CHAPTER TEN Friendship, Loyalty, and Duty

Robert Kennedy delivers his “Ripple of Hope” speech to South African students at the University of Cape Town, among them Margaret H. Marshall. June 6, 1966.

ONE SPRING MORNING IN 2016 I found Dick mumbling and grumbling as he worked his way along the two-tiered row of cardboard boxes in his collection. “Look how many boxes we have left,” he exclaimed, pulling an unlit, well-chewed cigar from his lips and waving it over the boxes. “See, Jackie and Bobby here, more Lyndon, riots and protests, McCarthy, antiwar marches, assassinations. Look at them! Boxes of treasure and Pandora’s boxes.”

“I guess we’d better pick up our pace,” I offered.

“You’re a lot younger than me,” Dick said. “Shovel more coal into our old train and let’s go!”

This determination to steam ahead had only increased with the approach of his mid-eighties. Dick scoffed at his wheezing and coughing, insisting once again that it was only allergies and spring pollen. Nevertheless, shortness of breath made for long pauses when climbing stairs. Recently, he had taken another fall on the gravel path while inspecting the forsythia, telling me as he scrambled to his feet that it was not a fall, but a slip, like a boxer trying to convince the referee it wasn’t a knockdown.

“Who would you bet on?” he asked me one night at bedtime, nothing particularly morbid in his tone. “Who will be finished first: me or the boxes?”

During visits to our cardiologist, Dick was surprisingly low-key, letting me steer questions about his shortness of breath, unsteadiness, troubling test results concerning the state of his heart. Knowledge and research were my shield against anxiety and fear. I took notes on every medical visit and kept daily observations in a notebook, hoping I’d record some detail that might prove useful to the doctors.

For Dick, the opposite was true. His lack of specific curiosity about his health allowed him to sustain an upbeat and cavalier attitude. He didn’t want to know details as long as I heard them. Our cardiologist later told me that when Dick was alone with him, he cut detailed conversations short. “I trust Doris,” Dick had explained to the doctor. “She trusts you. So I trust you. It’s simple—a transfer of trust.”

He only wanted to get better. He recoiled from the words “congestive heart failure” but was reassured when the doctor told us that with proper medication, this diagnosis was far less menacing than it sounded. And with a powerful regime of digoxin and an array of other medicines, the pumping of his heart markedly improved.

He did not want to know what pills he was prescribed or why. When I sat before the kitchen table filling his weekly pill organizer he would peer over the newspaper to provoke and pester me with questions: “Do you know what you are doing?” he teased me. “Can you keep the pills straight?” Yet he took his medication like an obedient child. He followed our doctor’s orders on exercise and diet, only drawing the line at relinquishing cigars or giving up a nightly gin with dry vermouth and a pickled onion.

We complemented each other perfectly.

So with the promise of quickened purpose and renewed effort, we plunged back into the autumn of 1965, the months following Dick’s departure from the White House—in particular, his deepening friendships with Jackie and Bobby Kennedy.

Lyndon Johnson had been mistaken to suspect Dick of disloyalty while he was in the White House, of being “in bed with the Kennedys.” All the chatter about Dick leaving to go to “the other side” wasn’t accurate. Both his diary and his correspondence with Bill Moyers make clear that his exit had nothing to do with the Kennedys or his own future political ambitions. In Johnson’s mind, however, Dick had not only been with John Kennedy from the very beginning but had remained friendly with Jackie ever since. For Johnson, these were sufficient grounds to prevent him from ever completely trusting an original young New Frontiersman.

The development of a friendship with Bobby after Dick resigned confirmed for Johnson that Dick had been disloyal all along—as if future events might prove past presumptions. Dick had been found guilty well before the crime of his real friendship with Bobby had even begun.

In actuality, Dick’s relationship with Jackie had long preceded his friendship with Bobby. The picture Dick painted of Jackie for me through his description of their work together on various White House projects was very different from the one generally portrayed to the public. She worked ferociously hard, advocating for the things she cared about with a sweetness that had a powerful edge. The breathy voice and saccharine manner that is so often depicted barely coincided with the disarmingly honest, funny, sarcastic, bookish, chain-smoking buddy who sought peace within the safety of her apartment from the pandemonium her celebrity stirred outside.

Perhaps Dick’s favorite story in a series of personal recollections about Robert Kennedy took place on a fall evening in 1965 when he was visiting Jackie’s Fifth Avenue apartment.

The doorman recognized me and nodded as he passed me through the entrance fronting 1040 Fifth Avenue to the elevator whose operator smiled in greeting, and without asking my destination, took me straight to the fourteenth floor to the entrance of Jacqueline’s apartment. A few minutes after I had pressed the small ivory button, the door opened.

We sat in the sitting room of her apartment, side by side on an upholstered couch—preferred in friendly evenings to the adjacent library… the books now arranged by color—all the red bound volumes in shelves facing the couch.

Going to the kitchen, she returned with a bottle of champagne, her favorite evening drink, and a bucket of ice. She poured the champagne and then placed some ice cubes in the glass to keep the wine chilled.

An intermittent ritual developed during these relaxed evenings. She would offer me a cigar from a supply she kept in an antique table drawer, a Por Larranaga. One evening as she crushed out a cigarette and prepared to light another, she asked me. “Why do you like those things?”

“Try it,” I responded, handing her the lit cigar, which she took, held gingerly between forefinger and thumb, and began to puff. “Don’t inhale,” I cautioned.

“They have a real taste,” she remarked, handing it back to me.

“Well, that’s why we like them,” I responded.

She would take a few puffs from my cigar, and then relinquish it to continue her chain smoking. I would estimate that over a period of years, beginning with Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, she consumed the equivalent of an entire cigar. I never pointed out to her the obvious—that her Cuban cigars must have been illegally obtained.

On the night of my “ice capade fiasco,” I heard the apartment door open and close. In a moment he was at the entrance to the library wearing a brown leather flight jacket, half zipped.

“Oh, it’s only Bobby,” she remarked.

“I thought we were going skating,” said Bobby, a pause. “Let’s go.”

“I don’t know how to skate,” I confessed.

“Well,” Bobby replied, “let’s all go anyway.”

We rose.

They were both carrying their own skates, and as we approached the rink, Bobby said to me: “You can rent skates here.” In a minute or two they had put on their skates and glided together across the ice. I went to the cubicle where skates were rented, and sat, somewhat nervously, as the attendant sized my foot, and brought me the skates.

I had no idea even how to begin. But I put them on and walked haltingly to the rink, gratefully grasped the wooden railing which encircled the ice, and moved totteringly along the rail, using it for support. Every once in a while I would let go, and try to move, only managing to keep from failing by re-grabbing the rail. I was, to myself, a comic figure, stumbling, ankles beginning to hurt.

Mercifully, I heard him call across the ice: “We’re going now.” The three of us walked off in the direction of the Plaza hotel. Entering the relieving warmth of a bar on the Central Park side of the Plaza, I rubbed the cold from my hands as we ordered drinks.

Bobby began to discourse on his newly discovered knowledge in astronomy, as if new wonders had suddenly been revealed to him. He had since his brother’s death begun to read far more widely than before, when it had seemed that he was confined to politics, public affairs and his catechism. I listened politely as he told us of the vast numbers of stars and of galaxies—billions of each. He sounded like a kid who had made his first visit to a planetarium. “Do you know,” he asked, “that some stars are moving away from us faster than the speed of light.”

“Aha,” I thought with delight, “I have him.”

“No, they don’t,” I said.

“What do you mean?” he said, somewhat annoyed by this interruption of his monologue.

“They don’t move faster than the speed of light, nothing does.”

“Of course, they do,” he insisted.

“Impossible,” I rejoined, “at that speed the mass would become infinite. It would mean a violation of the theory of relativity.” I didn’t know much about the subject, but I knew more than he did.

“Let’s bet a case of champagne,” I said.

Jacqueline sat across from me, next to her brother-in-law, watching the men joust.

The next day I called JFK’s presidential science advisor Jerome Wiesner and set up a conference call with Bobby. I posed the question to Wiesner, who, obviously uncomfortable at being caught between the truth and Robert Kennedy, hesitatingly confirmed the accuracy of my position.

“I never got the promised spoils of that jousting,” Dick said, ending his story, “but I got something better than a mere case of champagne. Before the week was out I received an invitation from Bobby: “Would I like to accompany him, some family and friends on a trip to South America, all expenses paid, and ‘you won’t be expected to do any work, just come along?”

“Improbably, that trip was the beginning of a bond that changed the rest of the decade for me,” Dick said. “Actually,” he added after a thoughtful hesitation, “it would change the rest of my life.”

NOVEMBER 10–30, 1965

“Didn’t you suspect there might be more to that invitation than camaraderie?” I asked. “A stint as a traveling speechwriter, perhaps? He knew you had traveled extensively through Latin America with President Kennedy, writing speeches along the way.”

“I never wrote a word for Bobby on that trip,” Dick maintained. “Nor was I ever asked to.”

Dick was simply along for the adventure, together with a traveling party that included Bobby’s wife Ethel Kennedy, Senate staff members Adam Walinsky and Tom Johnston, several friends, as well as a small contingent of chosen reporters. When asked about his role, Dick insisted that he was neither working nor writing for Bobby. It was bad enough he had abandoned Lyndon Johnson to go to Wesleyan; if he had gone to work for Bobby only weeks after leaving the White House, it would have been a genuine betrayal.

Neither did Bobby want the trip to signal any distancing from or challenge to the president. Before the plane departed from Miami to Peru, Bobby told reporters: “I am not thinking of running for the presidency. I have a high feeling for President Johnson. He has been very kind to me. I would support his bid for reelection in 1968, and I strongly wish to campaign for him.”

Despite these precautions, the privately funded trip had all the energy of a campaign from the moment the plane landed in Lima. Everywhere Bobby went—from Peru to Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela—massive crowds greeted him with shouts of “Viva Kennedy, Viva Kennedy.” The aura of John Kennedy, who was perhaps even more popular in death than he had been in life, surrounded his brother. Dick remembered being “brought to a halt” upon hearing the thunderous response of the crowd, “as if some nerve had been severed. How many times in how many places had I heard that same rising shout?”

They would be accompanied on this three-week journey not only by the ghost of John Kennedy and the fervor that the Kennedy name evoked, but also by the surveilling ghost of Lyndon Johnson who was monitoring the entire trip. Unbeknownst to either Bobby or Dick, a mysterious source (most likely someone working for conservative Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann) was sending biased impressions of the trip to the Oval Office. This informant insinuated that Kennedy was engaged in a full-blown presidential campaign, “obviously well-tutored by Richard Goodwin, his new South American advisor,” a misleading title Lyndon Johnson would neither forgive nor forget.

That same informant told the president that during a press conference, Bobby “took time out to introduce Goodwin as the author of the Alliance for Progress. Goodwin stood in the back of the room with his arms folded and a wise smile on his face. He badly needed a haircut and, of course, so did Bobby.”

Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported that State Department conservatives were “apprehensive” about the trip, worried that “the romantically inclined Latin mind will view RFK as a sort of government-in-exile who will give them what Tom Mann won’t.” Adding to their fears, the columnists noted, is “the presence of Richard Goodwin,” whose more radical views about the need for economic reform and social justice were “anathema” to the State Department’s old guard, which was partial to private enterprise and the status quo.

Dick later learned that Johnson had parsed wire reports of Kennedy’s speeches, and singled out various sentences that “could only have been written by Goodwin”—including one in particular, where Bobby warned a group of young Peruvian students that “the responsibility of our time is nothing less than a revolution—a revolution that would be peaceful if we are wise enough, humane if we care enough, successful if we are fortunate enough. But a revolution will come whether we will it or not.”

“That surely sounds like you,” I said.

“It’s a great line,” Dick said. “I wish it were mine. It was his young speechwriter Adam Walinsky.”

