April 5-7, 1968
The sixties was an incendiary decade. Carpets of napalm fell on Vietnam, American soldiers set fire to hooches, and Buddhist monks burned themselves alive. Americans torched flags, draft cards, and recruiting stations. Militants shouted, "Burn, Baby, Burn!" and in the summer of 1967, blacks burned Newark and Detroit. Later, studies and commissions would decide that greed and anger more than revolutionary fervor had motivated the looting and fires that followed King's assassination, but no one in the chartered plane bringing Robert Kennedy back to Washington from Cleveland knew that, and they re-turned to a city besieged by its own citizens, occupied by the military, and apparently facing an insurrection.
The passengers fell silent as the pilot circled Washington. Below, they saw smoke blanketing the Mall, and artillery pieces and army trucks ringing the White House—evidence of the greatest civil calamity to strike America since the Civil War. Jim Tolan thought, "My God! What's happening to us?" John Bartlow Martin believed they were witnessing the civil rights movement turning into the black revolution, and Adam Walinsky, remembering the previous summer's riots in Newark and Detroit, thought, "Well, it's finally Washington's turn."
Kennedy asked the pilot to circle the city again. After landing he said, "I think I can do something with these people." He proposed driving into the riot zone, and attempting to calm the mobs of looters and arsonists. His aides were appalled. Dutton, stalling for time, pointed out that as a courtesy Kennedy should first inform the mayor of the District of Columbia, Walter Washington. Martin told him that he could not accomplish much while people were still rioting, and warned that he would appear to be grandstanding. Kennedy reluctantly agreed to go home.
Two days later, he and Ethel visited the riot zone to attend 8 a.m. Palm Sunday services at the New Bethel Baptist Church. Its pastor, the Reverend Walter Fauntroy, was the local representative of Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), and he and Kennedy had become friends while coordinating King's 1963 March on Washington. Fauntroy's sermon compared the final weeks of Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King Jr., and he told the congregation that during their last conversation King had said, "I'm afraid this country just isn't ready for nonviolence."
Stokely Carmichael, the militant widely blamed for inciting the riots in Washington by delivering an incendiary speech to a street-corner mob, was also in the congregation. On April 4, he had waved a revolver in the air while shouting, "When the white man comes he is going to kill you . . . go home and get you a gun and then come back because I got me a gun." He was probably carrying that gun this morning.
Kennedy took communion with the congregation. Within hours, the Bishop of Washington had learned that a member of America's most illustrious Catholic family had received the sacrament in a Protestant church. When a Catholic cleric called Frank Mankiewicz to protest, he dismissed the story as an improbable rumor. Later that afternoon, a sheepish Kennedy admitted it was true, explaining that everyone else had been drinking the grape juice so he had simply joined in. John Kennedy, who had been scrupulous about observing church ritual, but was less devout than Bobby, would never have made such an error, but Bobby's politics were devoid of religious calculation.
After the service, Fauntroy and Kennedy stood together at the church door shaking hands with the congregation. When Kennedy asked about destruction in the surrounding neighborhood, Fauntroy said, "Let me show you." They began walking toward Fourteenth Street, which had suffered some of the worst destruction. Ethel Kennedy, Peter Edelman, and a small group of reporters and parishioners followed behind. They passed workmen using wrecking cranes to demolish gutted buildings and firemen playing hoses on embers. They heard burglar alarms clanging and sound trucks announcing a 4 p.m. curfew, stepped on shards of glass, and gagged on smoke and tear gas. They saw firebombed white-owned stores and black ones saved by their SOUL BROTHER signs. They may have noticed that rioters had spared the office of the local voting precinct while torching the adjoining offices, not because someone had scrawled SOUL BROTHER across its plate glass window, but because someone had hung Robert Kennedy's photograph in it.
As Kennedy picked his way through this postwar Berlin landscape of smoldering rubble, coughing and wiping his eyes, he muttered, "It's bad. It's terrible. We've got to do something."
The crowd surrounding him grew with every block, becoming so large and boisterous that a squad of National Guard troopers mistook it for a mob of looters and put on gas masks and fixed bayonets. Policemen who had been following in a squad car accelerated and swerved into their line of fire, and soon Kennedy and the soldiers were shaking hands.
Ethel pointed to some apartments over a row of burned-out stores and asked, "Who lived there, white people?"
"No! Black people," the crowd shouted.
Women leaning from windows yelled "Is that Kennedy?" then waved and cheered when they saw it was.
