Run, Bobby, Run
While most people believed that Bobby saw the Senate as a stepping-stone to the Oval Office, he insisted, almost until he declared his candidacy, that he did not. On January 4, 1965—the same day he was sworn in as the junior senator from New York—he playfully declared to the press, “I have absolutely no Presidential ambitions.” A Cheshire cat smile appeared on his face. “And neither does my wife—EthelBird.”
However kittenish he might’ve been in acknowledging his own deep-seated ambitions, Bobby was also a realist who had trouble imagining a viable run for the Democratic nomination. Though Johnson was deeply unpopular and Bobby felt that LBJ’s policy on Vietnam was catastrophically wrong, Bobby knew that the odds were against a successful bid to replace a sitting president on the 1968 Democratic ticket. Whatever Johnson’s dismal public approval ratings, in the sixties the nominee for president was decided by the party officials who controlled the delegates; with only fourteen primaries, the public’s voice in the decision was somewhat muted. And even a weakened Johnson was still the most gifted political dealmaker of his generation, and he could be expected to fight effectively for his own interests.
Further, Kennedy circle heavyweights like Teddy Kennedy and Ted Sorensen argued against his running: They reminded Bobby of the potential to split and weaken the party by challenging the presumptive nominee. They also argued that Bobby would be seen as a selfish spoiler, chasing the presidency to expiate grief over his brother, or simply because he believed it was due him by dynastic right.
As of the mid-1960s, however, Bobby still had time to decide. In the meantime, he was a senator. While he and Ethel bought a five-room apartment on the east side of New York City, in the United Nations Towers, they spent little time there. The majority of their time was spent at Hickory Hill, and Ethel’s life continued largely as before: overseeing a rowdy brood of children, throwing raucous parties, and serving as Bobby’s cheerleader, confidante, and comfort. Parties during that time included a 1966 gala thrown in honor of Ambassador-at-large W. Averell Harriman’s seventy-fifth birthday, where Peter Duchin’s orchestra provided the evening’s entertainment. The next year, only a few months after the premature birth of Douglas Harriman Kennedy—child number ten—Ethel and Bobby celebrated their seventeenth wedding anniversary with marathon festivities.
Beginning on Embassy Row, the progressive party eventually made its way to Hickory Hill, where three film projectors showed quick-cut footage on the walls of the empty swimming pool; the Duchin orchestra was again the accompaniment, until three o’clock in the morning, when a jukebox took its place. The party was still going in the morning, when Ethel served breakfast for those assembled before leading the entire sleepless crew to mass for Douglas’s christening.
The Senate years were not all fun for Ethel. In September of 1966, her beloved older brother, George Jr., died when a small plane, piloted by an off-duty Air Force Master Sergeant and carrying George and three friends, botched a tight canyon landing and crashed at a remote ranch in the Idaho wilderness. George had lived a flamboyantly dangerous and hedonistic lifestyle—his funeral would be attended by several of his blonde, blue-eyed mistresses, known to family and friends as the Swedish Girls. His death as a heedless adventurer, crashing in a plane loaded down with guns and liquor for a twenty-person hunting expedition, was completely in character for George Jr. His adoring younger sister was devastated. Ethel dutifully attended the funerals of not only her brother but of another of the passengers, CIA official and RFK’s friend Dean Markham.
According to friend Sarah Davis, Ethel handled her brother’s death “with incredible grace and incredible bravery. She never got maudlin or dramatic. She never shed tears that anyone saw. She dealt with it by ignoring it.” This stoic approach to death—the approach she took with her parents and her brother, and which she would later take to the deaths of her husband and two of her sons—is jarring in the hypertherapeutic era. Though professional grief counselors preach that there’s no wrong way to grieve, there’s something in Ethel’s approach to bereavement that strikes the contemporary observer as obtuse. But for a woman who survived so much, perhaps a little obtuseness is excusable. There’s a certain depth of loss where the fact of surviving it is more important than how it was survived.
As 1968 arrived, Bobby began reflecting with more urgency on whether to enter the presidential contest. His most enthusiastic cheerleader was Ethel, who in January got the kids to hang a “Run, Bobby, Run” banner out a bedroom window at Hickory Hill. At a January dinner Bobby worried that a presidential run would “go a long way toward proving everything that everybody who doesn’t like me has said about me . . . that I’m just a selfish, ambitious little SOB that can’t wait to get his hands on the White House.”
Ethel piped up: “You’re always talking as though people don’t like you. People do like you, and you’ve got to realize that.”
At a February meeting at Hickory Hill where RFK weighed a run with friends, aides, and allies, Ethel’s advice was direct and unequivocal: “Run. You’ll beat him. Run. Do it.” One of the meeting participants remarked that, since Ethel had spoken, the debate was over. Bobby insisted that it wasn’t Ethel’s decision, though he was clearly buoyed by her confidence.