From Day One of their South America trip, Dick told me, it became clear this was not to be the jaunt down memory lane he had expected. A different style emanated from Bobby than from his older, more aloof and regal brother—something hotter, more demonstrative and more accessible. He delivered intensity when nothing was to be gained beyond the moment. When Bobby played soccer with the kids in the barriadas, the slums of Lima, it was not for a photo op. It was his impetuous warmth, his affability toward the kids, that caught Dick’s attention. As they departed from the hovels and open sewage of the Lima slums, Bobby turned to Dick and asked, “What happened to all our AID money? Where is it going? Wouldn’t you be a communist if you had to live there?” concluding the outburst with a straightforward, “I think I would.”

As the trip went on, the memory of John Kennedy’s ironic, self-contained demeanor began to recede and the demonstrative figure of his younger brother began to take shape before Dick’s eyes. The self-righteousness and combativeness Dick had witnessed in Bobby in the past seemed diminished, replaced by a deepening empathy and compassion, an emerging fatalism.

Dick recalled one evening at the University of Concepción in Chile when Kennedy’s intrepid nature and openness particularly revealed itself. Alerted that an organized group of Marxist students planned to disrupt his speech that evening, Bobby spent several hours in the afternoon patiently listening to their arguments about capitalism and communism. He sought to appease discord and open a dialogue with them. By the end of the session the communist student leader conceded, “We do not condemn you personally, but we oppose you as a representative of a government whose hands are stained with blood.” And as such, they remained determined to prevent him from speaking.

Among an audience of three thousand, more than a hundred of their group awaited Kennedy’s entrance to the gym. “They were in the balcony directly over the podium,” Dick recalled, “and eggs, tomatoes, and even stones began to rain down on us.”

Bobby was somehow untouched by the pelting debris. “If these kids are going to be young revolutionaries,” he softly remarked to one of his traveling partners, “they’re going to have to improve their aim.”

Bobby’s speech was drowned out by the student protesters. Nevertheless, he plowed ahead at the top of his lungs. After he finished speaking, he approached the section of the overhanging balcony where the communists were clustered, mounted a chair, and shook the hand of the student leader he had met earlier that afternoon. Another student standing beside the leader spat in Kennedy’s face and was immediately dragged away by his comrades. A wild burst of applause sounded as the resolute Kennedy exited the gym.

With each passing day of Kennedy’s South America travels, the crowds came out in greater numbers and excitement. When the small Kennedy troupe reached the seaport city of Natal in eastern Brazil, more than 100,000 people filled the streets to meet him. Standing atop the roof of a truck, Bobby shouted with newfound confidence and stridency, “Every child an education! Every family adequate housing! Every man a job!”

“Sounds like Lyndon’s talking points.” I remarked, “Education… housing… jobs—the nucleus of his Great Society.”

“Fair enough,” Dick said. “It always baffled me that the Alliance for Progress never grabbed Lyndon. Maybe because the Alliance was Kennedy’s, not his. South of the border, Lyndon let the reactionary State Department make decisions.”

On November 22, two days after celebrating his fortieth birthday, Bobby attended mass in Salvador on the second anniversary of his brother’s assassination. He had wanted to be absent from the formal ceremonies back in the United States. The schedule he had kept in South America had run everyone ragged but the incessant activity still wasn’t enough to drown his grief. Dick witnessed several occasions where Kennedy’s defensive reaction seemed almost engraved in his nervous system; once when a string of firecrackers exploded below their vehicle, and another time when a car backfired close by, he flinched, instinctively covering his face. “Sooner or later,” he said quietly, “sooner or later.”

At Dick’s suggestion and subsequent arrangement, the group decided upon a recreational detour from their grueling schedule. Through a Brazilian friend of Dick’s from his Alliance days, a charter was arranged to carry the party to Manaus, the port city in the midst of the Amazon Rainforest. There they all boarded a paddle-wheeled steamer to carry them further up the river.

The most memorable day of the entire journey lay ahead. Dick convinced Bobby and a few others to board an ancient single-engine seaplane to take them deeper into the jungle. “I must be crazy to get on this thing,” said Bobby as he kissed Ethel goodbye.

The flight was unsettling, even alarming. Reminded of the frightful turbulence he had once experienced on the twin-engine “Caroline,” Dick told me he turned to Bobby and said, “Whenever I traveled with your brother I never worried. One look at him and I felt protected.”

“And now?” grinned Bobby as our seaplane bucked over the green sea of trees. “Feel protected?”

“I think we’ll be fine,” I told him hopefully, “I’m with you.”

“Well, don’t bet on it,” he laughed. “But regarding your protection theory with Jack and me I think you’re wrong twice.”

Finally, the seaplane skidded down without incident on the Nhamundá River, a tributary to the Amazon located near a small native village of several hundred thatched-roofed huts. With the translation of a missionary couple, Bobby asked if he and Dick might join two native fishermen he had spotted in a dugout canoe downriver.

“On that day we had a great Amazon adventure,” Dick fondly remembered. “I saw a whole new facet of Bobby. As we paddled over the water, Bobby shouted, ‘You know, I bet there are piranha in there. Want to go swimming?’ ”

Without delay, Dick cannonballed into the water. Kennedy immediately followed. Then, treading to keep afloat, Bobby—in an unmistakable imitation of celebrated TV anchorman Walter Cronkite—comically proclaimed: “It was impossible to pinpoint the exact time and place when he decided to run for president. But the idea seemed to take hold as he was swimming in the Amazonian river of Nhamundá, keeping a sharp eye for man-eating piranhas.

“Piranhas,” he added, “have never been known to bite a U.S. senator.”

“Well, I’m not a senator,” Dick had replied, “and I’m getting out of here.”

“This is going to be one of those things,” Bobby said, laughing as they reached the side of the canoe, “that’s going to be a hell of a lot more fun to talk about afterwards.”

And so it was. Finding a homemade scrapbook of their Amazon adventure put together by a member of the traveling party proved a delightful entertainment for Dick and me. It contained snapshots of Kennedy meeting with the villagers and playing with children, of Dick in a basket-brigade unloading supplies from a canoe, and of Dick and Bobby spearfishing on a stretch of rapids. The entire jungle foray was presented as a spoof, a parody of a preposterous campaign for votes since nothing could have been further from a political canvass. The villagers here had never heard of Bobby or, for that matter, of his slain brother. It was fun, pure and simple.

Shortly after returning to the United States and his fellowship at Wesleyan, Dick wrote of Robert Kennedy to his old college chum, George Cuomo.

He’s a remarkable guy with a reasonable chance of being president someday; and a large chance, if he does make it, of becoming an outstanding president.

About those observations, Dick never changed his mind. The trip to the Amazon and the adventures they shared had strengthened his friendship with Robert Kennedy, a friendship that would last, Dick said, “for as much time as we had left.”

JANUARY 12, 1966

In the aftermath of his well-publicized South American jaunt with Robert Kennedy, Dick feared he would not be warmly welcomed back to the White House by Lyndon Johnson. Regardless, he would keep the promise made upon leaving—to return and draft the State of the Union speech, scheduled for January 12, 1966.

Unknown to Dick at the time, Jack Valenti and Joe Califano (working under Moyers’s supervision) had originally sought permission from the president for Dick to commence drafting the speech in early December. LBJ’s response: an emphatic “NO.”

On December 7, Dick’s thirty-fourth birthday, Valenti informed Califano, by now the president’s top domestic adviser, of Johnson’s obstinate rancor: “[The president] specifically objected to the man you and I had discussed doing any work on it. I intend to press the suggestion real soon—but he flatly refused to let him work on the draft now.”

“Well, a Happy Birthday from Lyndon to me,” Dick caustically remarked to me after reading of the president’s directive so many years later.

But before that December was over, if Lyndon didn’t have a change of heart, he had a change of mind. None of the preliminary drafts that had been sent to him met his approval. At last, quietly, he let Valenti and Califano know he would allow them to summon Dick to Washington.

When Dick arrived at the White House on January 4, he was given an empty office in the West Wing. There was no affectionate greeting from the president; indeed, there was no reception of any kind, not even a phone call. Nor did the president reach out to contact Dick in the days that followed. Barely sleeping for days, only briefly retiring from his office to the Hay-Adams hotel for naps, Dick worked on draft after revised draft with Valenti, Califano, and Moyers acting as middlemen. The president steadfastly refused to see Dick, who felt he had been grudgingly invited to a party he was not allowed to attend.

“No way to draft a major speech,” Dick told me.

Prior to this experience, whenever Dick prepared any of Johnson’s major speeches, they had spent many hours together thrashing out what the president wanted to say. Over lunches, dinners, and late-night drinks, Dick had become privy to Johnson’s thoughts and sentiments. Even under the enormous pressure of drafting the “We Shall Overcome” speech in only nine or ten hours, Dick had been able to draw on his knowledge of the president’s deep emotional engagement with civil rights and his familiarity with the stories Johnson wanted to tell. Over time, the Texan and the New Frontiersman had developed a rare collaboration of feelings, thoughts, and language.

The atmosphere of trust that had made such collaboration possible was now gone, destroyed by Johnson’s notion that Dick had defected to the rival camp in order to write speeches for his political nemesis Bobby Kennedy.

The problems that beset this State of the Union, however, went far deeper than Johnson’s mistrust of his former chief speechwriter. There was already discord and bickering within the White House about the purpose of the speech—how to create a synthesis between the sustained but costly momentum of the Great Society, and its antithesis: the brutal, expanding war in Vietnam. Proponents of each side squabbled for more space and emphasis. At stake was the future direction of the country.

During the summer of 1965, Johnson had sought to resolve the problem of this fork in the road by attempting to take both paths at once. Now, in the State of the Union, he aimed to convince the entire nation to do much the same. This wishful synthesis would come to be known as the “Guns and Butter” speech.

The writing of a State of the Union is “always as full of tension as an opening night,” Lady Bird wrote in her diary. Recalling “the exhilaration” of the 1965 address, she contrasted that shining moment to the dreary tensions of the present. Then, “we were on the crest of the great victory of the November election, bolstered, assured the people were behind us, a sort of peak in our lives and here, in 1966, we are in a trough of a wave: erosion and frustrations have set in.”

Dick’s draft attempted to address that standoff of the Great Society and the Vietnam War with a confident and tone-setting opening: “This Nation is mighty enough, its society is healthy enough, its people are strong enough, to pursue our goals in the rest of the world while still building a Great Society at home.” This hopeful frame would be followed by an appeal to members of Congress to ask themselves whether they, “the representatives of the richest Nation on earth, elected servants of a people who live in abundance unmatched on this globe,” were “going to sacrifice the children who need the learning or the sick who need medical care or the families who dwell in squalor.”

Repeatedly, Dick drafted the sections of the speech that focused upon the revitalization of domestic concerns. Time and again these would be returned with notes suggesting shortening and revision. He had worked nearly thirty-six hours straight and still had not finished when, an hour past midnight on the day the president was scheduled to deliver the speech before the joint session, he realized that he had hit the wall. He was empty.

In desperation, he phoned the White House doctor. “I only need a few more hours,” he entreated. Soon, the White House physician appeared, drew a hypodermic partially filled with fuchsia liquid from his bag, and injected it into Dick’s shoulder. Whatever it was, Dick told me, it enabled him to finish the speech, which concluded, of necessity, with “the troubling awareness of American men at war tonight.” Though Vietnam was different from other wars, “finally, war is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore, to know war is to know there is still madness in this world.

“Many of you share the burden of this knowledge tonight with me. But there is a difference. For finally I must be the one to order our guns to fire, against all the most inward pulls of my desire. For we have children to teach, and we have sick to be cured, and we have men to be freed. There are poor to be lifted up, and there are cities to be built, and there is a world to be helped.”

“At about 4 a.m., on the morning of the day the speech was to be given,” Califano recalled, “as the President slept, we slipped under his bedroom door what we thought was the final version. I went to sleep on the couch in my office and Goodwin went to his hotel, utterly drained.”

