April 16 and May 11, 1968
A photograph hanging in the office of Father Peter Klink, president of the Red Cloud Indian School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, shows Robert Kennedy sitting on the edge of a bed with Christopher Pretty Boy, a ten-year-old Lakota Sioux with silky hair and large ears whose parents had died the week before in an automobile accident. The cabin where they are sitting belongs to Mrs. Veronica James, who has adopted Pretty Boy and his three siblings after the accident, meaning that nine people are living in this single room. Kennedy's hands are jammed into his trouser pockets and he is smiling, as if there was nowhere he would rather be than sitting on a worn blanket with a heartbroken orphan in a shack in Calico, one of the poorest communities on the poorest Indian reservation in North America.
A Jesuit Father from the Red Cloud Mission took the photograph, and because Kennedy had asked aides and reporters to remain outside, it is the only record of this meeting. In 1997, the Red Cloud School basketball team played in a tournament in Washington, D.C., and Klink invited Robert Kennedy's daughter Kerry to join the boys for lunch. He presented her with a framed copy of the photograph lacking only the note penciled onto the back of the original: "Taken at Calico Village Pine Ridge Reservation, April 16, 1968. Christopher Pretty Boy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were both dead a year after this picture was taken."
Klink remembers that he and Kerry Kennedy, who had been nine in 1968, struggled to make sense of the photograph. Since then, he has decided that it demonstrates that "what Kennedy wanted for America was often at odds with what was politically expedient."
The reporters and aides standing outside Mrs. James's home that morning were also trying to make sense of Kennedy's meeting with Pretty Boy, and of his obsession with Native Americans. It had started when he was attorney general and discovered that the Justice Department routinely litigated Indian land claims. He immediately reversed this policy and became such a vigorous advocate for Indian rights that at the 1963 convention of the National Congress of Indians in Bismarck he was adopted into the tribes and given the name Brave Heart. He told representatives of ninety tribes that they were being held in bondage by social and economic oppression, a situation he called "a national disgrace," and said that although the Kennedy administration was trying to provide them with better housing, education, medical care, and job opportunities, these only amounted to "spiritual first aid," and they deserved much more.
After being elected to the Senate in 1965, he visited reservations in upstate New York, called Indians "victims of racial discrimination in their own land," collected so many tomahawks, arrows, and belts that his office resembled a teepee, and was heard to remark, "I wish I'd been born an Indian."
He was interested most in Indian education. While campaigning for Democratic congressional candidates in 1966, he had visited a reservation school in North Dakota and asked its principal to show him the books about Indian history and culture in the school library. The only one contained an illustration of Cherokees scalping white settlers. The principal told Kennedy that Indians lacked any history or culture, so why should there be books on those subjects? Kennedy's aide Dick Tuck, who witnessed the exchange, remembered that "Bob was incensed—not incensed; he was upset—not upset: he was mad."
He also came away mad from an Indian orphanage in New Mexico whose director joked that if Ethel Kennedy thought the kids were so cute he could sell her one, and madder still after touring an Indian boarding school where students could not go home for Christmas because funds had not been allocated for their transportation. While visiting a reservation near Pocatello, Idaho, he became so furious after seeing a library book with an illustration of an Indian scalping a blond girl that NBC correspondent Sander Vanocur decided he was someone who functioned "in a near constant state of outrage."
In 1967, Kennedy persuaded his fellow senators to create a subcommittee on Indian education and make him chairman. During a trip to Los Angeles he persuaded Nicole Salinger, the wife of JFK's former press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to accompany him to a reservation school outside the city. She remembered three boys who had been painfully shy. But they opened up to Kennedy after he asked them questions such as "Did they smoke?" and "Did they have brothers and sisters?" that indicated, according to Salinger, an ability to put himself in the place of these children.
No issue outraged Kennedy more than the high suicide rate among Indian teenagers. When he announced that he was running for president he condemned what he called "the inexcusable and ugly deprivation which causes . . . young Indians to commit suicide on their reservations because they've lacked all hope and they feel they have no future." He kept talking about Indians throughout his campaign, telling Indiana steelworkers and Nebraska farmers that the reservations were a national disgrace, and that after discovering that an Indian child had died of starvation on the same day that he visited her reservation, "a little bit of me died, too."
Of approximately seventy events that Kennedy attended during the first month of his campaign, ten were on Indian reservations or at Indian schools. His aides believed he was wasting his time and tried to remove these appearances from his schedule. He called them "callous sons of bitches" and reinstated them. Fred Dutton begged him to cut back, arguing that Indians only amounted to a couple of hundred thousand voters in an electorate of sixty million, while the ones who actually voted numbered "pretty near zero."
