From the day Lyndon Johnson took office I had been grooming my accent to rid it of the Texas twang, that dead giveaway. The first time I heard myself on a tape recording was in language lab, and I felt a shock of dismay. To a Texan there was as much difference between my nasalized North Texas drawl and LBJ’s Hill Country brogue as there was, to a Southerner, between the pinched vowels of the Tidewater and the diphthongs of Alabama. When Lyndon Johnson said “wire” it came out “war,” as in a “bob-war fence.” When I said “wire” it made a noise like a Civil Defense siren in my nose. But when I heard myself saying “hablo muy bien el español,” I sounded like Lyndon ordering a platter of tamales.
I could not help feeling a grudging kinship with Johnson. We were stained by the same brush. The same hatred directed at him—from the East, the liberals, the Ivy Leaguers, especially from the Kennedys themselves—reflected on me as well. It was a class hatred. When Johnson complained to Hugh Sidey of Life, “I don’t believe that I’ll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful, because I didn’t go to Harvard,” I knew what he meant. Harvard was a chord often sounded in the new world, which saw the country being controlled by academics in Cambridge and New Haven, and by New York newspaper barons and network executives (“the malevolent press of the Eastern Seaboard,” Johnson bitterly labeled them), and by old-money lawyers and bankers in the Boston-to-Washington corridor. These people held the reins on the lobbyists and elevated bureaucrats who were themselves moneyed, privileged, and conditioned to represent the interests of their class. They were the Eastern Establishment. Outside their circle the rest of us stood about like orphans peering into shop windows. It was the classic and predictable confrontation of new money versus old, of a raw new breed trying to wrench respectability out of the hands of the effete old families, who were bound to deride our nose-picking manners and our undisguised ambitions. We were playing out the comic drama America itself had played for the amusement of Europe during the last two centuries. We were the new New World, and Lyndon Johnson was our innocent abroad.
Everything about Lyndon—his size, his earthy way of speaking, his legendary gaucherie—was a caricature of Texas qualities. He never seemed like a real person to me; he was not only larger than life, he was a sort of mythic Texas freak, like those jackelope postcards tourists bought when they drove through the state. His touch was more than common, it was coarse. He didn’t pet his dog, he picked him up by the ears. His idea of entertaining foreign leaders was to take them to the ranch and speed about in his open Lincoln with a six-pack of beer. When he went around the world in 1966, he took along a planeload of plastic busts of himself, which an aide dispensed from a shopping cart—he even gave one to the pope. The Kennedy entourage detested him, largely because of the clash of styles between their elegant champion and his indomitably tacky successor. Their attitude toward him was sealed in Dallas, when Johnson abruptly took control. “We didn’t like Johnson taking over Air Force One when his own vice-presidential plane, with identical facilities, was available,” Kennedy aide Larry O’Brien remembered. “We didn’t like his delaying the takeoff. We resented his calling Jackie ‘honey.’ ” Bobby Kennedy never forgave Johnson’s demand to be sworn in immediately; it was unseemly and constitutionally unnecessary. Despite Jackie’s state of shock and the panic of the Kennedy aides to get the hell out of Dallas, Johnson held the plane on the ground until Judge Hughes arrived to administer the oath—not on a Bible, as Johnson believed, but on Kennedy’s Catholic missal. In the sharp-eyed view of the Kennedy men, it was typical of Johnson to get even this historic moment just wrong.
Jackie wouldn’t leave the White House. Of course Johnson wouldn’t hurry her. She said she had “nowhere else to go.” In Texas we felt that her reluctance to leave was a personal slight—against us. We felt her grief, but we also felt her resentment. She didn’t want to relinquish her husband’s bedroom to Lyndon, the archetypal Texan. She was in pain, but so were we, so were the Johnsons. Liz Carpenter, Mrs. Johnson’s press secretary, expressed the sentiment of many guilty Texans when they faced the coincidence of Kennedy’s murder in their state and his succession by Lyndon Johnson: “It’s a terrible thing to say,” Carpenter told Lady Bird, as they rode together to The Elms, where the new President resided, “but the salvation of the State of Texas is that the Governor was hit.” And Mrs. Johnson replied, “I only wish it could have been me.”
This was the bloody transfer of power between the new world and the old—a by-product of madness, an incidental coup. The new world was bound to come to power someday; the census was on our side; but the fact that it came too soon and that it came through murder made our accession illegitimate. Johnson believed that Bobby Kennedy actually considered preventing his presidency. “I thought that was on his mind every time I saw him the first few days, after I had already taken the oath. I think he was seriously calculating what steps to take. For several days he really kept me out of the president’s office. I operated from the Executive Office Building because it was not made available to me.”