When Johnson awakened, he immediately read the draft and summoned Valenti, Califano, and Moyers—pointedly omitting Dick—to his bedroom. He told the three of them “it was getting there,” but was much too long and “he wanted it cut by a third.” He told Valenti and Califano to make the revisions, later calling in two old friends—Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas and chairman of the Defense Intelligence Advisory Board Clark Clifford—to help speed the editing process.

The remainder of the morning and into the afternoon, knives and cleavers were taken to the draft to carve off the required third of its length. For the first time since Dick had written Johnson’s “Great Society” speech, he had lost control of the final editing and overall shaping of his work. The majority of the cuts pared down the domestic side of the equation. Aspects of Dick’s draft remained, but the design of the speech was shattered, replaced by the hodgepodge of committee production.

The White House Diary records that there were brief calls from the president to Dick in the West Wing that morning and afternoon. When I asked him if he had any memory of the calls he shrugged. “Nothing stands out except his vague desire to clarify something or other.”

Later that afternoon, Dick staggered back to his room at the Hay-Adams at about five o’clock that afternoon. Suit jacket and pants still on, he flopped on his bed and slept at last. When the ring of the phone on the nightstand wrenched him awake, it seemed like a bizarre dream. It was the White House calling. Lyndon Johnson’s secretary informed him that the president—whom Dick had not laid eyes on during the whole bitter week-long sojourn—would like Dick to ride up to the Hill with him on his way to deliver the State of the Union.

Befuddled by the request, Dick mumbled that he would call back. He remembered the excitement and promise of previous rides to the Capitol; but then all the disappointment and anger at Johnson’s refusal to work face-to-face with him, all the endless revisions of his drafts, flooded over him. “It was just too much,” he later told Califano, “I couldn’t go through with it. I was exhausted and disgusted with the way I was treated.” He called the hotel desk, told the operator to hold all calls, threw his jacket and pants on a chair, and crawled back into bed.

Later that night after the ceremonials and speech were long over, Lady Bird Johnson wrote in her diary, with characteristic forthrightness: “The audience was cold and lethargic.” In the Speaker’s office following the speech, she likewise observed that while everyone shook hands, “the pervasively friendly atmosphere seemed missing from that normal, social interchange.”

Reviews of the speech noted a disquietude, a doubleness, a sense that something was out of joint. While liberal papers applauded the promise to sustain and even expand the Great Society, they were disconcerted by Johnson’s emphatic pledge “to give our fighting men what they must have; every gun, every dollar and every decision—whatever the cost or whatever the challenge.”

In the end, it had been worked over by too many hands, Califano acknowledged, leaving a “dull message, primarily concerned with foreign policy.”

The real problem with the speech, Dick later came to believe, was the flawed supposition at its “Guns and Butter” heart. Dick told me he couldn’t bring himself to read the final speech then and he refused to have me read it to him now. The whole thing had all been too infuriating and humiliating. He had been ignored, disrespected, and punished for a betrayal that had never happened.

When he returned to Connecticut the next day, a letter had arrived which Dick had preserved in his archive.

Dear Dick,

You left Washington so swiftly I had no opportunity to talk with you. I am told that exhaustion conquered you, finally, last evening, and you were unable to be with me.

I am not unaware of the long hours and sleepless nights that were your companions this week. But your gifts of skill and eloquence were gratefully received by me.

Sincerely,

Lyndon

“Cosmetic bullshit!” said Dick. “Once again, I sense the hand of my friend Moyers, upset by how things had turned out.”

As I mulled over this entire episode, I felt a lingering sadness, remembering what Dick and LBJ had accomplished together. They had never been friends, perhaps, but they had been awesome allies. This wounding sequence would mark the last time they would work together. Dick would never see Lyndon Johnson again.

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I’m afraid I can no longer awe the letter carriers of my friends with White House stationery and envelopes, Dick wrote George Cuomo in early February 1966 under the letterhead of Wesleyan’s Center for Advanced Study.

I’m slowly disentangling myself from seven years of politics. It’s taken quite a time to get used to this life. I don’t miss the decisions or being at the center of power at all. What is hard is the absence of all external discipline—no office to go to, no hours, no deadlines, no pressure—it all has to come from inside. This is an old story to you, but not to me.

I’ve been sleeping a lot, reading a lot, building up a record collection, running to parties in New York, and not getting much work done. But that is now changing, my metabolism seems to be quieting down, and I am full of hopes for the future.

I am writing—I am still playing around with ideas.

“How does one get one’s sea legs,” I asked Dick, “after being on the ship of state for so long?” He had, after all, been a Washington denizen since leaving law school. Suddenly, he had to organize his own time. He would no longer spend his days honing a justice’s opinions, decisions, or dissents; elucidating documents for a congressional committee; or designing policy and drafting speeches for the very different cadences and characters of JFK and LBJ. He would have to find his own voice.

The experience of the State of the Union, Dick declared to George, had “cured” him forever from speechwriting and politics. But as Justice Frankfurter’s observation about Dick having “politics in his blood” suggests, it was a malaise not easily remedied.

Dick’s escape from politics and Washington proved short-lived. After writing until 3 a.m. one mid-February morning, Dick was awakened before seven o’clock by the persistent ringing of his home phone. He ignored it, but moments later the phone sounded again. The third time he picked up. It was Bobby Kennedy: “Have you been following the Fulbright hearings?” he asked.

“That’s how it all began, again,” acknowledged Dick.

“So much for your forever cure from politics,” I laughed. “A speedy relapse!”

“You know,” said Dick earnestly, “there are times when private lives are drawn into public debate. This was the very beginning of such a time.”

Dick had of course been following the televised hearings launched in early February by Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee William Fulbright on the conduct and wisdom of the Vietnam War. Coming on the heels of the administration’s resumption of bombing after a six-week halt, the hearings had a huge national audience. Up to this point, Bobby Kennedy had been leery of publicly expressing his private misgivings about Vietnam. His motives would immediately be attacked, and any statement construed as opportunism fueled by ambition and personal animosity toward President Johnson. But now, Kennedy felt compelled to enter the debate.

“Do you think there’s anything constructive I can add?” Bobby asked Dick.

Later than morning, Dick called Bobby back with a suggestion.

“Everyone, even the administration, claims that the only solution is a negotiated settlement,” Dick said, “but nobody’s been willing to spell out what it would look like, what terms would be acceptable.”

That same day, Dick phoned Bobby again and read him a rough draft of a potential statement. Kennedy suggested additions and alterations and asked Dick to send it down to Washington posthaste.

FEBRUARY 19, 1966

“Ho Chi Kennedy,” headlined the Chicago Tribune:

“He is not the junior senator from New York, he is the senior senator from Communist North Vietnam—Ho Chi Minh’s Trojan horse in the United States Senate…. Out of his ignorance and political ambition, he [Kennedy] has compromised his loyalty to the United States.”

“Of all the gratuitous advice Pres. Johnson is getting on what to do in Vietnam,” charged the Buffalo Evening News, “it would be hard to conceive any more ill-conceived counsel.”

I could hardly believe my eyes when I scanned the savage headlines and editorials that greeted Dick’s first significant collaboration with Robert Kennedy. Strangely, Dick had preserved a packet of them, like a poisonous batch of book reviews.

Kennedy had delivered his statement at a press conference with all the fanfare and “trappings of a presidential news session,” according to The Los Angeles Times, complete with “more than 30 reporters, glaring lights, TV cameras, a dozen microphones.”

Dick had warned Kennedy when he sent the draft that it approached “the edge of political danger,” recognizing that any variance from the Johnson administration would be construed as self-serving. Consequently, the statement began with a preemptive declaration: “We are all Americans. To attack the motives of those who express concern about our present course—to challenge their very right to speak freely—is to strike at the foundations of the democratic process which our fellow citizens even today, are dying to protect.”

Reiterating Johnson’s own statements about the desire for a negotiated settlement, Kennedy then veered from the administration’s boilerplate by proposing that the Viet Cong be admitted “to a share of power and responsibility” at the conference table. “Each side must concede matters that are important in order to preserve positions that are essential.” Acknowledging that such deliberations may yield “a compromise government fully acceptable to neither side,” he maintained that “if negotiation is our aim,” an unwillingness to compromise will only lead to the “hazards of widening conflict and devastation.”

Kennedy left that press conference for a ski trip with his family. But an avalanche of organized scorn and ridicule trailed him. As Dick later wrote, “the roof fell in.” Although Johnson kept his silence, he delegated his team to close ranks and, knives out, attack Bobby. Vice President Humphrey led the charge, claiming the proposal for a coalition government “would be like putting a fox in the chicken coop, or an arsonist in the fire department.” McGeorge Bundy assailed Bobby’s naïveté, condescendingly reminding him that his brother had once warned that “forming a coalition with the Communists was like trying to ride a tiger.”

Kennedy hustled back to Washington to control the damage and “clarify” his position. While not abandoning his original proposal, he sought to introduce qualifications that only confused the matter. This appearance of waffling and vacillation made matters worse.

“It sure got me down,” Dick said, recalling that “my first bid to write something for Bobby seemed to have damaged—if not destroyed—his career. I was caught in a snarl of friendship, loyalty, and duty, trying to do what I felt was right.”

I was curious about Bobby’s response to this whole matter—in particular, his reaction to Dick. I remembered Dick’s “freedom fighter” statement that some deemed such a reckless and incendiary mistake that it threatened to capsize JFK’s 1960 campaign in its final days. John Kennedy’s coolly ironic reproach telling Dick and Sorensen—“If I win this thing, I won it. But if I lose it, you guys lost it”—had only enhanced Dick’s adulation.

From the start, Dick’s relationship with Bobby differed from such hero worship. They were closer in age (only six years apart as opposed to the fourteen-year gap with JFK). They were becoming fast friends. Dick told me Bobby assured him not to worry. “I went over every word of that with you,” Bobby said, “made changes, additions. I delivered it. The real mistake was not the statement, but how I handled it afterward.”

That Dick continued to be deeply troubled by the episode is clear from the long letter he wrote to Bobby after the dust had begun to settle.

It’s hard for me to talk about whether it was “all worthwhile,” since I have to share responsibility for getting you into it, and I don’t want to sound self-justifying.

However, I have tried, as best I can, to purge myself of that, and look at the whole thing clearly and with some detachment.

Vietnam is the central issue of today. It not only involves a present war in which many will be killed, but the serious possibility, even probability, of far greater war. It seems to be right that someone of your insight and standing should stand up and talk about it.

It is a mistake to think that the American people delight in the idea of fighting wars in Asia or anywhere else. They don’t want it. That’s why they elected Ike, and underneath the reluctance is even stronger today because people are doing well, and they don’t want to give it up. And remember that half the country is under 25. As the war grows those that cry for more of it are going to be in great difficulty.

There are many who will tell you, and write, that you have hurt yourself… I am miserable at the thought I might have contributed to damaging you. But you spoke truly, in the interests of the nation. And there is nothing else to be done—except to deceive or stand silent at a moment of great crisis. I believe history and politics will reward that courage.

Justice Frankfurter told me, when I had been attacked in an editorial, there were two kinds of pain in public life. One was the deep continuing pain of serious emotional blows. The other, the pain of immediate controversy, was like a toothache. It was terrible, but once fixed, you forgot it ever existed. You have already known the first kind. This is the second.

JUNE 6, 1966

If the “roof had fallen in” after Dick’s first collaboration with Bobby, his next effort proved so durable that its words have inspired generations around the world and would one day be inscribed on Robert Kennedy’s untimely grave.

The iconic speech had a difficult birth. Kennedy had been invited by Ian Robertson, a young student and president of the nonracial National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) to be the keynote speaker on its Day of Affirmation, an annual occasion students had organized to proclaim their opposition to apartheid—the country’s system of racial segregation that kept the majority-Black population under the brutal rule of the white minority.

