that he had gone to the meeting. “They need to know,” he said, that “somebody [will] listen.” After “all the abuse the blacks have taken through the centuries,” he continued, “whites are just going to have to let them get some of these feelings out.”
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He had come a long way from the man who had once said he could have been smoking a cigar in Palm Beach.
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The Ritual Discipline of Humiliation

T
HE EMERGING THEME
is one of ritual humiliation: it explains much in Bobby's career that is otherwise inexplicable; his very campaigns for public office partook of it. There
was
a medieval quality to Bobby, a part of him that was in love with the idea of the mortified flesh. The body, in the idiosyncratic philosophy he evolved, had been created for punishment as well as pleasure. Hence his predilection not only for the most dangerous rapids of rivers and the sheer faces of mountains, but also for the frenzied crowds that reached out to touch him.
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In his own campaigns, and when he campaigned for others, he was literally bloodied by his supporters, and yet he continued to submit to them. “They tore at his buttons and his hair … they tried to pull him out of his convertible.” His bodyguard Bill Barry, a big man who had played football at Kent State, was forced “to hang on to him with all his strength.”
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“People were coming up to him,” Dolores Huerta recalled, “and they would grab him and hug him and kiss him on the mouth!”
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They would shout, “Un gran hombre … un gran hombre”—“a great man”—and “his hands were all bloodied where people had pulled him.”
29
Teddy White, who traveled with Bobby during the '68 campaign, remembered the “near-sexual orgy of exultation” of the crowd, the “frenzy of their love.”
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The “hands would reach for him, grabbing for a thread, a shoelace, a shoe; in the near-hysteria, anyone in the car with Bobby would become a bodyguard, protecting him.”
31
At one point, White said, the “clutchers seized him and pulled so hard that in tumbling over the edge of the car he had instinct enough only to throw his elbow over his eyes to protect them; and slammed his jaw on the door of the car, breaking a front tooth and cutting open his lip.”
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His tie, his cuff links, even his shoes were taken from him, and still the “touching … and the pulling and the pushing and the screaming” continued.
33

A lot of people [the television reporter Charles Quinn remembered] were crushed and fainted and got hurt, and we had some close calls in the motorcade when little kids fell under cars. It was hairy.… I have a vivid picture of a lady grabbing him by the tie and pulling him down by the neck; his little head bobbing up and down.
34

It was more than a modern form of self-flagellation, it was a kind of fatal dance, as Bobby himself acknowledged when he said that each time he stepped into the mass of tangled, moving, pressing flesh he was playing a game of Russian roulette.
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The crowd, for its part, sensed his willingness to be a sacrifice, and attributed to the garlanded hero extraordinary and undefinable qualities, qualities that made it all the more eager to reach him, to grab him, to make some sort of tactile contact with him, as if the touch of his hands, swollen and scratched—as if his very skin and hair—were a cure for all our modern scrofulas.
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