Johnson understood that his presidency was premature, that he was acting as a regent for Kennedy’s ghost. Kennedy had drawn around him a Cabinet of pedigreed intellectuals, exactly the sort of men who were most likely to add luster to Kennedy’s own polish, but they would make his successor appear ignorant and crass, a Texas yokel. In their presence Johnson became intensely conscious of his background. He used to joke uncomfortably about how many men serving him were Rhodes scholars, how many had gone to Harvard, how many to Yale, but there was only one man in the room who had gone to Southwest Texas State Teachers College in San Marcos, Texas. He seriously considered not running for his own term in 1964, he told New York Times columnist James Reston, because the country was “not far enough from Appomattox” to accept a president from his part of the country. “I was not thinking just of the derisive articles about my style, my clothes, my manner, my accent, and my family,” Johnson recalled in his memoirs. “I was also thinking of a more deep-seated and far-reaching attitude—a disdain for the South that seems to be woven into the fabric of Northern experience.”
But the choice that year was not between the new world and the old, it was between Johnson and Goldwater, the one running under the banner of the Kennedy legacy and the other sounding the trumpet of new world insurgency. Johnson’s historic mandate in that contest was a repudiation of his own region and origins, and in a subtle way a slap at himself. If he had been running against Rockefeller, he might have understood more clearly how the nation was shaped, for him or against him.
I have wondered since then how much of the antiwar movement was actually an Eastern Establishment reaction to President Johnson. The same Establishment had drawn Kennedy into Vietnam in the first place and had steadily pulled Johnson in after him, until suddenly the Establishment changed its mind. Johnson watched them desert him and questioned what his critics would have said if Kennedy were alive and running the war. What would the students say, who loved Kennedy so? Johnson believed that if he had backed out of Vietnam, Robert Kennedy would be leading the pack against him, crying out at the betrayal of his dead brother’s policies.
In fact, Robert Kennedy did that anyway. I watched, with complicated feelings of guilt, obligation, and suspicion, as Bobby entered the primaries in 1968. He had a tie on my loyalties that went back to the School Book Depository, and yet I had always distrusted him. I didn’t understand how, exactly, a man who had worked for Joe McCarthy during the worst days of the anti-Communist witchhunts, who had been a hawk all during the early days of our Vietnam involvement, could present himself as a liberal peace candidate. His appeal actually had little to do with the war. From the beginning his supporters were evenly divided between those who approved of the war and those who opposed it. He was a Kennedy—that was what mattered—and the hysteria that surrounded his campaign had more to do with celebrity than politics, more to do with myth than reality.
When John Kennedy was alive, we understood him as a political man. In death, however, he was wrapped in the myth of Camelot, a myth invented by an anxious widow as a way of forestalling the judgment of history. After the assassination Jacqueline Kennedy summoned Theodore White to Hyannis Port, and as Life magazine held the presses she sold him on her own version of John Kennedy, the creature of destiny. “All I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy, it’s been an obsession with me,” Mrs. Kennedy said, according to White’s notes of the interview. “At night before we’d go to sleep … Jack liked to play some records … I’d get out of bed at night and play it for him … on a Victrola ten years old—and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record, the last side of Camelot, sad Camelot: … ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.’ ”
White dictated this story to his editor forty-five minutes later, with Jacqueline Kennedy standing over his shoulder, and the result of this collaboration was the most powerful myth of modern American politics. It ruined Johnson’s presidency. Even after he received the greatest majority vote in history, Johnson was overshadowed by the vastly romanticized re-creation of his predecessor’s brief term. Part of the message of Camelot was that the Kennedys were America’s royal family, and the White House rightfully belonged to them, especially to Bobby. Columnist Murray Kempton compared the Kennedys to the Bonapartes: “They identify with the deprived, being the radical foes of all authority when they are out of power.”
This is what the crowds were screaming about when Bobby’s campaign wheeled through America five years after his brother’s death. They were responding to the ideal of a golden age, an era of charm and sexiness that had been celebrated on television and in the fan magazines and then cut short by murder. Added to this nostalgic brew was a kind of spiritualism that saw Bobby as our link to his dead brother, and in a way to a dead America. And yet Bobby was not Jack. He was not elegant, he was not handsome; he was toothy, and his voice sometimes sounded as if it were floating on helium. In place of Jack’s charm, Bobby offered a grim drive for power. He was “ruthless”—that tag placed on him by Jimmy Hoffa, the corrupt Teamsters Union boss whom Kennedy hounded during his years as attorney general. He was also an opportunist. He had won election as senator from New York on the barest excuse of residency. And in 1968 he was late coming into the primaries to challenge LBJ; he had waited for Eugene McCarthy to show it could be done.