For five months, the South African government procrastinated in issuing Kennedy a visa. An earlier invitation by NUSAS to Martin Luther King Jr. had been rejected by the government out of hand. Finally, the apartheid government determined that as much as it disliked the idea of letting a civil rights champion into the country, Kennedy was the brother of a president and might someday be president himself. Reluctantly, a limited visa was granted for four people only for a four-day visit in June. No U.S. journalists were allowed to accompany Kennedy.

The first draft of Kennedy’s speech was penned by Adam Walinsky, the talented speechwriter who had worked for Kennedy in the Justice Department and written all his speeches and statements during the South America trip. Dick had befriended Walinsky during that adventure, admired his work, and eventually became something of a mentor to him.

The writing of the speech was “very, very tough,” Adam recalled in an oral history. Kennedy’s advance man, Thomas Johnston, had warned that the senator would be “going into a terribly explosive and delicate situation where the government was completely against him…. The whole trip had the makings of one of the major disasters in his life.” As Walinsky worked up the first draft, he felt compelled to address the racial situation cautiously, without “totally antagonizing” the staunchly anticommunist regime that had the full support of an overwhelming majority of the voters, not surprising since no Blacks were allowed to vote.

Two days before their departure, political activist Allard Lowenstein, recently returned from South Africa, paid a visit to Kennedy’s office to talk about what he had seen and learned. Walinsky showed him the draft he had prepared. Lowenstein reared up. “Terrible,” he pronounced, “all wrong!” If Kennedy were to deliver such a tepid speech, Lowenstein implied, there was no point in going. Immediately, Kennedy and Walinsky decided to recast the speech. Walinsky remembered that he was relieved that his “delicately phrased non-revolutionary” draft had now “happily passed into oblivion.”

At this juncture, only a day before Kennedy’s small party was set to embark for Africa, Bobby called Dick, seeking his help on the speech. Somehow, Walinsky recalled, Dick managed to produce a dazzling improvement overnight. “It was brilliant, the best stuff he [Dick] ever did.” Walinsky stitched together the final draft; but in his oral history for the JFK Library, he graciously acknowledged that all the “really brilliant rhetoric”—the language suggesting the impact young people can make when they stand up for justice—“came from Dick.”

When I asked Dick to explain how he had done it with such speed and polish he only said, “It’s funny. I worked one night and there it was. It’s like a song. You can work on something for weeks and months. Nothing happens. Then one morning you take a shower and it all comes together before you can dry off.”

En route to South Africa, Kennedy stopped in London where he saw his good friend, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter Anthony Lewis, who had covered the Justice Department when Kennedy was attorney general and then headed the Times’s London bureau. Because his bureau reported on South Africa, Lewis was able to brief Kennedy about the complexities of the situation he was about to encounter.

I had known Tony Lewis even before I met Dick. We had traveled together as part of a delegation to Russia in 1973 when I was teaching at Harvard. Later, when Tony married South African native Margaret Marshall, Dick and I saw them together a number of times at dinner parties and events. All those years, neither Dick nor I ever made the connection between Robert Kennedy and Margaret Marshall, who, I only discovered a short time ago, had played a central role in Kennedy’s visit.

It would have heartened Dick to learn—as I did through a long conversation I recently had with Margaret, now the retired chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (the first naturalized American citizen to serve on that historic court), that Dick’s words had left a permanent impact on both Margaret and her late husband, Tony Lewis.

Back in 1966, Margaret was the twenty-year-old vice president of the National Union of South African Students. Just prior to Kennedy’s arrival, the government retaliated against the student organization by “banning” its president, Ian Robertson, confining him to his house for a period of five years and prohibiting him from engaging in politics—even from talking to more than one person at a time. As Robertson’s surrogate, Marshall greeted Kennedy at the airport and accompanied him throughout his visit.

“Robertson’s banning terrified me,” Marshall admitted. It also seemed to unnerve Kennedy. “He kept asking, ‘Is this going to hurt anyone? I can do this, but is anyone going to pay the price for me?’ ” He worried that even his presence might put Marshall and other NUSAS leaders at risk. Although she sought to put Kennedy at ease, she had good reason to fear a knock on the door in the middle of the night. She was well aware that if the government banned or arrested her, no court of law would protect her from losing her freedom, her place in college, her passport.

More than fifteen hundred people of all races had gathered at the airport for Kennedy’s arrival. Cries of “Yankee go home” and “Chuck him out” shrieked from a few hecklers until cheers and enthusiastic screams drowned out any abuse. Over a thousand students packed the auditorium at the University of Cape Town. Hundreds more milled around outside enduring the cold winter night to listen to the speech through loudspeakers. Even after South African security forces cut the wires to silence the transmission, the students remained huddled together outside the auditorium for the next three hours, waiting for their fellow students and Robert Kennedy to emerge.

Inside, anticipation and anxiety filled the room as Kennedy stepped to the podium. Dozens of uniformed and nonuniformed South African security police were present to intimidate the students, take photographs and record what they said to use against them later. Despite the threatening atmosphere, Kennedy began his speech with a passage that seemed to refer directly to South Africa’s troubled history.

I come here this evening because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day;… a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which was once the importer of slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage.

Marshall was seated on the stage behind the podium. An empty chair symbolized the absence of Ian Robertson. “There was great tension in the room at that point,” she told me. “People were on edge.” And then Kennedy said:

I refer, of course, to the United States of America.

“As soon as the audience realized what he said,” Marshall recalled, “there was laughter and a sense of total relief. It was simply fabulous.”

Kennedy’s voice gained in strength as he reached the core of the speech, his challenge to the young people to battle the “danger of futility, the belief there is nothing one man or woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills.”

To refute this sense of despair, Dick cited his old philosopher muse, Archimedes, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world”:

Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation. Thousands of Peace Corps volunteers are making a difference in the isolated villages and the city slums of dozens of countries. Thousands of unknown men and women in Europe resisted the occupation of the Nazis and many died, but all added to the ultimate strength and freedom of their countries. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage such as these that human history is thus shaped.

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance….

So we part, I to my country and you to remain. We are—if a man of forty can claim the privilege—fellow members of the world’s largest younger generation. Each of us have our own work to do. I know at times you must feel very alone with your problems and your difficulties. But I want to say how impressed I am with what you stand for and for the effort you are making; and I say this not just for myself, but for men and women all over the world.

There was an unnerving moment of silence after the speech was done. Marshall remembered how Kennedy glanced back to those sitting on the platform, “as if to say, was the speech okay?” But then a rushing sound of overwhelming applause rose from the audience, followed by a lengthy standing ovation. The words had hit a communal nerve.

During the previous months, Marshall and her fellow students had wondered if all their marches and demonstrations against the apartheid government were in vain. The oppressive power of the government had reached a frightening stage. Civil rights had been decimated, there was no protection against arrest, torture, and jail. Once imprisoned, there was no access to lawyers. Leading opponents of apartheid, including Nelson Mandela, had been convicted of treason and sentenced to prison for life. Opposition parties were outlawed. Books were banned. Television was forbidden. “It was as if a heavy boot had come down and smashed everything,” Marshall told me.

Robert Kennedy’s words, Marshall said, had suddenly “reminded us—me—that we were not alone. That we were part of a great noble tradition, the reaffirmation of nobility in every human person…. He put us back into the great sweep of history. Even if it’s just a tiny thing, it will add up. He reset the moral compass, not so much by attacking apartheid, but simply by talking about justice and freedom and dignity—words that none of us had heard, it seemed, in an eternity.”

The South African novelist Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country, which had been banned in his native land, remarked that Kennedy’s visit was no ordinary moment, it was momentous: “Kennedy was like a fresh wind from the outer world,” reassuring us that “independence of thought is not a curse, that to work for change is not a species of treachery…. It was to feel part of the world again.”

As Kennedy traveled around the country in the days that followed, something extraordinary happened. While initially students had comprised the large majority of his crowds, now thousands of others flooded the streets—cheering him, shouting encouragement, reaching out to touch him.

A speech in the right place and at the right time, in this instance beginning with the reflecting mirrors of American and South African histories, had resulted in an explosive demonstration that words, like individuals, can make a difference. Words are flammable.

For Margaret Marshall, the fire that started that winter night in South Africa has continued to burn throughout her life. When she came to America to get a master’s degree in education and a law degree at Yale, she became involved in the antiwar movement, the women’s movement, and the fight to impose sanctions against South Africa until apartheid was lifted.

Once she became a United States citizen, the apartheid government denied Marshall a visa to return home to South Africa. In America, her adopted country, she would become Harvard’s general counsel and vice president before being selected as the first woman to be named chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

In 1984, when she married Anthony Lewis, she told me that they had incorporated the entire “ripples of hope” passage into their wedding ceremony. In 1996, Marshall was able to hear Kennedy’s voice actually delivering the Cape Town speech—for the first time since she was twenty: “I did not even know there had been a recording,” she said to me. “Someone, an admirer of Kennedy’s, had sent it to me. I listened to it on my way to work. It had such an impact on me that I had to pull over to the side of Memorial Drive. There were tears coming down my face.”

As chief justice in 2003, Judge Margaret Marshall authored the ruling (Goodridge v. Department of Public Health) that made Massachusetts the first state in the country to legalize gay marriage. When asked how growing up in South Africa had affected her groundbreaking decision, she told me, “At the time I was not at all conscious of any connection between my decision and my South African roots. Later, when asked about it, I thought: If you grow up like I did under a government, which I had fought against, saying with no evidence that Black South Africans cannot be educated or become engineers or doctors or—fill-in-the-blank—while in Goodridge the state is arguing without evidence that gay couples cannot be good parents, will harm children or whatever, in retrospect I did not think that would survive scrutiny, especially where my court had previously authorized gay couples to adopt children.”

As I read over and over this South Africa speech and a half dozen others Dick had helped to craft that had also become historical markers, it became freshly evident that for Dick, words were actions. He often downplayed the importance of the words he had written. After all, he would repeatedly say, the impact of any speech depends on the right place and the time in which it is delivered. If this were the case, he seems to have been in that right place and time with uncommon frequency. And he delivered something different and deeper than mere skillful rhetoric. Kennedy’s words on South Africa’s Day of Affirmation speech were drafted by a young man who himself stood up for ideals and struck out against injustice, sending forth ripples of hope that would change lives in future times and places.

SEPTEMBER 17, 1966

“I felt like I was walking the plank from Lyndon’s ship of state,” Dick said to me as he remembered preparing his first public statement against the war to be delivered before the board of the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) in September. He knew that once he spoke out against Vietnam there was no return.

All summer long, as every conversation centered on Vietnam, Dick had wrestled with exactly what to say about a war that seemed increasingly out of control. The number of American troops had increased from 23,000 at the end of 1963 to 350,000 by July of 1966.

Dick now deemed an earlier piece on Vietnam he had written for The New Yorker far too timid. Then, he had not doubted “Lyndon Johnson’s desire to end the war” with some kind of political settlement. Now, both he and Arthur Schlesinger had become convinced that Johnson had “turned a corner toward the systematic enlargement of the war.” The two good friends feared that the president had embraced Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s domino theory, namely that “if we don’t hold the line in Vietnam, we are condemned to ‘wars of national liberation’ all through the underdeveloped world.”

Things had now reached such a dire impasse that summer leisure seemed untenable. “It would be terrible,” Dick said to Schlesinger with hyperbolical flair, “if when the nuclear bombs begin dropping on Peking or Washington, we had to reflect that all we did in the summer of 1966 was to rest comfortably on one or another beach.”

At dinner with Bobby Kennedy in late July, Dick and Arthur aired their decision to speak out against the escalation—Dick at the ADA, Arthur in a long piece for The New York Times Magazine.

“What’s your plan of action?” Bobby inquired of Dick.