One concern on most everybody’s mind—which Ethel never outwardly acknowledged—was Bobby’s physical safety should he seek the presidency. Jackie Kennedy gave her blessing directly to Bobby but later shared her true feelings with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby? The same thing that happened to Jack,” she said. “There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack . . .” The fear that Bobby—like his brother—would be cut down by an assassin was very real, and it was shared by many in the Kennedy family and entourage.
Blackmail was also a worry, though not one that Bobby ever openly acknowledged. President Johnson, with the help of a very eager FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, had been gathering dirt on the Kennedys since Jack’s administration. LBJ was in possession of untold amounts of damaging information: on Bobby and Jack’s Cuba plots, on the brothers’ sexual escapades, on the little known fact that, as attorney general, Bobby had authorized wiretaps on Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement. Some in his circle worried that a ruthless LBJ wouldn’t hesitate to release information to capsize the campaign of a man with whom there was such long-standing mutual enmity.
But the voices urging him to run gained volume, and, as 1968 progressed, events made his decision easier. In February, a massive uprising by the Viet Cong—the Tet offensive—caught US forces in Vietnam flat-footed and gave Bobby more evidence that the war was a strategic and moral quagmire. And Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy entered the race and proved with a strong showing in New Hampshire that Johnson was not invulnerable. On March 16, 1968, Bobby Kennedy announced his candidacy.
He stood in the US Capitol, at the same podium where his brother had started his campaign a little more than eight years before. Ethel and nine of their ten children sat in the front row. Ethel’s adoring attention was only interrupted by hopeless attempts to corral the rowdier children. Kerry, then eight years old, raced around the Senate chambers. Four-year-old Christopher kicked a reporter in the shin; Matthew Maxwell wrestled with him.
“I do not run for the Presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies,” Bobby said in his Boston-tinged monotone. “I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done.” He vowed to end the bloodshed both in Vietnam and in our cities at home, and to “close the gaps between black and white, rich and poor, young and old, in this country and around the world.”
The initial response was rapturous—for Bobby and for Ethel. “If Ethel Kennedy becomes First Lady,” Paul Healy wrote in the New York Daily News, “the White House will have the swingingest First Family since Teddy Roosevelt’s day.” The day after the announcement, Bobby spoke to crowds of fifteen thousand and seventeen thousand screaming supporters at Kansas State University and the University of Kansas, respectively. The Kennedy camp was reassured by the excitement he had generated even in the heartland: The people at the Kansas rallies weren’t radical rabble-rousers, but clean-cut Middle Americans. “This is Kansas, fucking Kansas!” Look photographer Stanley Tretick exclaimed at one of the deafening Kansas events. “He’s going all the fucking way!”
The nomination still wasn’t a sure thing. More than half of the delegates were controlled by the South, where Bobby was hated for his pro–civil rights stance, or by party bosses beholden to Big Labor, whom he’d antagonized as head of the rackets committee, as attorney general, and as a senator. He had no particular liking for or rapport with the business community. And among the politically motivated student movements, support for Eugene McCarthy was strong; many young people saw in Bobby an opportunistic spoiler. He somehow had to create, in the words of Evan Thomas, a “coalition of the have-nots,” while simultaneously wooing any party boss he could get under his tent.
Ethel was, as ever, Bobby’s most avid supporter. She was with him as often as she could be for the campaign, and various minders looked after the younger Kennedy children at Hickory Hill. Kathleen and Joe, sixteen and fifteen, respectively, were both away at boarding schools, and the five youngest children, from one-year-old Douglas to ten-year-old Michael, were the charges of two nurses and a secretary. But Bobby Jr., fifteen, David, twelve, and Courtney, eleven, were less supervised. Ethel hired a handsome twenty-one-year-old named Bob Galland to look after them. Galland was a college dropout, but a devout Catholic; as a former Boy Scout, Ethel reasoned he could be their instructor in camping and sailing. He discovered soon after taking the job that he was more of a live-in nanny. He also discovered that, though often far away, Ethel had very specific ideas of how the children were to spend their time.
“One of her rules was, ‘You will watch the six-o’clock news every night because your father might be on,’ ” said Galland. “We did that religiously. They’d get real excited to see their parents. There was a lot of elation—‘Yea, there’s Dad! This is great!’ ” The fact that she and Bobby were so often in the media was important to Ethel, and she kept a wary eye on the press. After Washington newspaper columnist Richard Harwood accused Bobby of being a “demagogue,” Ethel responded by approaching him on the campaign plane, crumpling up the offending newspaper, and throwing it in his face. When Ethel was campaigning in Indiana, a tongue-tied local TV reporter asked her about Bobby’s reputation among fellow senators as “worthless.” The reporter had meant to say “ruthless,” which would have been bad enough; “worthless” was beyond the pale. Ethel’s eyes took on a reptilian hardness. “I would use ‘brilliant’ to describe him myself because that’s what he is,” she hissed and then walked away.
Just two weeks after Bobby announced his candidacy, Johnson revealed to the nation that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection. Bobby was shocked. “Well, he didn’t deserve to be president anyway,” Ethel said to a near-catatonic Bobby, who’d gathered his advisers at the New York apartment. Bobby was quiet, his eyes glued to the television coverage. Ethel brought out the Scotch.