Nineteen sixty-eight was the year the Baby Boom arrived at the voting booth. Before the general election I would turn twenty-one, which was still the legal age required to vote, and for the first time I heard the candidates speaking to me, a fully vested citizen. The voice that most appealed was dry, witty, haughtily intellectual, and politically alienated; it was the voice of Eugene McCarthy. Norman Mailer characterized him as looking and feeling “like the dean of the finest English department in the land”—no wonder students accepted his authority. What we admired was his intelligence and his courage. Everybody knew that it was impossible to topple Johnson, especially from within his own party. But McCarthy ignored conventional wisdom. He refused to kiss babies or flatter campaign contributors, and he always said what he thought with eloquence, though without drama. He was pointedly anticharismatic. To the frustration of the press, McCarthy never permitted himself the hollow gesture, the hypocritical statement, or the trumped-up pseudoevent, which had become the mainstays of the evening news. He refused, as the New Republic noted, “to respond in kind to ersatz seriousness and spurious conscientiousness.” His genuineness was turned against him.
McCarthy came within 410 votes of beating Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. His main appeal, beyond his pledge to end the war, was the fact that he wasn’t supposed to run. Even my father admired him for that. McCarthy gathered support from unlikely quarters, including the Republicans and the Wallacites. (George Wallace was nominated in Dallas as the presidential candidate of the American Independent party.) Three fifths of the people who voted for McCarthy in New Hampshire actually supported American involvement in Vietnam and thought that Johnson wasn’t pressing the war aggressively enough. McCarthy was bucking the system, that was what mattered. Although he arrogantly advertised himself as the most qualified man ever to have run for the presidency, he was actually an interloper, and it is easy to perceive in him the same outsider appeal that became the basis for the more successful candidacies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
On March 31, 1968, I stood in the lobby of my dormitory and watched Johnson declare a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam. As always with Johnson on television, there was a languid, underwater quality to his speech and movements, as if he were hypnotized by the TelePrompTer. I could never square that awkward figure on the tube with the legendary muscleman of the Senate cloakroom. Whenever he came on TV my instinct was to leave the room, in the same way that I might steer clear of some pathetic relative at a family reunion. “I call upon President Ho Chi Minh to respond positively and favorably to this new step of peace,” Johnson said—a statement that was quietly and, I think, cynically received by the students around me. Then Johnson hesitated. He glanced away from the camera (he was looking at his wife) and continued: “There is division in the American house now. There is divisiveness among us all tonight. And holding the trust that is mine, as President of all the people, I cannot disregard the peril to the progress of the American people and the hope and prospect of peace for all people.… I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes.… Accordingly, I shall not seek, and will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” There was an instant of shocked silence before the room erupted in cheers. “We did it!” someone cried, and I knew what he meant. We—the American student body—had brought down the President of the United States.
We had booed him off the stage, that miserable creature with his compulsive fibs and grotesque piety. But there was another part of me that felt repudiated—as a Texan once again—and that made my hatred of Johnson seem cheap and traitorous. In some nonpolitical, purely human region of my soul I felt ashamed of what had been done to Johnson. No president had ever known the hounding mob that followed Johnson wherever he went, and finally kept him a prisoner inside the White House gates. What a relentless, formidable enemy we had become. In a way our persecution was a kind of assassination; at least Johnson thought so. “The only difference between the Kennedy assassination and mine,” he later said, “is that I am alive and it has been more torturous.”
Now that he was beaten I allowed myself to recognize him as a great man, in his own failed fashion. He had been trapped in the war, which he had no stomach for—although the war was the one issue that might have saved him. Until the Tet offensive that spring no more than 20 percent of the electorate favored withdrawal. When Johnson decided to bomb North Vietnam, his popularity rating immediately jumped 14 percent. If he had prosecuted the war more vigorously, he would very likely have been reelected, or else, if he had declared the war unwinnable and pulled out our troops, he would at least have been seen as a decisive leader. But Johnson was equally afraid of winning and losing. Finally the people who mattered to him, the liberals and the Eastern Establishment, turned against him and sent him off to the Siberia of permanent disgrace. He came home to Texas and let his hair grow down to his shoulders.
“It’s narrowed down to Bobby and me,” Eugene McCarthy said the day after his victory in the Wisconsin primary. At the time, neither Vice President Hubert Humphrey nor Richard Nixon appeared to be serious candidates. George Romney and Ronald Reagan were not giving Nixon much of a challenge in the Republican primaries, but Nixon had a reputation as a chronic loser; he was still trying to live down his tantrum before the press in 1962 when he was drubbed in the California governor’s race. McCarthy ridiculed the Republicans for their characteristic blandness: “They’re somewhat like the lowest forms of plant and animal life. Even at their highest point of vitality there is not much life in them; on the other hand, they don’t die.” As for Humphrey, he had lost his standing with the liberals during his hawkish years on Vietnam, and the moderates saw him as a hypocrite. He was trying to paint himself as a peace candidate, although he had advocated American troops in Vietnam as far back as the Eisenhower administration, and as Johnson’s vice president he called the war “a great adventure, and a wonderful one it is.” In the Senate, Humphrey had been a hero of the left because of his impassioned support for civil rights, but by 1968 he had become a buffoon, a tool of the Establishment. He launched his campaign bubbling about “the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose, the politics of joy.” He never approached Kennedy or McCarthy in the polls, so he stood back from the primaries and let the party bosses quietly assure him of the nomination through secret pledges and old debts now called in. He might not have campaigned at all, but he raced around the country nonetheless, unloading an unmatchable torrent of verbal energy. “I don’t know what kind of president Hubert would make,” marveled Groucho Marx. “He’d make a hell of a wife.”