“The only thing likely to reach Johnson,” Dick replied, “is vigorous political opposition.” He described their plan to bring together a national coalition of prominent citizens opposed to the continued escalation. He proposed using LBJ’s 1964 campaign slogan, “No Wider War,” as a common ground of agreement. They hoped to line up former generals, university presidents, scientists, and former cabinet officials known to have questioned the conduct of the war. They were intending to reach former Generals James Gavin and Matthew Ridgway, along with former treasury secretary Douglas Dillon, though Dick told Bobby he feared Dillon, given his hope of becoming secretary of state, might be hesitant to speak publicly.

“That’s wrong,” Bobby pushed back at once. “Dillon will do what he thinks is right. He’s my friend.” Dick immediately understood, as he confided in his diary, that with Bobby, “the integrity of friends, especially those who served John Kennedy, was not to be doubted.”

“Well, Senator, what are you going to do about it?” Dick asked his friend, hoping to find some solid ground. “What’s your plan of action?”

Bobby grinned and with a self-mocking jab said, “Why, I’m going to make speeches. That’s what a Senator does. I might even write a book. That’ll show them.”

Responding to the suggestion of a coalition against escalation, Bobby argued that a successful movement had to be tied to a leader, not simply a concept. There he stopped short. He was not ready to consider a presidential bid in 1968, despite the fact that recent polls showed that he was “running well ahead of LBJ both in voter preference among Democrats and as matched against various Republican possibilities.”

Dick and Bobby continued to talk and drink at Bobby’s New York apartment until 2:30 a.m. “We discussed all the great opportunities that were going down the drain,” Dick recorded in his diary, “the hunger of the people for leadership, that this was a critical moment in the life of the country.”

The task of pulling together an influential group, a consensus in search of a committed leader, was the context within which Dick prepared to address the Americans for Democratic Action on September 17.

Recalling his nervous tension, Dick told me: “I had always had a persona, a mask. I was accustomed to speaking for or through someone. This time it was me, my own skin in the game. Not that my own skin in the grand scheme of things was so important, but I had been at the core of Lyndon Johnson’s administration and now I was trying to stake out a place against his administration’s increasing militancy in Vietnam.”

We each read the ADA speech separately and Dick surprised me with a critical shake of the head.

“Not much of a speech,” he muttered with dissatisfaction. “Pretty restrained.”

“Even though the ADA endorsed your proposal for a national coalition against widening the war and offered resources to help?” I asked.

“All and all, a pretty modest proposal,” he insisted.

“From hindsight,” I told Dick after leafing through a sheaf of newspaper articles, it sure made an impact at the time. The New York Times headlined “Ex-Johnson Aide Assails Vietnam War Policies.” A widely syndicated columnist called the speech “the most sweeping and explicit critique of the present role in Vietnam by a former member of both the Kennedy and Johnson White House teams.”

“A former ghostwriter has come back to haunt President Johnson,” Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory wrote. “Goodwin, who put thousands of words into Mr. Johnson’s mouth, has now turned his rhetoric against his former boss.” He has made, she observed, “a devastating case against the effectiveness of bombing the North.” Most tellingly, he had charged the administration with “deliberate lies and distortions” in describing the progress of the war. As an example, he presented a caustic bit of arithmetic. “If we take the numbers of enemy we are supposed to be killing, add to that the defectors, along with the number of wounded… we find we are wiping out the entire Vietnamese force every year. This truly makes their continued resistance one of the marvels of the world. Unless the numbers are wrong, which of course they are.”

In closing, he said:

Some have called upon us to mute or stifle dissent in the name of patriotism and the national interest. It is an argument which monstrously misconceives the nature and process and the greatest strength of American democracy…. It is not our privilege but our duty as patriots, to write, to speak, to organize, to oppose any President and any party and any policy at any time which we believe threatens the grandeur of this nation and the well-being of its people. This is such a time.

If Dick’s assessment that it was not a particularly distinguished speech was accurate, it was nonetheless a gigantic stride in his personal dissent. No immediate response was forthcoming from the White House, but Dick knew his bridges to the administration had been burned.

“I did not feel elated,” Dick later wrote. “Liberated perhaps, but sad—at the loss of a relationship that had meant so much, at the knowledge that what I thought an act of integrity would, for a very long time, cause others to suspect that my convictions were shaped by personal expediency. But it was done. And rightly done.” Dick only regretted he had not called for more extreme measures.

“Of course, that was unforgivable to Johnson,” I said to Dick after reading newspaper accounts and interviews. “You were the first from the inside to speak out on Vietnam. He felt betrayed.”

When a reporter asked the president directly about Dick’s address to the ADA, Johnson evaded the question with acerbic humor: “It’s like being bitten by your own dog.”

---

During a halcyon moment between them only a year earlier, Dick had sent Johnson a memo suggesting a writing project to document the Great Society’s achievements:

“Mr. President,” Dick had written: “I think it would be a good idea to publish a book containing your speeches and messages since assuming the presidency.” An initial book, Dick suggested, would cover the first two years, after that they could put out a book every year.

“We could get someone to edit the book, and perhaps a distinguished historian to do an introduction. I have talked to the people from McGraw-Hill who are doing your mother’s book. They would be delighted to do this.

“Shall I go ahead?”

Johnson boldly checked “YES” and directed Dick to contact Abe Fortas to assign royalties to the LBJ Foundation.

Dick had not only arranged the contract for publication and selected the public statements to best represent the Great Society’s scope and impact, but, at Johnson’s bidding, had written the introduction and subsequently reviewed the galleys for the entire book project.

Now, in the aftermath of Dick’s public break on Vietnam, the publisher quietly received a request from the White House to remove Dick’s name not only from the introduction but from the book as a whole. It was no longer tenable for the president, after what he considered an act of disloyalty, to allow Dick’s name to be associated with the achievements of the Great Society.

Because Dick had edited the book and written both the introduction and commentary, the publishers felt they had no choice but to refuse the White House request. Johnson thereby withdrew the book, repaying all advances and costs.

The whole episode saddened me. I understood why Johnson was so upset with Dick. His former White House aide had, after all, accused the administration of deliberate lies and deceptions. But to whom did Dick owe loyalty? Behind the charge of disloyalty, Dick later wrote in an essay, “The Duty of Loyalty,” was “the assumption that a man who has worked for a president owes continuing loyalty to his policies; that once having served a president, a man is barred from expressing his views on public issues unless he happens to agree with the administration.” The loyalty that was paramount to Dick was of a different kind. It was not to Johnson or his administration but to America and what he felt was in the best interest of the country. And the war was casting a long shadow over the growth of the domestic agenda that both he and the president had cherished most of all.

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One Saturday morning while I continued sorting through the files containing letters and documents from 1966, Dick sat engrossed reading Cicero’s treatise on friendship. It was his habit to launch into off-the-wall explanations on philosophy, botany, physics, or whatever caught the fancy of this perpetual and eclectic reader. “How would you describe the taste of this?” he’d ask me at dinner, “the smell of that? Is the language of taste better or worse than the language of smell?”

The dialogue in his mind on this morning was Cicero’s comparison of various types of friends: useful friends with whom we have transactional relations, amusing friends with whom we share pleasure and games, and those rare friends that Cicero calls “another self” with whom we share soul secrets and deepest feelings. After describing these categories of friendship, Dick put Cicero’s dog-eared treatise in his lap and said, “You know, I bet twenty times I heard President Kennedy use the aphorism ‘in politics there are no friends, only allies.’ ” Suddenly he began to grunt softly, as if some thought was troubling him before pronouncing, “He was wrong about that.”

He followed this pronouncement with a reminiscence of his shared friendship with Bill Moyers, a brotherly bond formed during their long days and nights in the White House when their teamwork provided inspiration, humor, and counsel during the formation of the Great Society. If Dick’s devotion to John Kennedy verged on hero worship, they shared neither leisure nor social time. With Lyndon there were many occasions of celebration and liquor, but sustained leisure or recreation was hardly to be found anywhere in Lyndon’s life. Nonetheless, if not friends, they were historically effective allies and shared the deepest of convictions. Never before or after had Dick met such a fearsome force who inspired such awe and wonder. By contrast, once Dick was out of government, he had developed friendships with Bobby and Jackie Kennedy that provided advice, companionship, emotional support, and reciprocated trust.

Our rambling dialogue about friendship quickened when, carefully preserved in Dick’s archive, we found a striking, oversized letter from Jackie Kennedy that suggested the nature of the friendship between them. I gently unfolded the sheet of rice paper, its left hand border displaying a hand-painted stalk of bamboo in black ink, postmarked July 13, 1966, from Hawaii.

Dear Dick,

I am writing you on rice paper from my Chinese brush lessons – as you can see I am not doing too well on bamboo leaves –

I’m glad you wrote – I have had so many thoughts out here – like Chinese painting – it’s better not to put them all in words –

It took a long time to unwind – & then in the mindless beautiful days you find you can enjoy just simple things – I read about so many people who found peace out here – they were all rather complicated souls – Robert Louis Stevenson – Jack London – Mark Twain – & Gauguin – I’ve read all their memoirs and stumbled upon Alan Moorehead’s book –

The hardest thing for civilized people to do I guess is just be peaceful & fill their days with so little – though you think so much – Once you get that way – you don’t want to go back to the other –

There have been 3 places in the last year I thought I’d like to stay – Argentina, Spain & here – and it’s because each offered a new life & new thoughts – a new civilization to learn about – & nature to lose yourself in – Now I know that that’s what I must do – & I hope I will figure out how eventually – as I’m just not strong enough to go back into the old world – with memories that drag you down into a life that can never be the same – & you struggle against the despair – & lose the battle bit by bit – & then you go away and recoup and start again – I’ve given up smoking here – which means you give up drinking too – as it makes you want to smoke – I go to bed so early – I want to stay like that – Maybe it’s cowardly to decide what I’ve decided –

I read the Greek way here to counteract all the Eastern bit – & Greeks would face life – & Orientals when life is unbearable – just avoid it – which isn’t a bad idea – You are the only person I even want to tell that to – as you are kind of a lost soul too & I know what you mean about Vietnam & everything – I think you must do what you are going to do – & thank God there is Bobby.

What struck me most powerfully about Jackie’s letter was the candor and emotional vulnerability of the phrase: “you are the only person I even want to tell that to – as you are kind of a lost soul too.” It was no coincidence that at the same time Jackie spoke of her enervating struggle against despair and her efforts to rebound, Dick felt he was losing ground in his own search to find balance in a time of transition, to establish his own voice as a writer.

Though he had a writing fellowship at Wesleyan during the year and spent his summers among other writers on Martha’s Vineyard, he still had not found the internal discipline or the personal tranquility to make progress on the ambitious work he had in mind. In addition to procrastination, he was drinking far too much as he confided to his oldest friend, George Cuomo, that same summer of 1966.

I am in the middle of a literary colony here. On my right is Lillian Hellman. Philip Rahv is in the adjoining house to the left and Bill Styron is three houses down. Philip Roth lives down the road along with Robert Brustein. And other writers keep floating through. The effect is opposite of what you can expect. Writing is discouraged. There is so much 4 a.m. drinking that it is almost impossible to get anything done at all.

A diary entry after a sailing trip with friends revealed that he struggled with a far deeper sense of despondency and dread.

It is funny you think about the possibility of drowning, or the boat sinking and look out at the lovely sunny day—quiet and green in beauty—and think there are no auguries of disaster. No way to tell if in a day or two all will be different and you will be struggling in the ocean. There is no real warning of disaster anywhere, anytime. It just comes out of sunlight to darkness. But I am recurrently stricken with morbid thoughts.

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In the fall of 1966, Dick’s friendship with both Jackie and Bobby led to a prolonged and scathing episode wherein all three were drawn into a public controversy that erupted over the impending publication of biographer William Manchester’s book on John Kennedy’s assassination—a book the Kennedys themselves had authorized him to write.