He stopped at one of the only grocery stores remaining open. A man waiting in line grabbed his hand and said, "I have ten children, too, and I want a better life for them." A woman stared at him in disbelief. "Is that you?" she asked. "I knew you'd be the first to come here, darling."
After reaching a rise in the road Kennedy and Fauntroy stopped, momentarily stunned by a panorama of destruction reaching almost to the White House.
Fauntroy asked Kennedy how his campaign was going. Kennedy replied that it was going well, and that if he won Indiana and Nebraska, he thought he could win Oregon and California, and if he won California, he thought he could win the nomination. He paused for a moment, as if carefully considering his next words before saying, "But there's one problem."
"What's that, Bobby?"
"I'm afraid there are guns between me and the White House." Fauntroy froze, stunned that Kennedy had suddenly voiced the silent fear of everyone who knew him, walked through a crowd with him, stood with him on a street corner surrounded by tall buildings, or rode with him in an open car.
Had this been the only time that Kennedy had made a comment like this, it might be dismissed as an aberration, perhaps prompted by King's death, and by the troops whose guns were at this moment surrounding the White House. But on the night of King's assassination he had told Joan Braden, "It could have been me," and a month from now he would tell author Romain Gary, "There is no way to protect a candidate during the campaign. You must give yourself to the crowd, and from then on you must take your chances. . . . I know that there will be an attempt on my life sooner or later. Not so much for political reasons, but through contagion, through emulation."
It was not just the campaign that made him nervous. Several months after Dallas, he had told Ken O'Donnell, "I knew they would get one of us, but I always thought it would be me." In 1965, at a surprise fortieth birthday party that Ethel had organized for him while he was traveling through Brazil—a trip scheduled so he would be away on the second anniversary of his brother's death—some guests pulled on some party crackers, and at the sound of the bangs he had dropped his head into his hands and cried, "Oh, no . . . please don't." Four days later, on the anniversary of his brother's assassination, he was sitting with an American woman at an outdoor cafe in Rio de Janeiro when several loud bangs sent him leaping out of his chair. When he realized they came from a backfiring car he told her, "Sooner or later. Sooner or later."
On March 10, 1968, six days before announcing his candidacy, he had imagined seeing an assassin mingling with a crowd of farmworkers at an outdoor rally in Delano, California, that he was attending with Cesar Chavez. The man had brown hair and gray eyes, and wore blue jeans and a blue jean jacket. Kennedy pointed him out to Dolores Huerta, one of Chavez's deputies. She questioned him in Spanish and became suspicious when he did not respond. Afterward, she asked some union members to stand behind Kennedy and cover his back. Kennedy noticed the man again while being escorted to his car by union official Mack Lyons. "Watch that guy," he told Lyons. "He has a gun." Lyons saw a middle-aged man with a smooth complexion and yellowish skin. He went over and stood next to the man until he disappeared into the crowd. As Lyons helped Kennedy into the car he could feel his body shaking.
Every public appearance that Kennedy made that spring was an act of courage; every motorcade in an open car an act of defiance. Before King's assassination, an attempt on his life had seemed likely; afterward it seemed inevitable.
Some farmworkers told Chavez they would not vote for Kennedy because they were afraid that if he won the nomination someone would shoot him. Jerry Bruno recalls going into small towns to advance Kennedy rallies and being told, "I like Kennedy, but they won't let him live to be president." An underground newspaper in San Francisco published an imaginary interview with the ghost of President William McKinley in which he said, "Don't waste your vote on Kennedy. They're going to kill him." A city official in Logansport, Indiana, told reporters he had stationed policemen on roofs because "we just want to make sure he [Kennedy] leaves town the same way he came in."
The possibility of an assassination "was on our minds all spring," John Bartlow Martin said, and whenever he and Kennedy rode together in a motorcade or walked through a crowd, Martin watched windows and studied faces. When a man whose face was twisted in anger asked Kennedy a hostile question during a whistle-stop, Martin's eyes never left him, and if the man had reached into his pocket, he was prepared to push Kennedy out of the line of fire.
Life's Loudon Wainwright described the Kennedy press corps as "a partisan band, obsessed with the future of the candidate, sensitive to his moods and . . . concerned to the point of anxiety about his safety and his success." As reporters became fonder of Kennedy, they became more protective, unsettled by firecrackers and backfiring cars, and encircling him in crowds whenever there were rumors of death threats. Some were prepared to take the bullet for him, like the female reporter who told him, "If anything happens, I'll save you. I'll throw myself in front of you."