McCarthy believed that Kennedy was his real opposition, and once he adjusted to Bobby’s entry into the race, he affected a certain relish for the idea of running against Kennedy. “So far he’s run with the ghost of his brother. Now we’re going to make him run against it. It’s purely Greek: he either has to kill him or be killed by him. We’ll make him run against Jack.” Then McCarthy added enigmatically, “And I’m Jack.”
When Johnson withdrew, however, it took the war out of the campaign, and without the war McCarthy was lost. He was not Jack after all. I continued to support him, although perhaps, as Abbie Hoffman noted, it was easy to cheer for McCarthy now, knowing he would never win; it was like cheering for the Mets. It was different with Bobby.
More than anyone, Bobby Kennedy knew the dangers of public life. He saw the nearly hysterical adulation he excited, which left his hands bleeding and his clothing in shreds. His supporters, such as journalist Jack Newfield, spoke of his “existential dimension,” acknowledging in that term the possibility of death that accompanied his candidacy. It was just such a possibility that sent the crowds into frenzies. Politics had become a blood sport for the Kennedys, and in that sense Bobby was playing a different game from that of the other candidates, and we were bound to notice him above the rest. “One of his possibilities was that he was always doomed,” the poet Robert Lowell remembered. “It’s very strange when you sort of anticipate something; then, when it happens, you’re almost more astonished than if you hadn’t anticipated it.” Kennedy himself acknowledged, “I play Russian roulette every time I get up in the morning. I just don’t care. There’s nothing I can do about it anyway.” That wasn’t true; he could have protected himself better than he did, but he made a show of thrusting himself into crowds and disdaining security. He refused the assistance of local police everywhere he went. When Jimmy Breslin asked aloud, “Do you think this guy has the stuff to go all the way?” John J. Lindsay of Newsweek replied, “Of course he’s got the stuff to go all the way, but he’s not going to go all the way. The reason is that somebody is going to shoot him. I know it and you know it, just as sure as we are sitting here—somebody is going to shoot him. He’s out there now waiting for him.”
In fact Kennedy probably could not have gone all the way. McCarthy had the momentum in the primaries, and Humphrey had the party bosses in his pocket. Even if Kennedy had secured the nomination there was a scandal lurking that could have destroyed his candidacy, having to do with Marilyn Monroe. Rumor said that Bobby had been with her the night she died, trying to persuade her not to give a press conference detailing her relationships with him and with Jack. His brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, had spirited him out of town after Marilyn killed herself. This was all gossip; on the other hand, Bobby’s nemesis, Jimmy Hoffa, had hired private detectives to bug Lawford’s seaside villa and Marilyn Monroe’s Hollywood bungalow. Hoffa supposedly had tapes of trysts between Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers, which he planned to distribute to newspapers.
Kennedy was in Indiana when news came of Martin Luther King’s death. That afternoon Kennedy spoke to a shocked crowd in the Indianapolis ghetto. It was the finest moment of his career. More than any other politician, perhaps more than any other white person in America, Bobby Kennedy had an authority to speak on the subject of political violence to the black community, which would so soon explode. “In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. For those of you who are black—considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible—you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization—black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.
“Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”
Privately he acknowledged the absurdity of events. He had lost patience with meaning. Perhaps that was his most existential quality. He told speechwriter Jeff Greenfield that King’s death was not the worst thing that ever happened. Then he remarked, “You know that fellow Harvey Lee Oswald, whatever his name is, set something loose in this country.” He knew that what was loose in the country was looking for him, and would find him, and when he was dead it would all have been pointless, for naught. “I am pretty sure there’ll be an attempt on my life sooner or later,” he admitted to French novelist Romain Gary. “Not so much for political reasons.… Plain nuttiness, that’s all.” As he walked in Martin Luther King’s funeral, with his coat slung over his shoulder, he observed how few white faces were in the crowd. Jimmy Breslin said that you’d think a few would come out to look, even for curiosity. Kennedy agreed. “Then maybe this won’t change anything at all?” Breslin asked. “Oh, I don’t think this will mean anything,” said Kennedy, and then he turned to Charles Evers, brother of another murdered civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, who was walking beside him. “Do you think this will change anything?” Kennedy asked. “Nothing,” said Evers. “Didn’t mean nothing when my brother was killed.”
“I know,” said Robert Kennedy.