The contract Manchester had signed four months after President Kennedy’s death stipulated that “the final text shall not be published unless and until approved” by Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy. Jackie allowed Manchester two five-hour interviews. Bobby also sat down with the author and asked dozens of Kennedy family members and colleagues to make themselves available. Two years later, when Manchester submitted his manuscript to Bobby and Jackie, neither were able to bring themselves to read it. They knew the book would trigger gruesome memories. In their stead, the task of approval was relegated to two longtime Kennedy aides, Ed Guthman and John Seigenthaler.

Dick had also looked over the manuscript that spring, not as a surrogate for the Kennedys, but as an acquaintance and colleague of Manchester’s at Wesleyan. A “masterful achievement,” Dick blithely told his neighbor, suggesting he change the title from The Death of Lancer (JFK’s Secret Service code name) to The Death of a President. Manchester was delighted with Dick’s opinion and the new title for the book.

Guthman and Seigenthaler recommended more than a hundred changes, mostly to soften the relentlessly demeaning portrait of LBJ and to delete some of the intimate details Jackie had revealed in confidence to the author. Manchester accepted most of these changes, and in July received a telegram from Robert Kennedy that while he had not read the book, “the members of the Kennedy family will place no obstacle in the way of publication of his work.” If serial rights were sold, he importantly added, he “would expect that the incidents would not be taken out of context or summarized in any way which might distort the facts or the events.”

Manchester’s publisher, Harper & Row, then felt free to send out copies of the manuscript to magazines for serialization. A bidding war resulted in Look’s offer at $665,000 (equivalent to over $6 million today) for seven installments—the largest amount ever paid at that time for serial rights. When Bobby delivered this news to Jackie, who had just returned from Hawaii, she was sent reeling in panic. “I thought that it would be bound in black and put away on dark library shelves,” she later said. The frenzy surrounding the serial rights horrified her; she realized that each installment would provide fodder for major news stories, forcing her to confront anew, day after day, the assassination she was desperately trying to survive.

She wanted it all to vanish: the magazine rights, even the book itself. That wish could not be granted unless she sued to stop publication. Bobby initially agreed, although he realized that a lawsuit would bring on a public circus. Far better, he eventually decided, would be the removal of the most troublesome passages; if unsuccessful, they could “issue a statement vigorously disclaiming the book.”

It was at this impasse in the story that Dick officially entered the morass. The Kennedys appointed him their “literary broker” to negotiate further changes with Manchester. “It made sense,” Manchester later wrote. “His Middletown home and mine were a short walk from one another. Jackie trusted him. His dedication to Bobby’s ambitions for national office was absolute.”

“At the outset of his fracas with Jacqueline Kennedy,” Garry Wills would later write, “William Manchester could not decide whether Goodwin was on his side or hers.”

“I wish I had never gotten involved,” Dick admitted to me. “My friendship with Jackie, her acute distress, impaired my judgment.” As a neighbor and fellow writer, he wanted to be fair to Manchester. He fully understood that the removal of a string of words here, a sentence there, could jeopardize the whole thing. “Like that game with hardwood blocks where you remove one block at a time,” he said emphatically, “the unstable tower trembles and can tumble down.” But Jackie was his major concern.

Look reluctantly agreed to reduce the seven installments to four and to delay the publication date until January to allow sufficient time for Dick and Manchester to make revisions. “However,” Dick acknowledged in his diary, “we are trapped.” The contract Manchester had signed with Look gave him no rights to make additional changes unless the magazine agreed, and they were “refusing to budge” on many of the attempted revisions.

The same two issues Seigenthaler and Guthman had dealt with in the lengthy manuscript—the mean-spirited comments concerning LBJ and the private revelations Jackie had let slip—were magnified in the short installments, where every offending sentence stuck out more clearly, a danger Bobby’s original telegram had foreseen in the matter of serial rights when an excerpt in isolation could change the proportion and substance of the whole. Dick described the dilemma in his diary.

We would like to remove those things which are enormously intimate about Jackie and are in bad taste. She talked to Manchester at great length after the assassination in that period when talking was a great form of therapy, telling everything, including intimate details of their life together—the Modern Screen stuff.

The other things we would have liked to get out are the many episodes, comments, quotes etc. which reflect on Johnson. I don’t think anyone will be helped by these, for it also creates the impression that the Kennedy people were down on LBJ from the very beginning, never giving him a chance to assume the Presidency properly without their instant enmity.

We have given up on the political things—they will come out and be damaging—but will try everything to get the stuff harmful to Jackie, a violation of her privacy, out of the manuscript.

By early December, Dick had succeeded in securing the agreement of both Manchester and Look to delete a significant number of passages containing indiscreet details Jackie had provided. Manchester believed he had done all he could without shredding his manuscript. The publishers of both Harper & Row and Look sent letters to Jackie informing her that they realized she might not be “entirely happy with all the particulars” but they had “gone the limit to try to be fair and thoughtful of everyone’s feelings and yet consistent with accuracy.” They had therefore determined to proceed with publication.

When Jackie read these letters, she phoned her longtime lawyer, Sy Rifkin, and instructed him to sue. Bobby refused to join the suit, believing it “a terrible mistake.” In public, however, he would support Jackie without reservation.

I asked Dick if he had tried to change her mind. “No,” he said, “her mind was made up. She was in terrible shape. With Bobby pulling away, she felt abandoned. For her sake, I had no choice but to support her suit.”

The suit, as Bobby had predicted, became the talk of the country. Most editorials roundly criticized Jackie’s decision to sue. “History belongs to everyone, not just to the participants,” The New York Times editorialized; “having made her original decision she cannot now escape its consequences.” Television crews camped out on the sidewalk in front of Manchester’s house. Stress landed the beleaguered Manchester in the hospital with a serious case of pneumonia.

Public opinion turned against both Bobby and Jackie. A Harris poll found that one person in five “thought less” of Bobby as a result of the controversy, while one in three “thought less” of Jackie. The whole tawdry business had delivered the first public bruise on Jackie’s reputation.

If anyone acted well in the wake of this debacle, it was Lyndon Johnson, the recipient of a consistently obtuse and boorish portrayal in Manchester’s book. Much of that scorn was attributed to comments from Jackie. At Lady Bird’s sage prompting, Lyndon personally hand wrote Jackie a preemptive note. “Lady Bird and I have been distressed to read the press accounts of your unhappiness about the Manchester book. Some of these accounts attribute your concern to passages in the book which are critical or defamatory of us. If this is so, I want you to know while we deeply appreciate your characteristic kindness and sensitivity, we hope you will not subject yourself to any discomfort or distress on our account. One never becomes inured to slander but we have learned to live with it. In any event, your own tranquility is important to us, and we would not want you to endure any unpleasantness on our account.”

Settlement talks commenced shortly after the suit was announced. Look agreed to delete an additional 1,600 words from the installments, consisting of seven pages from the book. All the taped interviews Manchester had made with Jackie would be locked under seal in the Kennedy Library until 2067. The suit was dropped. “JACKIE WINNER IN BOOK BATTLE,” Newsday announced in bold letters. “Magazine Agrees to Changes Say Book Publisher.” An editorial in the London Daily Express suggested: “We are not now dealing with the whispering baby-voiced mincing shy wife devoting herself to culture but to a steel-minded woman willing to risk exposing herself to a fabulous court battle in order to preserve her domestic secrets.”

In actuality, it seemed like anything but victory to Jackie. During the magazine bidding war, copies of the original July manuscript had been circulated. Passages that Dick and Manchester had worked hard together to redact had inevitably trickled their way into the press, magnifying the attention paid them.

“I am sick at the unhappiness this whole terrible thing has caused everyone,” Jackie responded to President Johnson’s tender letter. “Whatever I did could only cause pain,” she wrote, “I am so dazed now I feel I will never be able to feel anything again.”

Even in Antigua, where Jackie had gone to escape after Christmas, the scandal pursued her, giving rise to a second letter to Johnson. She had read in an article that the Manchester book claimed she objected to the president calling her “honey.”

“All the rage that I have been trying to suppress and forget down here boiled up again.” She noted that only a good friend would call her “honey” and that she hoped he would call her that again. She was writing simply to express “the fondness I will always feel for you—no matter what happens, no matter how your feelings may change towards me. Once I decide I care about someone—nothing can ever make me change.”

The whole episode left Dick with such unpleasant memories he cringed to recall them. Friendship and loyalty had aligned him with Jackie, but he had failed to protect her by not pushing back on her decision to sue. And he would always regret the role he had played as “literary broker,” pressuring Manchester, on behalf of the Kennedys to delete words, sentences, and entire passages from his manuscript. He had allowed himself to be caught in a crossfire, a figure who, as Garry Wills had noted, endeavored to serve both sides at once.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this controversy, the book was a sensation. The first installment sold more than four thousand copies in Times Square alone in a matter of hours. In hardcover, The Death of a President sold more than a million copies within the first twelve months. Manchester’s royalties after the first printing were contractually obligated to the Kennedy Library. When the publisher’s check for $750,000 was received after that first year, Manchester became, ironically, donor-in-chief to the JFK Library.

JANUARY 1967

Where to stand? What to do? By the start of 1967, debate and discord over Vietnam rumbled through families and generations, town halls, schools and colleges, churches and synagogues. The issue of deciding what to do and where to stand on a war that had become firmly and forever an American war had reached a critical point.

We were no longer simply supporting South Vietnam. The United States was waging an escalating war against North Vietnam. American troops deployed to Vietnam now numbered 435,000. America had dropped more bombs on North Vietnam than it had dropped on Japan during World War II or during the entire Korean War. In spite of this, there was no evidence that the bombing had diminished North Vietnam’s capacity to carry on the war.

At home, the war continued to drain momentum from the Great Society. In the November midterms, the Democrats had lost forty-seven seats in the House, more than they had gained from Johnson’s 1964 landslide. Johnson’s drive to pass a third major civil rights law—to outlaw discrimination in the rental and sale of housing—had been thwarted by a Senate filibuster. The vote was not even close. Efforts to expand funding for his war on poverty had been defeated. People’s attention and inclination had turned away from the progressive accomplishments of the past two years.

Since burning bridges with the administration at the ADA meeting the previous September, Dick had sharpened his criticisms of the war, which he then considered “the single most costly error in the history of American foreign policy.” In a combination of speeches and articles, he began to hammer away at “a government which feels little obligation to tell the truth to our country, always ready to change the facts in order to suit the needs and politics of the moment,” a government which has let loose an “outpouring of deception so torrential it has almost numbed our capacity to separate truth from falsehood, reality from wishful thinking.”

In his “The Duty of Loyalty” essay, he acknowledged that “one does not lightly attack the policies of a president, who, as in my own case, offered a magnificent chance for significant public service. To do so is not only damaging, raising the question of the dissenter’s trustworthiness in the minds of other men, but personally difficult and disturbing. It is, however, President Johnson’s misfortune and ours that the Vietnamese war is precisely the kind of issue which compels such a choice.”

While Dick refrained from publicly narrowing his attack against Johnson himself, his anger at the president mounted, fueled by his sorrow over the withering Great Society program that he had helped to launch. In private conversations, he attacked Johnson’s character with increasing ferocity, at times reducing the president to a caricature. In Dick’s estimation, the immensely complicated man he had worked with day after day receded as the war raged on. Dick worried in his diary during the fall of 1966 that “the country is now in the most dangerous hands of its history.”

Dick began to visualize the necessity of a political future without Lyndon Johnson. In that same diary entry, he had already predicted that LBJ could be defeated in 1968. “The greatest issue against him is not the war or inflation—but simply that people no longer trust him, nor do they like him. He can never come back from this. I have briefly mentioned 1968 to Bob [RFK]. He is reluctant to mention it, but we agreed, he silently, that there was nothing he could do about it now except what he was doing—so best sit tight and wait. It means a real party revolt, and the seeds are there.”