Photographers and reporters who had covered JFK found it difficult to cover Bobby. One of Bill Eppridge's colleagues at Life told him, "Look, you'll notice that there are not a lot of guys who worked with his brother. Why? Because they're all looking over their shoulders at the crowd instead of at the candidate."
Some newsmen were concerned they might miss the assassination of a second Kennedy. One network ordered its film crews never to leave his side. AP reporter Joe Mohbat remembers that "if there was a handshaking reception at 11:30 on a Saturday night with fifteen people— you couldn't make a newspaper or a TV spot at that hour—somebody would say, 'I'm going back to the hotel and get a drink. I'm bushed.' And everybody would sort of look at him and say, 'Really? Where are you going to be when it happens?' Or 'Where are you going to be when the shots ring out?'" One evening, Mohbat skipped a rally and remained on the chartered plane. When Bobby and Ethel returned, she tugged on his jacket and said, "Joe, where were you? I almost got killed." He almost went into shock before realizing that she was joking.
The more a reporter admired Kennedy, the more painful it was to cover him. Hays Gorey thought that by campaigning "virtually unprotected," and by letting anyone who wanted to get close to him touch him or pull him from a moving convertible, Kennedy had turned his campaign into a form of slow-motion suicide.
John Lindsay believed that everyone in the press bus viewed an attempted assassination as inevitable. "All they could do was protect him from personal injury like rock-throwing," he said, "but it was not possible to protect him from what ultimately happened. There wasn't a single person in this outfit who didn't know that."
Six months after his assassination, Sylvia Wright engaged in a stream-of-consciousness unburdening, telling an interviewer, "I used to get very cross with Chuck [Charles Quinn]. . . . I would say, 'Look, I don't want to hear all your pessimistic, sadistic talk. I think it's sick.' Because that's just what they talked about. Every time I would say, 'I have to get stuff on an 8:30 flight, otherwise I won't be able to get it on until 1:30. . . . Then I can change clothes and be ready, and you won't have to wait for me to go to dinner. And Chuck would say, 'then you won't be there if he gets shot.' " Wright herself was not immune to the death-watch atmosphere. When Bobby's sister Pat Lawford had suggested waiting on the press bus during a chilly evening rally, Wright had said, "I really can't, Pat. It's outdoors and anything can happen outdoors because you can't control who's around."
Few politicians have been loved and hated as passionately as Bobby Kennedy, or made enemies as dangerous as Jimmy Hoffa and J. Edgar Hoover. An FBI informer reported that Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa had said, "I've got to do something about the sonofabitch Bobby Kennedy. . . . He doesn't even have any guards on his house. What do you know about plastic bombs?"
The threats spiked after Kennedy began running for president. Many originated in California. Ethel received a copy of a political cartoon depicting him as a little boy dragging a sack of his father's money into Indiana. "This is a perfect likeness of your 'groovy' husband," someone had typed across its top, "Why don't you all get out of Indiana before it is too late!" An FBI informant reported that the Mob had put out a contract of several hundred thousand if Kennedy appeared poised to win the nomination, and every week FBI agents provided Frank Mankiewicz with photographs of potential assassins. Mankiewicz scanned faces at airports and rallies, searching for a match.
Kennedy appeared to face the threats with an insouciant fatalism. If someone raised the subject of a possible assassination he would say, "What happens, happens," or "If anyone wants to kill me, it won't be difficult," or he would quote Camus: "Knowing that you are going to die is nothing." When Warren Rogers of Look asked if he ever feared that his unruly fans or his enemies might injure him, he said, "Oh hell, you can't worry about that. Look at their faces. These people don't want to hurt me. They just want to see me and touch me," but then he added, "Well, doing anything in public life today is Russian roulette."
He would tolerate small detachments of plainclothes men, but only if they remained at a distance and were inconspicuous. He resisted surrounding himself with uniformed police officers in the belief that they excited a crowd and made it more aggressive, and made it appear that he was afraid of the public.
Former FBI agent Bill Barry, who served as his one-man unarmed security detail, was as vigilant as possible under the circumstances. He and other aides covered Kennedy from the front and rear when he moved through crowds, hid his motorcade cars overnight to prevent them from being wired with explosives, and had plainclothes police officers watch his room while he slept. But Barry could not prevent him from taking his cocker spaniel Freckles out for a walk, or wandering alone through hotel lobbies. Nor could Barry turn off the television lights at nighttime rallies that made Kennedy an easy target. He urged him to hire a second bodyguard, and complained to Jimmy Breslin, "I get mixed up with crowds and I can't see. And I get tired. Maybe I won't be able to react quickly enough. I wish someone would talk with him."