In life, Martin Luther King had become a sad figure out of control of his movement, derided by the young as an Uncle Tom, but in death it was possible to believe he was a saint. He was not a perfect man, as the FBI wiretaps would prove. He was an egotist and an adulterer and something of a peacock. No doubt the minister of my own church in Dallas had a higher set of personal morals. Furthermore there was the problem of the Great Man—who is he to presume on history? Why should I follow him? Isn’t he flawed after all? Toward the end of King’s life people were turning away from him everywhere; even his disciples were talking about his naïveté and his irrelevance. King insisted on remaining nonviolent as the power passed into the hands of the Black Panthers and the hard-faced kids of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). Black Power and the upraised fist were the appropriate responses now. The gospel of revolution was not the New Testament but Fanon and Camus. The passive resistance of Christianity was pushed aside by the existentialist doctrine of “necessary violence,” which supposes that justice is more important than life. King was written off by the white liberal intelligentsia as being middle class and out of date. “Conventional commentators these days like to speak of King’s ‘nobility’ and the purity of his humanism, and they sigh that the world is not ready for him. But it is more accurate to say that King is not ready for the world,” wrote Andrew Kopkind in an infamous issue of The New York Review of Books, which had a diagram of a Molotov cocktail on the cover. Kopkind also wrote: “Morality, like politics, starts at the barrel of a gun.” The younger black leaders, such as Stokeley Carmichael, believed that King deserved part of the blame for the riots in the summer of 1967, in Harlem, Chicago, Cleveland, and elsewhere, which indicated the impatience of the black community for change. “Those of us who advocate Black Power,” Carmichael wrote, “are quite clear in our own minds that a ‘non-violent’ approach to civil rights is an approach black people cannot afford and a luxury white people do not deserve.”
Of course it was ironic that the reaction to King’s death was massive violence, but perhaps it was only the weight of his spiritual authority that had kept the ghettos unburned until then. In the final months of his life, King himself realized that the nonviolent tactics that had succeeded in the South were failing as the movement traveled North. One of his last marches in Memphis had turned into a riot over which he had no control. Now that he was safely martyred, the country just cracked in two, the black part and the white part. Everything King lived for seemed to be undone by his death, which sparked the worst eruption of civil disorders in the history of the nation. That night there were 711 cases of arson and ten people killed in Washington, D.C., alone. In Baltimore over the next four days there were more than a thousand fires, and it required 12,000 troops to subdue the riots. Before the convulsion subsided, more than 150 other cities in the country were in flames, more than 21,000 people were arrested, and 45 were killed, all but 5 of them black.
I had not loved John Kennedy until he was dead; then I fell guiltily in love with his legend, his promise—with Camelot, in short. With Martin Luther King my feelings were more confused. I thought I had moved beyond him. In 1968 Soul on Ice appeared, and I read it excitedly, because Eldridge Cleaver connected the black movement with the student movement and both with liberation movements throughout the world. The same connections had been made before—notably, by Martin Luther King—but they had not been made by a black rapist in a California prison, who was for me an American Camus. What appealed to me so strongly about Soul on Ice was the mood—romantic, existential, violent. I think those three adjectives described me and my generation as well. Reading Cleaver had persuaded me that Martin Luther King was beside the point. And yet if John Kennedy’s death in Dallas had marked the end of my age of innocence—and perhaps the nation’s as well—then Martin Luther King’s death began another period for me, having to do with my role as a man and my place in the world. The question for me was violence.
The greatest hypocrisy of my childhood was the notion of Christian love—that is, the pacific brotherly love that Jesus preached. “Turn the other cheek” was a failed doctrine in Dallas. I grew up celebrating violence. It was not just the ritualized violence of sports, which have always been important in Texas. It was a matter of history. Hadn’t my father’s heroic violence contributed to the end of the war? What might have happened if America had stayed out of the fight, allowing the Axis to overrun the globe? What if Hitler ruled the world? You would never hear a word against the military from the pulpits of Big D. As an American boy I subscribed to the proposition that might makes right; after all, America had never lost a war, and hadn’t we always been on the side of truth and justice?
My ideal American then was John Wayne. He was always setting people straight, with his fists or his gun, and he was invariably right. You could never imagine John Wayne turning the other cheek, but he did live by a code. Never back away from a fight, but don’t go looking for trouble. Never draw first, but when you do, shoot to kill. In his humbler moments, when he was lying in his bedroll under a billion stars, John Wayne might gaze upward and realize what a small figure he was in the universal scheme of things, but that was a passing thought and he found no solace in it. The night was filled with bandits and Indians, so John Wayne never slept. In the morning the sun lit up the existential landscape and you knew there was no God, there was only John Wayne.
That was my image of America’s role in the world. We lived by the code. In the real world the only certainty of justice came from our power, our willingness to use violence appropriately. It seemed to me then that strength and truth were welded together and that if one exercised power, justice would naturally follow.
Moreover, I liked violence. I liked the aesthetics of it—the beauty of the gunfight and the glory of the battlefield—it was noble action. My father brought home several weapons from the wars, including a samurai sword from the Occupation of Japan. When I drew it partly out of the black lacquered scabbard and tested the blade, it sliced my finger. I went light-headed at the sight of my blood running down the brilliant blade. Death, I thought, and I am its messenger.