The content of the boxes of articles and speeches on Vietnam from 1967 reflected the ascending tension and acrimony that pervaded the atmosphere that year. One exception was an interview with Dick that made us both burst out laughing. Citing an article in the London Observer, the interviewer suggested that Dick was a central figure in a secret conspiracy to discredit Johnson’s policies in Vietnam. The London paper had identified his co-conspirators as Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith. His evidence: All three “full-fledged members” of a “government in exile,” were seen having lunch together in a quiet restaurant in Manhattan. Arthur denied the conspiracy in a letter to the editor, suggesting that sometimes a lunch is simply a lunch. “I don’t think we’d be very good at plotting,” Dick told the interviewer, “we all talk too much.” And if they were part of a government in exile, Dick added, “it must be one of the most unobtrusive in history. It never makes any decisions and it has no power. If you mean that there are a lot of people who aren’t running things that wish they were, I think that’s true. But that’s always been true.”

Such buoyant sarcasm was hardly in evidence at a dinner party at Robert Kennedy’s house, Hickory Hill. In normal times, rules of decorum and civility generally prevail at such occasions, but these times were hardly normal. Now the social gloves were off. In public and in private, members of the administration began to attack the motives, loyalty, and patriotism of those who dissented from their standard line.

“I was floored,” Dick told me, “when Averell Harriman confronted me at Bobby’s house.”

“ ‘You and Schlesinger are murderers,’ he flatly accused me, ‘you’re killing American boys.’

“I tried to calmly explain to him that exactly the opposite was true. We were trying to stop the killing.”

“You’re just encouraging Hanoi,” Harriman charged, his voice growing shrill. “All this protest just makes them think we’re going to give up.”

“In an earlier time,” Dick told me with more seriousness than I am comfortable with, “I would have challenged him to a duel.”

Dick was further enraged when Dean Rusk assailed “pseudo-intellectuals who had served under JFK and LBJ and are now in dissent over Vietnam.” Words such as “traitor,” “unpatriotic,” and “disloyal” were bandied about. Dick had prepared his essay on loyalty to counter such charges. “Where to stand” had ceased to be an issue for Dick; exactly what to do and how to do it was now all that mattered:

“The government of the United States is not a private club or college fraternity. Its policies are not private oaths or company secrets. Presumably a man enters public life to serve the nation. The oath taken by every high officer of the nation, elected or appointed, is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, not an Administration, a political party or a man.

“Dissenters are sometimes accused of demeaning the presidency. That office should demand respect. Its dignity, however, flows not from private right or title or the man who occupies it, but solely from the fact that its occupant is chosen by the people of the United States. It is their office, and if they, or any among them, feel that it is wrongly used, then it is their obligation to speak.”

MARCH 2, 1967

For Senator Robert Kennedy, the answer to the question of where to stand on Vietnam was fraught with complications. “If another speech would do any good,” he had told his friend Village Voice columnist Jack Newfield in December 1966, “I would make it tomorrow. But the last time I spoke,” referring here to the speech Dick had helped draft the previous February, “I didn’t have any influence on policy, and I was hurt politically. I’m afraid by speaking out I just make Lyndon do the opposite.”

As the bombing intensified and the discord on the home front deepened, however, Kennedy felt that America had reached “a critical turning point.” He determined he had no choice but to take a risk and speak out. Several of his closest relatives and friends pleaded with him to remain silent, including his brother Senator Ted Kennedy, Ted Sorensen, and Bill vanden Heuvel. Their counsel was counterbalanced by young aides and allies Adam Walinsky and Jeff Greenfield, Al Lowenstein, Arthur Schlesinger, and Dick—who urged him to make a clear and decisive stand against the war.

Kennedy’s announcement that he would make a major speech on the Senate floor on March 2 spurred a wave of anticipation across the country. While other senators had spoken out against the war, Kennedy was not only the second most powerful figure in the Democratic Party but was, without question, the figure who most bedeviled President Johnson. With assistance from Dick, Schlesinger, and Walinsky, the speech gradually took shape over several weeks in February. Kennedy would call for a bombing halt, followed by an announcement that America stood ready to start peace negotiations within the week—as well as an agreement with the communists that neither side would increase the scale of the war so long as negotiations were underway.

Bobby continued working on the speech with Dick and Adam until 3:30 a.m. on the day it was to be delivered. A Gallup poll had suggested that only 24 percent of the country favored a bombing halt. Bobby understood that very well and when he came down to breakfast, he told his tablemates that Teddy Kennedy had called to “make sure they announce it’s the Kennedy from New York.”

Before a packed chamber, the junior senator from New York rose to the floor and spoke, Newfield recalled “in a quiet, tense voice” from his allotted desk at the rear of the room. To head off accusations that Lyndon Johnson was the real target of his address, Kennedy pointed a finger in many directions, careful to shoulder his own share of responsibility. He acknowledged that three American presidents—Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson—had taken action in Vietnam. “If fault is to be found or responsibility assessed, there is enough to go around for all, including myself,” Kennedy said. At that time, this acknowledgment made him, according to The Facts on File almanac, “the only major official in either Democratic administration who admitted publicly to being wrong about Vietnam.”

He then spoke to the “horror” of war, the night air saturated with bombs, “destroying yesterday’s promise of family and land and home.” The responsibility for this horror belongs to all of us, he said. “It is we who live in abundance and send our young men out to die. It is our chemicals that scorch the children and our bombs that level the villages. We are all participants.”

Counterattacks in the press were immediate. As Kennedy had feared, the speech was largely construed within the context of his personal and political clash with Johnson. No sooner had he finished than a coordinated retaliation commenced: Senator Henry Jackson read a letter from the president, insisting that “the bombing had been effective and would continue.” General William Westmoreland followed up, stressing that the bombing was “vital to the U.S. war effort and meant fewer American casualties.” The commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam was unwilling, he said, to pay “one drop of blood” for any proposed bombing halt. Senator Everett Dirksen charged that Kennedy’s peace proposal was already “undermining” our efforts to win the war. And from resurgent Republican candidate Richard Nixon came the cut-and-dried judgment that “Johnson is right and Kennedy is wrong.” The speech, Nixon stated, “had the effect of prolonging the war by encouraging the enemy.”

While the speech may have hurt Kennedy politically in the short run, it was a “watershed” moment, Jack Newfield said. “It emancipated Kennedy psychologically and intellectually about Vietnam.”

“He had now become the leading voice in the antiwar movement,” Dick recalled. “There was no turning back.”

APRIL 15, 1967

The tidal pull of the great public questions that beset Dick and Bobby Kennedy about what to do about Vietnam had invaded the private lives of all of us at Harvard that spring. As a twenty-four-year-old graduate student working on my PhD thesis, I was a teaching fellow for courses on the American government and the American presidency. But in a real sense, the core curriculum for everyone during that time was the war.

I was learning from my students who were busy signing petitions, passing out leaflets, planning marches and demonstrations, analyzing “the System.” If Dick had gone further than Bobby in expressing his convictions against both the war and LBJ, I was lagging behind them both. I was clearly against the war but not with the passion and conviction I had for the Civil Rights Movement or the domestic agenda of the Great Society. I still believed and hoped—as Dick and Kennedy no longer did—that Johnson was angling for a way to bring North Vietnam to the table and that outside pressure might hasten that goal.

Across the country, protests and demonstrations were beginning to converge into a full-blown antiwar movement. Teach-ins on the history and conduct of the war had spread from the University of Michigan to scores of college campuses, including Harvard. Fierce debates resounded on the morality of the war, the fairness of student deferments, enlistment, or resistance to the draft. Pressing choices lay ahead for my own students. One third of Harvard’s graduating class, a poll revealed, would refuse to fight in Vietnam.

Dunster House, where I was a tutor, was alive with arguments and debates about the war, sometimes led by students, faculty members, or guest lecturers. One memorable night that spring, the liberal activist Al Lowenstein delivered a ringing antiwar speech, conversing with students for hours afterward. At the time I was only dimly aware that Lowenstein was organizing a “Dump Johnson” movement on college campuses and searching for someone to challenge Lyndon Johnson in the primaries. I can still see Lowenstein with his thick glasses and wrinkled suit sitting cross-legged on a carpet amidst a large gathering of graduate and undergraduate students at Dunster House, urging us to go to New York on April 15 to join the “Spring Mobilization March to End the War,” which, he predicted, would be the largest antiwar march to date.

Afterward, I talked long into the night with my fellow graduate student and friend, Sanford “Sandy” Levinson, and we decided to travel down to the march together. Two years older than me, Sandy had been involved in the Civil Rights Movement from his early days at Duke, then an all-white institution. One of the founding members of the school’s NAACP, Sandy had been a member of the student union committee that brought to Duke Morehouse College president Dr. Benjamin Mays, the first African American to speak at the university. In the summer of 1964 Sandy had joined Black and white activists who drove to Montgomery, Alabama, the day President Johnson signed the civil rights law to be the first diners to integrate the Holiday Inn. He had been a staunch partisan of Lyndon Johnson’s leadership on civil rights, but by 1967 had come to believe that the administration had turned a deaf ear to antiwar voices. The sheer number of protesters expected in New York, he hoped, would compel attention.

Early in the morning of April 15, we drove to New York together with Sandy’s wife, Cynthia, a senior at Wellesley, and our friend Simeon Wade, a doctoral student in history. We had greatly anticipated hearing from the scheduled keynote speaker, Martin Luther King Jr., but his participation was now in doubt. Several days earlier, King had made his first major public statement against the war at New York’s Riverside Church. All his senior advisers had counseled against it, considering any detour into foreign policy a disastrous mistake. But King insisted that the time had come to speak up: “My conscience leaves me no other choice,” he declared at the opening of a searing indictment against the “madness” of a dishonorable war that was poisoning “the soul of America.”

The speech had sparked “a firestorm of criticism” within the civil rights community. The NAACP Board of Directors passed a resolution denouncing King’s “serious tactical mistake.” The Washington Post noted “the irony that the Government which has labored the hardest to right these ancient wrongs, is the object of the most savage denunciation.” Lyndon Johnson was reportedly “crushed.”

Conversation on the way down to New York City was intense and nonstop. We discussed the war and politics, the collision of the Civil Rights Movement and the Antiwar Movement—the two great movements of the decade—friendship and loyalty and the meaning and direction of our lives.

As Lowenstein had predicted, this march was, indeed, the largest antiwar march on record. Upon reaching our destination near Central Park, I saw a vast mosaic of American life in the crowd of 125,000—mothers toting babies, girls with daffodils painted on their foreheads, boys wearing headbands and beads, Black Power advocates, a contingent of Native Americans from South Dakota, college students from the East Coast and Midwest with knapsacks and bedrolls, professors and graduate students, anarchists with black flags, Peace Corps volunteers.

Pete Seeger, along with Peter, Paul and Mary led us in a medley of folk songs. Banners implored us to “Make Love not War,” others insisted “Don’t Give a Damn for Uncle Sam.” There was a raucous and unruly aspect that seemed like it might get out of hand. Seventy Cornell students burned their draft cards and released signed pledges to resist conscription. An American flag was burned. Construction workers hurled nails at marchers as they passed their site. Flour, eggs, and red paint were spilled from windows.

We were too far back to hear the speeches clearly but the next day we saw photographs and read accounts in the papers of King, Harry Belafonte, Stokely Carmichael, and Dr. Benjamin Spock marching arm-in-arm from Central Park to the speaker’s platform at the United Nations Plaza. Speaking first, King’s tone was no longer as strident as it had been a few days before in the speech that had put his position here in jeopardy. He had come, today, he said, to speak in sorrow, not in anger. He was wistful when he mentioned the Great Society and did not take direct aim at President Johnson. His softened rhetoric on this day called simply for a stop to the bombing. But the Riverside speech had already done its damage. The break between the two most powerful leaders of the decade was permanent. They would never see each other again.

Leaving New York, we were badly vexed by the increasing level of raw anger and violence we had witnessed throughout the day. “A few minutes of us on television,” one antiwar protester lamented at an earlier march, “the rest of the country has redoubled its fervor to win with LBJ.”