During the final three days of the tour, four of his nine events in Arizona and New Mexico involved Indians. On March 29 in Albuquerque, he told the superintendent of an Indian school who reported spending twenty-two cents a day to feed each pupil, "When I was Attorney General, we spent more than that on the prisoners in Alcatraz." In Tucson, he boarded a small propeller plane for a two-hour flight to the Navajo capital at Window Rock, Arizona. As it bumped through choppy weather, heading for an unpaved strip illuminated by the headlights of two rows of automobiles, Dutton snapped, telling him, "We're in a campaign and you should knock off the Injuns." Kennedy was suffering from laryngitis and scribbled his reply on a yellow legal pad. He wrote, "Those of you who think you're running my campaign don't love Indians the way I do, you're a bunch of bastards."
His speech at Window Rock was the most passionate of the tour. It was largely ad-libbed, and concerned three topics that moved him— Indians, children, and education. He asked the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) bureaucrats sitting in the front row, "Is it not barbaric to take children as young as five and send them a thousand miles from their families to a boarding school?" After reminding them that two boys had recently frozen to death after fleeing a reservation school, he said, "When the United States can spend $130 million a year on Indian education but does not have enough money to send a child home for Christmas then something is pretty bad." Cheers and war whoops rang through the hall. As he was leaving an elderly man grabbed his hand and said, "I've waited all my life for a white man to say that."
Before deciding to run, Kennedy had scheduled hearings of his subcommittee on Indian education at the Pine Ridge reservation on April 16. He could have easily postponed them until after the June 4 South Dakota primary, a contest that had assumed greater importance after Johnson's withdrawal. The state promised to be a difficult one for him. Senator Eugene McCarthy represented neighboring Minnesota and was considered an honorary South Dakotan. Minnesota's other U.S. senator, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, had been born and raised in the state. Aside from Kennedy and McCarthy, the ballot also listed a slate of Johnson-Humphrey delegates who were publicly backing Humphrey. The South Dakota and California primaries both fell on June 4, and Kennedy victories in urbanized and diverse California and rural and conservative South Dakota would impress Daley and the other bosses and hurt Humphrey because, as one South Dakota newspaper pointed out, "It would be quite a lever at the national Convention if he [Kennedy] could say that Hubert couldn't even carry his home state." Because more delegates were at stake in California, Kennedy could only spend two days in South Dakota, making his decision to spend most of one of them on a sparsely populated Indian reservation even more remarkable, or foolhardy. Father Jim Fitzgerald of the Holy Rosary Mission, who helped to arrange Kennedy's visit, had believed until the last minute that he would cancel the trip because, as Fitzgerald puts it, "I mean, how many votes could he get?" Later, Fitzgerald decided that Kennedy had come so his press corps could see the reservation's desperate poverty—part of what Fitzgerald calls Kennedy's "educational agenda."
The nearest airport to Pine Ridge was at Chandron, Nebraska. When Kennedy landed there on April 16, the sons and daughters of the region's conservative ranchers and farmers, who had been given a school holiday in his honor, pushed down a steel fence and mobbed his plane. His official welcoming party included Judi Cornelius, an Indian college student who had arranged the Pine Ridge visit, and Sam Deloria, a Yale-educated Indian who ran the reservation planning office. Deloria rode on the press bus so he could brief reporters. During the ninety-minute journey they asked two questions: "How long until we arrive?" and "How long until we leave?" When the bus stopped near Pretty Boy's cabin at Calico, most remained on board, like students boycotting a boring field trip.
Kennedy had dragged them to a Connecticut-sized reservation with sixty miles of paved roads, no public transportation, and not a single supermarket, bank, motel, library, or movie theater. In cities, poverty hides behind doors. In Appalachia, forests and hollows camouflage it. But Pine Ridge's prairies made it impossible to ignore the junked cars and tumbledown shacks. Half its inhabitants were classified as "destitute," and two thirds of its buildings as "dilapidated." It had a 75 percent unemployment rate and the lowest per capita income in the nation. Only half of its households had electricity, and even fewer had running water. The average life expectancy was forty-eight for men and fifty-two for women, twenty years below the national average, and the lowest in the Western Hemisphere except for Haiti. Its youth suicide rate was three times the national average and, according to former Pine Ridge chief Johnson Holy Rock, it was not uncommon for a young woman to go out to collect firewood and be found hanging from a tree, or a young man to drive into a utility pole on purpose.
Since his brother's assassination, Robert Kennedy had not only sought out extreme physical challenges, but also extremes of poverty and suffering. On April 16, sitting in Mrs. James's ramshackle cabin in Calico with the orphaned Pretty Boy, he had finally reached the ground zero of human suffering on the North American continent.