In the sixties my faith in violence was shaken, first by the Freedom Riders and then by the assassinations. In Dallas we didn’t know what to make of the Freedom Riders. On the one hand, the Supreme Court said black people had the right to use public accommodations involved in interstate commerce, the right to use public rest rooms, to eat in restaurants, to ride on buses, and in Dallas we were great respecters of the law. We desegregated our own public facilities—except for the schools—without a fight. On the other hand, there was custom to consider. Texas was never a part of the Deep South, but it had been a member of the Confederacy, and we were southern in our prejudices. When the first busload of Freedom Riders approached Anniston, Alabama, in 1961, a mob punctured the bus’s tires and set it on fire. The next bus made it to Birmingham, where the police stood aside and let the white mob beat the riders nearly to death. The news reports never made it clear to me that the race riots we kept hearing about were actually white riots, often police riots. I didn’t clearly understand that the Freedom Riders were not fighting back. Nonviolence was such a foreign idea to me that I assumed the blacks and several whites on the buses had provoked the mob and got what was coming to them. I didn’t grasp the philosophy of nonresistance—but then nothing in my years of churchgoing had prepared me to understand the power of suffering, or redemptive love. The buses kept coming, and then the marches began, into the wall of fire hoses and mounted patrolmen and billy clubs and police dogs. I was surprised by the violence at first, but I gradually began to realize that these marchers and these Freedom Riders, who were always singing, expected to be hurt. They had come for two reasons: to be hurt, and for me to see it. They would not defend themselves. They would keep coming. How would John Wayne handle this? Which side of the line would he be on? You couldn’t see him charging his horse into the line of hot and frightened Negroes, clubbing a teenaged girl who was crying “Freedom!” Still, you wouldn’t expect him to hold hands with her and march unarmed into the face of the mob, or to stand still when some redneck spit in his face. Not to fight back was cowardice—wasn’t it? But in my heart I knew the limits of my courage. I was brave enough to fight, but I didn’t think I would ever be brave enough not to.
It was unsettling to hear Martin Luther King, in those early days, talking about Jesus. “I am still convinced Jesus was right,” he said in 1960 at the lunch-counter sit-ins in Durham, North Carolina. “I can hear Him saying, ‘He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.’ I can hear him crying out, ‘Love thy enemies.’ ” These were injunctions I also heard nearly every Sunday, but didn’t we, as a nation, live by the sword? I never heard a sermon preached on God’s commandment Thou shalt not kill. And you couldn’t say in Dallas that we loved our enemies.
I remember the hypothetical game we used to play in Sunday school: What would happen if Jesus came back? How would we treat him? Would we recognize him? Would we acknowledge the divinity of his message? Or would we ignore him, harass him, and ultimately kill him again? The lesson of this game was that saints are intolerable to society. We were supposed to be steeling ourselves for the return of the Redeemer, following that time when brother would rise against brother, and children against their parents. Yes, we were soldiers of the Lord. Our doctrine was brotherly love. And yet no one ever proposed that Jesus might return as a Negro.
Perhaps if President Kennedy had not been assassinated the civil rights movement would have remained nonviolent. It was strange, because Kennedy never had the emotional commitment to civil rights that Lyndon Johnson did—certainly Kennedy never intended anything like the Great Society—but his murder shattered the idealists. After that, nonviolence seemed ineffectual and naive. With three shots Lee Harvey Oswald did more to change history than Martin Luther King, with all his talk about the beloved community, had done in a decade. After that, good no longer seemed certain to triumph over evil.
It may sound absurd to say that Oswald murdered my faith in God. Indeed I was never more pious than the year after Kennedy’s death. Religion became a sanctuary for me, and I put my questioning aside. But it happened, slowly, that my faith was dissolving inside this shell of piety, and although the shell remained a while longer, the animal inside was dead. Martin Luther King had helped me see the hypocrisy of the religion I grew up in, but before I might have made the step across to join the ferocious Christians of the civil rights movement, Kennedy was dead, my faith was dying, and the movement was about to turn existential and begin its violent feast.
However, there were certain vestiges—religious ideals—that clung to me; it was all myth to me now, but even myth is a way of seeing things. In this sense I would always be a Christian. Once I had broken free of the church and declared myself agnostic, I found I had an unaccountable weakness for Jesus, or the idea of Jesus. I suspect this longing for Jesus may have been a part of the subconscious of my generation; suddenly there were quite a number of young men who looked like our idea of Jesus, with long hair and beards, preaching peace and brotherhood and stuffing flowers into the rifle barrels of the federal troops. They were trying to rescue Jesus from Christianity. I saw the beauty of their actions. I listened to the lyrics of the songs that called on us to smile on your brother, to come together, to reach out, to love one another right now, and I approved these sentiments just as I had in Sunday school. But I could never surrender entirely to the hippie mentality. There was too much anger inside me, too much turbulence and confusion. Also, the nonviolence of hippies seemed harmless and playful and passive; it could not be compared with the death-defying nonviolence of the Freedom Riders.