It was on the ride back to Cambridge that Sandy and I decided to collaborate on a statement suggesting some way “to convert into a meaningful political voice the wide base of support that was demonstrated at the march.” We proposed the organization of a third party comprised of people not truly represented by the two major parties—students disaffected by the war, the urban poor, the marginal farmer, the unskilled laborer.

We argued that “it need not be posited that a third-party candidate would win.” After all, the traditional role of third parties had been “to demonstrate a bloc of voters for whose support a major party must bid.” How, we asked ourselves, could marches and protests impact policy? What is the most productive relationship between outside movements and the channels of inside power?

If the article was somewhat politically naïve, as Dick pointed out when we read it together four decades later, it was propelled by the same aspiration that Dick had expressed in his ADA speech—the longing to prod the political establishment to rein in the war. With Al Lowenstein’s connections, we forwarded our piece to The New Republic. Then we waited.

During this waiting period, I learned I had been selected as a finalist for a fellowship program I had applied for the previous January. A nonpartisan program, the White House Fellows was designed to allow young people to work for a year as special assistants to the president and members of his cabinet. Each prospective fellow could identify two or three preferred departments, and matches would be made after the winners were chosen. If selected, I wished to be assigned to the Labor Department or the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, some place I might play a role in the domestic agenda.

With great fanfare, thirty finalists were assembled for a weekend at a Virginia conference house where we would be interviewed by a commission of government officials, judges, and journalists. Finally, we returned together to an office in Washington where thirty envelopes were placed on a round table. About half of us, we were told, could be selected. I have no recollection at all of the moment I opened my envelope to discover that I was one of the sixteen chosen.

The following evening, we were invited to a festive White House reception to honor our selection. First off, we gathered in the Rose Garden for a photograph with the president, my first time in the presence of a president. We walked with Johnson into the East Room where he delivered remarks and introduced each of us to the crowd of invited guests. Cocktails and dinner followed. Music began to play and dancing commenced.

When it was my turn to dance with the president—he danced with all three women in our class of fellows—what I remember most clearly as he whirled me with surprising grace around the floor was that he hardly resembled the stilted figure I had glimpsed on television in recent months, eyes squinting, speaking solemnly about the war. This was not the face I had seen on incriminating posters in Harvard Yard and at antiwar demonstrations. His presence dominated the entire room filled with senators, representatives, cabinet members, White House staffers, and reporters.

“Do your men ever dance at Harvard?” he bantered. He never stopped talking the entire time we danced.

“Of course they do,” I said.

“Bull,” he said. “I know what goes on up there.” If I, like so many of my generation, harbored the makings of a simplified caricature of him, he had similarly made one of me—as a “Harvard.”

As my turn to dance with the voluble president ended, he said in a loud whisper that I would work directly for him in the White House.

Hardly a week passed before my first published article appeared in The New Republic. Suddenly, my excitement gave way to dread when I saw, atop the magazine cover, our article’s title—selected by the magazine’s editors:

“HOW TO REMOVE LBJ IN 1968.”

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Panic set in. I felt I had let down everyone on our newly chosen team of White House Fellows. Not only would I lose my place, I anxiously speculated, but I had cast a shadow on the entire program, jeopardizing it, perhaps destroying it.

I was not merely catastrophizing. Years later I learned of the trouble The New Republic article had stirred up among White House staffers. On May 8, a week after the White House ceremony, the president was flying back to Washington from Texas on Air Force One when an advance copy of the article was transmitted on the secure communications system used to relay time-sensitive documents. A young air force officer retrieved it from the printer, handing it off to assistant press secretary and former White House fellow Tom Johnson (a member of the program’s original class). “You better be the one to give him this one,” the young officer said.

“It was with great trepidation that I handed LBJ the printed copy of the article,” Tom Johnson told me as we recently reviewed the whole incident together. “I thought this could be the demise of the Fellows program. Surprisingly, he read it quietly and said nothing.”

According to the White House diarist, that night at 8:33 p.m., the president called Civil Service commissioner John Macy concerning “White House Fellow (just appointed) Doris Kearns whose article is coming out in the May 13 issue of The New Republic.” He wanted to see my FBI report.

Meanwhile, I received calls from several White House aides requesting that I elaborate on my version of events. I acquitted myself less than nobly. I stressed that the title chosen by the magazine—“How to Remove LBJ in 1968”—had given the piece an unintended sensational thrust. That was accurate. But I also tried to distance myself from the passages dealing with the 1968 election, claiming my contribution focused mainly on the need for a third party to represent disaffected voters. In truth, there was no division of responsibility in the writing of the article. Sandy and I had collaborated on the entire piece.

When giving talks on college campuses in recent years, I am often asked what advice my older self would give to my younger self. “Some things travel well over time,” I would tell them, but if applied to this tempest and my disappointing response, I might add that I would warn my youthful self that shame and regret can sting, even after five decades.

In the course of writing about this episode I called Sandy, who is a professor of law at the University of Texas. I reached him at Harvard where he was spending the fall semester teaching a seminar on constitutional law. We went to dinner, and after catching up on our lives, I asked him how he had felt about my reaction a half century ago. He said his major worry as my friend was that I might lose the fellowship. When I told him of the guilt I had felt all these years, he said: “I am not authorized to grant absolution, but if I were, I would do so!”

While reading the White House diarist’s notes during this period I further discovered that the situation was treated with urgent gravity, discussed by the president and the first lady, explored with close advisers, researched by investigative agencies and vetting interviews.

Four days after the president had first read the article, I was, embarrassingly, once again, under the microscope. At 10:20 p.m. on May 12, the presidential daily diarist recounts, the president was in the small lounge beside the Oval Office with Lady Bird, Senator Russell, and White House speechwriter Harry McPherson:

“He [LBJ] and Sen Russell were discussing Doris Kearns, and the President asked Mrs. Johnson to read her FBI [file]. After the President told Sen Russell the story of how she was selected etc., Mrs. Johnson returned the file to the President and the President said, ‘I think she’s been framed.’ At this point the President was handed an item from tonight’s reading from [special assistant] Douglass Cater giving Miss Kearns’ accounting of how the matter came about. The President read this quietly and then handed it to Harry McPherson asking him to study both her explanation and the file.”

Russell remained for dinner where the talk swerved to the grim topic of the expansion of bombing in Vietnam, politics, and finally a tirade against the press that flared and threatened to last past midnight when Senator Russell arose and announced, “Mr. President, it’s midnight, and I have to go to bed because I’m an old man, and you have to go to bed because you’re President of the United States.”

After his full review of the files, Johnson determined that I should keep the fellowship and join my classmates in September. The White House then coordinated a simple and positive story. Tom Johnson told reporters that “Miss Kearns was selected on the basis of her ability and not on the basis of her political views.” Even Alex Campbell, the managing editor of The New Republic, weighed in on the side of putting the episode to rest, commenting, “I certainly don’t see what the story would have to do with her work in the White House.”

Newspapers had a field day with the president’s decision, with mocking headlines that read: “She Panned LBJ, Still Has a Job”; “LBJ Chooses Aide, She Maps His Defeat”; “Swinging Blonde LBJ Critic Wins Post.”

In the end, however, the only word that mattered was LBJ’s and he told his White House staff: “Bring her down here for a year, and if I can’t win her over, no one can.”

There was no more talk of my working directly for Johnson. Indeed, I was uncertain if any cabinet member would select me; but soon after the commotion died down, Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz called me to Washington for an interview. Despite my melodramatic initiation to public service, I now had a chance to land at the Labor Department, the place I had most wanted to work from the beginning.

Beforehand, I read all I could find about Wirtz and his enormous career in labor history, which reached from World War II to the present. An outspoken liberal, he had been a key adviser, law partner, and chief speechwriter to Adlai Stevenson during both his presidential runs. As labor secretary under both JFK and LBJ, he was considered an unquestioned champion of the poor and the unemployed.

Walking into his office, I hardly knew what to expect, but within moments the tall, gentle, and droll figure with a graying crew cut escorted me into a small sitting area. He asked me why I wanted to work in government service, took his pipe from his pocket, and listened thoughtfully as I spoke of the March on Washington and Adlai Stevenson’s speech on civil rights at my Colby College graduation. Referring to the civil rights freedom fighters, Stevenson had predicted that someday they might run for office on their prison records. Before the hour had passed, this man—steeped in law and in public oratory, a scholar of labor history and fighter for the workingman—took his pipe from his mouth. “Welcome,” he smiled, “I would like you to be my White House fellow.”

FALL 1967

When Dick and I had first met, he had questioned why I wanted to work in the Labor Department or anywhere else inside LBJ’s administration. So fierce and sweeping was Dick’s indignation toward LBJ that he believed the Great Society had simply vanished, that the war had assumed center stage in every bureau of every department. He was wrong, of course. Live currents of the Great Society clearly remained in the Labor Department and throughout the government, even as the funding for domestic programs had shrunk in the wake of increased military expenditures abroad.

And Secretary Wirtz turned out to be a powerful advocate for the Great Society and the best mentor a twenty-four-year-old could have. He gave me a series of challenging assignments and was always ready to answer my questions or offer advice.

No sooner had I begun the fellowship in September of 1967 than Wirtz put me to work overseeing skills training and remedial reading programs for young at-risk Black students. He sent me to the U.S. employment office in Cleveland to pose as an unemployed worker to see how the personnel treated those seeking jobs. Under his auspices, I played a significant role in setting up a government-funded halfway house for drug addicts in the capital’s Cardozo neighborhood that included employment opportunities right within the house and incorporated the newest theories about addiction. Occasionally he asked for my help on speeches he was writing, though he needed little assistance; he was widely considered the best writer in the cabinet.

Furthermore, he was fun to work with, leavening serious situations with verbal silliness by using one of the many malapropisms he had collected over the years. Before I caught on, I tried to correct him when he once told me, “a word to the wise is deficient.”

“You mean ‘sufficient’?” I blurted.

“If you’d prefer,” he said, chuckling.

Once accustomed to the secretary’s wordplay, I simply shook my head and smiled in amusement.

I often recalled Wirtz’s wordplay when Dick would endlessly quote from one or another of Yogi Berra’s famous quips—“It ain’t over till it’s over,” or “The future ain’t what it used to be.” And Dick had his own collection of playful word combinations. He could almost always bring any small argument we had to an end by saying: “Just remember, I a-window- you” (rather than I a-door-you), and I always will.” I couldn’t be mad at him anymore. It was infuriating.

If work on urban poverty provided a temporary sanctuary from events overseas, there was no real escape from the war. Vietnam had infiltrated everything, including the relationship between the president and his secretary of labor. “For two or three years, I was very close to Lyndon Johnson,” Wirtz told reporters years later. “And then in about 1966 or 1967, I began to have a feeling that his Vietnam program did not make sense and should be stopped and wrote him to that effect. That was the end of the close relationship.”

In the fall the fellows were invited to the White House several times to meet with the president or attend receptions. On one occasion, seated together around an oval-shaped table, Johnson spoke to us about the importance of the war effort in Vietnam. After finishing, he said he had only time to take a question or two. He then pointed at me and said, “You.” Startled, I simply spoke aloud what I had been thinking while he had been speaking. I asked him if he understood the depth of young people’s opposition to the war.

I hardly remember more of what I said, but my fellows classmate Tim Wirth recalls that awkward moment more clearly. “You gave an impassioned statement about the war. LBJ was this enormous man. It seemed as if he half rose from his seat toward you. It was terrifying. But then, in a low voice, he simply looked at you and said: ‘AND THEREFORE?’ ” In other words, What do you propose? What next? Where do we go from here? The president’s question made such an indelible impression on Tim Wirth that from then on, he explained, during his long career as a congressman and senator from Colorado, when someone issued an impassioned challenge, Lyndon Johnson’s words would drum in his head: “And therefore?”