A Tidal Wave
On Friday, November 22, 1963, as Ethel and Bobby entertained guests poolside at Hickory Hill, the telephone rang. Ethel pulled away from her hosting duties to answer it and was surprised to hear J. Edgar Hoover on the line, as the FBI director had never called the house before. Director Hoover and Bobby had a fraught and complicated relationship. While Bobby, as attorney general, was nominally the FBI director’s boss, the de facto power that Hoover wielded was unprecedented for a nonelected official. The files he hoarded—containing scandalous personal information on major Washington and Hollywood figures—served to ensure his position and influence. Throughout the Kennedy administration, Hoover had periodically and with great relish contacted the attorney general to let him know about some damaging new piece of information he possessed, usually about JFK’s prodigious sex life. It was always couched in courtesy, but the meaning of these calls, if oblique, was unmistakable: Hoover had a lot of dirt, and he was not to be messed with.
For his part, Bobby chafed against the bullying and resented the fawning that Hoover seemed to expect as a matter of course. He also had more substantial problems with the director: for example, Bobby wanted to wage a war on organized crime, while Hoover steadfastly denied the existence of the Mafia. Their relationship was one of distance and ornate courtesy, punctuated by overt clashes. Ethel, naturally, shared her husband’s antipathy: She once left a note in the FBI’s suggestion box helpfully proposing that the agency find a new director.
Bobby took the phone call from Hoover. After a beat, he put his hand across his mouth. “Jack’s been shot!” he said. Ethel ran to him and wrapped her arms around his waist to support him, as she would over the dark months to come.
Just as she had when her parents died, Ethel held fast to her faith. When nostalgia arose, she would say that Jack was in heaven, looking over the family. “That’s the wife of the Attorney General speaking,” Bobby icily replied. He wasn’t as comforted by his faith, and he struggled with this latest loss—the third of his siblings to die, and the one with whom he was closest. While the rest of the family gathered as usual at Hyannis Port for Thanksgiving dinner the week after Jack’s funeral, Bobby chose to stay away and instead spend the holiday with Ethel and the children at Hickory Hill. Bobby swallowed his tears, trying to abide by the family dictum “Kennedys don’t cry.”
“It was like a tidal wave of grief,” Ethel recalled of Jack’s death. “To see this vibrant man with all his character and sense of fun and wonderful judgment, it was lost. Everyone was devastated.” Ethel didn’t know how to reach Bobby. “It was like [he] had lost both arms,” she said. “It was six months of just blackness.”
“Daddy became much more withdrawn after Jack died,” said Kathleen, recalling her father spending more time alone reading poetry and the Bible. “I think that he tried to really feel the pain. He said, ‘I’m going to dwell in the pain, and I’m going to understand that something terrible has happened.’ ”
Ethel gently pushed her husband back into the world—encouraging him to go to New York, for example, to represent the family at a ceremony to change the name of New York International Airport to John F. Kennedy International Airport—and, eventually, his friends credited her for keeping him from drowning in his grief. In 1964, after months of reflecting on God and loss and his own mortality, and after seeing his little brother, Ted, nearly killed in a plane crash, Bobby refocused and set his sights on a US Senate seat in New York. If he succeeded, he’d be joining Ted, who’d first won a seat in the assembly four years earlier and was running his first reelection campaign. Though Ted would be confined to a hospital bed for much of the campaign recuperating from a badly injured back from the plane wreck, he was staying in the race, with wife Joan making appearances for him.
Bobby obviously couldn’t run where he’d long lived in Massachusetts—Ted already possessed a Massachusetts Senate seat, and not even the Kennedys had the chutzpah necessary to claim both—and by moving to Long Island, he faced predictable backlash for being a fair-weather resident and carpetbagger. Bobby responded with a pledge: “Whether I win or lose this election, I’m going to stay in the state of New York.” Despite the controversy, he was given rock-star treatment as he campaigned, stirring up scenes of frenzy everywhere he went. Women left lipstick on his face, and his campaign convertible was showered with confetti and rice as he drove down the street. “Three times, while standing in the car to shake hands, he was almost pulled over backwards,” wrote the Associated Press’s Relman Morin from the campaign trail. “After that, one aide grabbed his belt and another a leg to keep him upright.”
On November 3, 1964, he won, though not by as much as he had hoped. While Lyndon Johnson carried the state by an overwhelming 2.7 million votes in the presidential contest, Bobby won by only 700,000.
Bobby’s transition to the New York political scene was pretty transparent: Ethel and the children were moving back to Hickory Hill by January, and by 1966 Bobby’s name was being floated as a possible challenger to Lyndon B. Johnson for the presidency. Asked about one poll that showed voters would prefer Bobby on the Democratic ticket in 1968 by 51 percent to President Johnson’s 49 percent, Bobby said he wouldn’t be a candidate “under any foreseeable circumstances.”