My attitude toward violence had not changed, except to this extent: In a godless world, you had to fight for justice—even if it meant fighting John Wayne, the arrogant vigilante, the unloving reactionary, the swaggering bully of white America.
In the period between John Kennedy’s death and his own, Martin Luther King tried to rebuild faith in nonviolence. He realized that he could not advocate nonviolence at home and continue to support a war abroad. One year to the day before his death, King spoke out against the Vietnam War at Riverside Church in New York City. I didn’t hear the speech; it wasn’t until after his death that I grew haunted by his words and his example and began to look to him for clues about how to conduct my life. King spoke about how Vietnam was a symptom of a deeper malady of the American spirit, and about the need to turn away from the militarism and violence inside ourselves. “This call,” he said, “for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love of all men. This oft-misunderstood and misinterpreted concept so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force—has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door that leads to ultimate reality.”
During King’s first march in Memphis to support the garbage collectors’ strike, a group of teenaged boys broke off from the march and went on a small rampage of brick throwing and window breaking. The Memphis Commercial Appeal described it as a “full-scale riot,” although most of the violence was on the part of the police, who fired into the crowd and fatally wounded a sixteen-year-old boy. There were 120 arrests and 50 people injured. King and his colleague, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, escaped by jumping into the backseat of a passing car. Nearly four thousand national guardsmen were rushed into town to impose a dusk-to-dawn curfew. That night King could not sleep. He wondered aloud, according to Abernathy, “if those of us who advocated nonviolence should not step back and let the violent forces run their course.” He was suddenly quite desperate to get home.
None of his friends had ever seen him so pensive and depressed as he was in the following week. He knew he would have to go back to Memphis, but he put it off several days. When he finally did return, he closeted himself in the Lorraine Motel and sent Abernathy to speak in his place at the rally. The weather was awful—there were tornado warnings out—so the crowd in the auditorium was only a thousand people, but they were so enthusiastic that Abernathy called the motel and summoned Dr. King. He drove through a rainstorm to deliver his final speech.
Did he know he was about to die? As a casual scholar of assassination, I’ve wondered about the premonitions of men about to be murdered. Lincoln’s personal aide, Ward Hill Lamon, recounted a dream the President had a few days before his death. In the dream the President heard a sobbing sound downstairs in the White House, and he arose and went searching for the source of the grieving. He entered the East Room. “There I met with a sickening surprise,” he told Lamon. “Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’ was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin!’ ” Lincoln, of course, was notoriously melancholy; the thought of death was never far from his mind. Because of threats, he had to be smuggled into Washington for his first inauguration, and during his presidency he was several times the object of assassination attempts. Twice his stovepipe hat was shot off his head. However, that dream suggests to me that Lincoln knew his fate was at hand. John Kennedy also brooded about assassination. The day before his death he told an assistant, “Anyone perched above the crowd with a rifle could do it.” Then, on the very morning he went to Dallas, he said to his wife, “You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president …” He pointed his finger like a gun and fired twice.
In the last days of Martin Luther King’s life, according to Andrew Young, one of his lieutenants, King developed a habit of looking about as if he might see an assassin stalking him. Like Lincoln, King had a preoccupation with death. He had twice attempted suicide as a child, by jumping out of windows, and in 1957 a crazed black domestic stuck an eight-inch letter opener into his chest while he was autographing copies of his book, Stride Toward Freedom, at a Harlem department store. After the Kennedy assassination he told his wife, “This is what is going to happen to me also.” Moreover, given the depression he had fallen into after the Memphis riot, he may have felt doomed and helpless, so that thoughts of death, which were never far away, rushed upon him. And yet his speech that last evening of his life still seems to me a work of prophecy, in which he saw not only his own imminent death but the future of the movement as well. He compared himself with Moses, who had led his people to the Promised Land but would not be permitted to enter there himself. He talked about the threats of death that followed him. That very morning the flight from Atlanta had been delayed so that the luggage could be searched for bombs. “Well, I don’t know what will happen now,” King said. “But it really doesn’t matter with me now.… Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land.” As he spoke, with that curiously impassive face of his, which was always like a mask of resignation, the congregation began to moan and cry out, and King’s lieutenants looked at each other in alarm. Andy Young thought the speech was macabre. “I may not get there with you,” King continued, “but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
I had grown up in a world that hated Bobby far more than it had hated Jack. Bobby had shown us the arrogance of power; he had a way of rubbing it in. He was always smarter, tougher, braver, meaner than everyone else. He had none of the easy glamour that made his brother attractive even to his opponents. In Texas he had almost no organized support at all. Partly, of course, this was because of the well-advertised loathing Kennedy had for Lyndon Johnson. One of the few old party men in the state to declare for Kennedy was Judge Woodrow Wilson Bean in El Paso, who said he was doing it “because if he’s elected, anyone from Texas will need a pass to get to Washington, and I’m going to be the man handing out passes.” But there was more to our fear of Bobby than that. The dread of change and revolt that had run through the new world in 1960 seemed far more palpable now. Bobby was drawing power from the disinvested, the underclass. What frightened people in Texas—and I think this apprehension was widespread around the country—was the subconscious intimation that Bobby was Samson and that he would bring the status quo crashing down in his vastly public death.