A few days later, on April 3, LBJ reluctantly received Bobby at the White House and assured him of his neutrality in the upcoming presidential contest. Both men knew he was lying. After Bobby left, Johnson met with Vice President Hubert Humphrey and pledged his behind-the-scenes backing. He also met that day with Eugene McCarthy, who’d won the Wisconsin primary on April 2. When Robert Kennedy’s name came up, a silent LBJ “drew the side of his hand across his throat.”
The next day, April 4, on his way to a campaign appearance in inner-city Indianapolis, Bobby was informed that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis. By the time his plane had landed, it was confirmed that King was dead.
King’s assassination sparked riots in dozens of urban areas throughout the nation, including Baltimore; Chicago; Washington, DC; Louisville; and Kansas City. Fearing the same thing in Indianapolis, the police chief advised strongly against Bobby making his appearance. Ethel begged him to skip it as well. Bobby sent her back to the hotel and made his way to the rally with a handful of campaign workers. His police escort peeled off and abandoned him as soon as he entered the ghetto. The message from the local authorities was clear: You’re on your own.
It was dark when Bobby arrived at the rally site—a vacant lot surrounded by tenements. He climbed onto the bed of a pickup truck, declined the speech his campaign had written for him, and removed from the pocket of his overcoat his own hastily scrawled remarks. It was then that he informed the crowd that Martin Luther King Jr. was dead.
Those assembled gasped in unison. Anguished shouts—moans, really—of “No! No!” rose from the audience. After a few seconds, the initial clamor died. Bobby continued:
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, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
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 . . .
Riots broke out in 110 cities nationwide that night. Thirty-nine people died in the violence, and more than 2,500 were injured. Indianapolis was one of the few major metropolitan areas that remained peaceful.
A few days later, Ethel flew with Bobby to Atlanta, where they attended King’s funeral service. There, she did her best to comfort King’s widow, Coretta. Though mere acquaintances, “we embraced each other,” Mrs. King reported. “It was a natural reaction from her to me, and I had that kind of warm feeling about her as a woman who reached out to me.”
Bobby won the Indiana primary on May 7. Early returns showed that minorities were turning out in large numbers for Kennedy. “Don’t you just wish that everyone was black?” Ethel asked, with her patented unfiltered honesty. Her frankness, spontaneity, and sense of the absurd were often buoying on an exhausting campaign. “Kennedy’s mood, often irascible, improved when Ethel was on the plane,” Bobby Kennedy biographer Evan Thomas noted.
On a campaign train in Colorado (following a decisive primary win on May 14 in Nebraska), Ethel arranged a surprise for Fred Dutton, Bobby’s right-hand man. As the train arrived in tiny Julesburg—Dutton’s birthplace—Ethel produced signs created by her and some of the women on the campaign. “Make Fred, Not War,” read one. “Fred Dutton’s Brother for Attorney General,” read another. Ethel had made “Dutton Buttons” and Bobby held up a sign reading “Sock It to ’Em, Freddy!” RFK led the puzzled crowd in a “We want Fred!” chant, and Ethel forced Dutton to deliver a speech imitating Bobby’s stock phrasing and sharp Boston accent.
In addition to her importance within the campaign, Ethel played her part in maintaining the family-centric Kennedy image. “I plan to remain active in my husband’s campaign [but] I want to spend at least three or four days a week at home with my kids,” she said. In early May, Washington columnist Maxine Cheshire reported that Ethel was pregnant with her eleventh child. In Davenport, Iowa, she played up her image as mother hen and homemaker. “I try to keep our family life happy and easygoing so [Bobby] doesn’t have to worry,” she said. “It’s important for him to know the children are well.”
But with both parents gone so much, not all was well at Hickory Hill. David in particular was beginning to cause trouble with increasing frequency. Neighbors complained that their homes were being vandalized, that firecrackers were being thrown at their houses and damaging their mailboxes. One particularly aggrieved neighbor, Jack Kopson, fired a shotgun near David’s feet late one April night in an attempt to scare the boy off of his property. In early May, shortly before the Indiana primary, David and a classmate were picked up by the police for throwing a rock through the windshield of a passing motorist. The driver was unhurt and agreed to drop the charges on the conditions that the Kennedys pay for the damage and that they deal seriously with their son’s behavior. They came through on the first condition.
It does not seem, however, that Bobby and Ethel confronted David in any serious way. “David was chided and ridiculed by the Senator and Mrs. Kennedy, but not for what he did,” recalled Bob Galland. They “felt he was stupid to get caught. I think the Senator took Dave aside and they had a chat . . . but that was it.” The situation concerned Bobby, at least, more than Galland perceived. He spoke to child psychiatrist Robert Coles about what might have motivated twelve-year-old David to throw rocks at a car’s windshield. Because he wanted to hit someone, Coles responded. It was not to be the end of David’s difficulties.