Kennedy felt safest when surrounded by a crowd, and most at risk if he left an auditorium, ballroom, or building through a back exit, kitchen, or underground garage. After Adam Walinsky and Jerry Bruno tricked him into leaving a hall in Montana through a rear exit, he became furious, telling them, "You must never do anything like that again. . . . I don't care what you've heard or what the cops say. I want it to stop. If someone wants to kill me, they're going to kill me. I do not want to live from day to day with this constant threat."
During the tour, Barry and Tolan had incurred his wrath by bringing him to the ballroom of Seattle's Olympic Hotel through its kitchen and scullery. When they tried steering him out the same way, he jumped from the dais into the crowd and headed toward the main door. A few days later in Salt Lake City, police received a tip that a bomb was set to explode in the Terrace Ballroom of the Hotel Utah while he was speaking. Bruno told him about it, adding that to avoid a panic the police had decided not to inform the audience. A police official intercepted Kennedy in the lobby of his hotel and ordered him to stay away from the event. Kennedy refused. The official blocked his car with police cruisers. Kennedy stuffed his hands in his pockets, put his head down, and walked. He told the audience about the bomb and said, "If you want to leave you should leave in an orderly fashion. Be careful of the children. Anyone who wants to stay, I'll stay with you." After no one left, he said, "This is what I call opening the campaign with a bang. But let me tell you, if I have to go, I can't think of anybody I would rather go with than you people here tonight."
LIKE OTHERS WHO loved Robert Kennedy, Walter Fauntroy had wanted to believe that he was oblivious to the dangers of an assassination. Knowing that whenever he rode through a city in an open car he also imagined, like many of those traveling with him, Jackie in her pink suit and the Texas Book Depository, was too painful. Fauntroy was so upset by Kennedy's remark about guns that he continued walking with him and missed the start of his 11 o'clock service. Finally, unable to contain himself any longer, and wondering if there had been some specific threat, he asked him what he had meant about guns separating him and the White House.
Kennedy fixed Fauntroy with a piercing stare and said, "Nothing." But in a way, he had said everything. He had said that, like Jackie, he feared that what had happened to Jack could happen to him. He had explained why Fred Dutton noticed his adoring crowds transporting him "out of whatever morbid state he was in at the time"; why Jim Stevenson detected "a resident, melancholy bleakness" in his face; and why, after traveling with him in Indiana, AP reporter Saul Pett noticed moments when, "almost alone at last, quiet at last," he would stare straight ahead, "beyond all other things in sight." At that moment, Pett wrote, "there comes then into those blue eyes, like a shadow over a turquoise sea, a look of such infinite sadness, or such terrible hurt, one feels compelled to look away."
It was assumed that during these moments of infinite sadness Kennedy was thinking about his late brother. But his comment to Fauntroy, like those to Joan Braden, Romain Gary, Dolores Huerta, Mack Lyons, and others, suggests that the fear that guns lay between him and the White House was always with him. It was these guns that led his press corps and staff to treat him with a tenderness customarily extended to the terminally ill, and that explain why he campaigned so passionately, as if this campaign might have to serve as legacy, and epitaph.
Four days after walking through Washington with Fauntroy, Kennedy was in Lansing, Michigan, when Fred Dutton suddenly burst into his hotel room and began drawing down the shades. He explained that police had spotted a man with a rifle on the roof of a neighboring building. Kennedy, angrier than Dutton had ever seen him, said, "Don't close them. If they're going to shoot, they'll shoot." Meanwhile, Bill Barry had persuaded a delegation of local politicians to meet Kennedy in an underground garage instead of the hotel lobby. After discovering what Barry had done, Kennedy told Dutton, "Don't ever do that. We always get into the car in public. We're not going to start ducking now." (He later told Dick Tuck, "I do not go out back doors; I do not go through basements.") He ordered his driver to stop in the street outside the hotel and jumped out, making himself an easy target. But two weeks later, when teenagers attending a rally in Scottsburg, Indiana, set off a string of poppers that made a loud bang and shot streamers into the air, he flinched and scanned the crowd, looking for the source of the explosions. Shirley Amick, a local supporter sitting next to him on the platform, has never forgotten the look in his eyes, saying, "I saw real fear there."