Of course, this may have been a miscalculation. Bobby Kennedy had been a liberal senator, but his politics were historically conservative, and in the end he was once again confounding traditional liberals by attacking the welfare system and proposing himself as the law-and-order candidate. “I get the feeling I’ve been writing some of his speeches,” Governor Reagan said in California, and Richard Nixon pointed out, “Bobby and I have been sounding pretty much alike.”
To be the existential hero, according to Jack Newfield, Kennedy’s friend and biographer, was to define and create oneself through action, to learn everything from experience. The last several months of Kennedy’s life are a legend of discovery and change. His candidacy was an extraordinary personal journey through the streets of the northern ghettos, the rural roads of the impoverished South, the oppressive world of migrant labor in California, the boiling campuses everywhere. No doubt he was deeply affected by the needs of the Indians and farmworkers and sharecroppers who became his special constituencies. And yet, as British journalist Henry Fairlie points out, “no constituencies can be bought more cheaply than the poor and the young.” Kennedy was a powerful magnet, but his rivals already had nailed down the more significant Democratic franchises. McCarthy had the suburbs and the heart of the peace movement; Humphrey had the labor bosses, the civil rights leaders, and the party mechanics. What remained were the alienated and the dispossessed—people like Sirhan Sirhan.
Sirhan was born in Jerusalem in 1944. He had been traumatized early in life by Zionist terrorism, which left him with a lifelong hatred of Israel and its defenders. His family immigrated to Southern California when he was twelve.
Not long after that, bitterly unhappy in his adopted country, Sirhan may have heard the first soundings of his own destiny. In high school he underlined passages in two history books about assassination: one concerned the murder of Archduke Ferdinand, the event that precipitated World War I, the other was the death of President McKinley. One of the sentences in the history books read: “After a week of patient suffering the President died, the third victim of an assassin’s bullet since the Civil War.” Sirhan noted in the margin, “Many more will come.”
He was already an assassin in spirit; what remained was to select his victim. Sirhan became a Rosicrucian. He wrote out his objectives in a notebook, a form of mind control practiced by that group. Robert Kennedy’s name first appears in the notebook on January 31, 1968, shortly after the senator from New York proposed that the United States sell fifty Phantom jets to Israel to replace the aircraft lost in the Six-Day War. “RFK must die,” Sirhan wrote. At that time Kennedy was not a presidential candidate, and the chances that he would cross Sirhan’s path in California must have seemed remote. “Robert F. Kennedy must be sacrificed for the cause of poor exploited people,” Sirhan noted. He also wrote, “I believe that the U.S. is ready to start declining, not that it hasn’t—it began in Nov. 23, 63.”
Just after midnight on the morning of June 5, 1968, Robert Kennedy stood on the podium in the Embassy Room in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles to acknowledge his victories in both the California and the South Dakota primaries. “Here is the most urban state [California] of any of the states of our Union, South Dakota the most rural of any of the states of our Union. We were able to win them both. I think that we can end the divisions within the United States.” He made a pitch for McCarthy to capitulate. “What I think is quite clear is that we can work together in the last analysis, and that what has been going on within the United States over a period of the last three years—the division, the violence, the disenchantment with our society; the divisions, whether it’s between blacks and whites, between the poor and the more affluent, or between age groups or on the war in Vietnam—is that we can start to work together. We are a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country. I intend to make that the basis for running.”
Sirhan shot Kennedy as the candidate walked through the food service corridor to escape the crowd. “Kennedy, you son of a bitch,” Sirhan said as he fired a .22-caliber revolver an inch away from the senator’s head. The hollow-point bullet exploded in the right hemisphere of Kennedy’s brain. Sirhan fired seven more times, hitting Kennedy twice in the right armpit as he fell to the floor, and wounding five other persons.
Kennedy lay for a while on the floor, as confusion swarmed around him. He fingered rosary beads and asked people to stand back and give him air. The next day newspapers would carry a photograph of him splayed out there, among the shoes, with the puzzled look of a man falling through space. As they lifted Kennedy onto a stretcher, “The last thing I heard him say,” recalled Charles Quinn, a television correspondent, “was ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ like that, in the voice of a rabbit at the end of his life.”
Later Eugene McCarthy came to the hospital where Kennedy lay dead, and said to Ted Kennedy that he had heard the name “Sirhan Sirhan” on the radio, and he remarked how odd it was, and mysterious, and coincidental, that he had the same first and last names, like the hero in Camus’s The Stranger. A man comes out of nowhere and kills.
This was the year of my political education. Nineteen sixty-eight.