Among those waiting for him to emerge from the cabin was David Harrison, an Honorary Kennedy from Massachusetts whom Ted Kennedy had recruited to organize North and South Dakota. Harrison had arranged for key North Dakota Democrats to meet Kennedy at his Fargo hotel on the evening of April 15. But after a predawn flight from Washington, two motorcades in Indiana, a television taping, and a rally at Fargo's civic auditorium at which Kennedy was supposed to have spoken about the farm crisis but had ignored his prepared speech and spoke instead about the racial crisis, he had told Harrison he was too exhausted to meet the delegates. Harrison pleaded with him, saying, "If you're going to win over these guys, you've got to at least see them." Kennedy relented and gave the delegates a few minutes. Now, twelve hours later, Harrison was astonished that he would spend so much time with Christopher Pretty Boy. "And it was not some quickie drive-by, either," Harrison remembers. "I mean he really spent time with that kid."
When Kennedy emerged from the cabin he was holding Pretty Boy by the hand. As they walked through Calico, he frequently leaned down to talk to the boy. "I mean, if you didn't fall in love with Kennedy then," Judi Cornelius says, "you didn't have a heart."
He stopped to speak with an elderly woman who was making bread in an outdoor oven next to her home, a rusty delivery van, and told her, "It makes me sad to see how your people live. You were the first people on this continent. But mark my word—in years to come there will be brand-new houses here."
He woke a sick boy who was sleeping in an abandoned car and stroked his feverish head. After questioning his mother and discovering that doctors at the hospital had claimed to be too busy to examine him, he told an aide to return the boy to the hospital.
Pretty Boy and Kennedy remained together all day. One news clip shows a solemn little boy in a light blue shirt gripping Kennedy's left hand as they walk through a crowd of Indians.
At the Red Cloud Indian School, Kennedy climbed onto the hood of a car and shouted to students in the parking lot, "You are the most important and significant Americans!" During a speech in its gymnasium, he told them, "Your tremendous culture has been unequaled by any other group in the United States!" Pine Ridge was poor, he said, "because the white man has not kept his word." His words were reported across South Dakota and may have unsettled voters whose land would have belonged to the Sioux had the white man kept his word.
Kennedy's Indian education subcommittee convened in Billy Mills Hall, a low brick building named for a Pine Ridge track star who had medaled at the 1964 Olympics. It was the largest space on the reservation, but even with its bleachers pulled out and folding chairs covering the basketball court, it could not comfortably accommodate an audience of over a thousand. When Kennedy noticed tribal elders standing along a wall, he stopped the proceedings and insisted that chairs be found so they could sit in the front, a gesture that is still remembered on the reservation.
Fred Dutton thought Indians liked Kennedy because they were thrilled someone was finally paying attention to them. John Nolan believed Kennedy liked Indians because they were like him: quiet and soft- spoken, but if you riled them up, they raised hell. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, who accompanied Kennedy to Pine Ridge, was impressed by how quickly Indians warmed to him. He called it "a special response" that had eluded other politicians, including Hubert Humphrey, who had never been popular because Indians distrusted white men who spoke too fast. Kennedy, however, spoke like they did: softly and in halting sentences broken by "ahs" and "ums."
The psychologist Robert Coles believed Kennedy appealed to poor people like Native Americans because he seemed to be, as they were, unsure of himself. His body had "a tentative quality," Coles said, and he moved and spoke like someone who had a lot to say but was not quite sure how to say it—"who has a lot stirring in him but doesn't know how to put it into words."
A month of campaigning outdoors had also given Kennedy an Indian-like face, darkly tanned and deeply lined. The Indian activist Vine Deloria Jr. later wrote, "Spiritually, he was an Indian!" and believed Kennedy became a hero to native peoples because, like their most famous chiefs, he had a reputation for ruthlessness.
Kennedy's ruthlessness was not in evidence at Billy Mills Hall, perhaps because he was interrogating the powerless instead of the powerful. He persuaded Leona Winters, a nervous tribal councilwoman from remote Wanblee, to answer questions rather than read her prepared statement, frequently interrupting to say, "Now, you're doing very well."
Their exchange was as stark and discouraging as Pine Ridge. When Kennedy asked about the unemployment rate in Wanblee, Winters said that in her community of 350 people "there is no employment." When she told him that the Wanblee medical clinic was only open on Thursdays, he asked how far people had to go if they made the mistake of getting sick on one of the other six days. A hundred miles, she answered, and there was no ambulance. "What do people eat in Wanblee?" he asked. "Cornmeal," she replied. When she finished, Kennedy said that considering that America was spending $30 billion a year in Vietnam, "it seems it could spend some in the United States to alleviate the great poverty here."
During the hearings, McGovern mentioned that the most important site for Great Plains Indians was nearby at Wounded Knee, where a monument commemorated the 1890 massacre of 249 Sioux, many of them women and children, by soldiers of the 7th Cavalry. When Kennedy insisted on going McGovern protested that they were already running late and had an important rally that evening in Rapid City. Kennedy cut the hearings short and asked the remaining witnesses to place their statements on the record.
As the sun was setting, he and Pretty Boy arrived at Wounded Knee and climbed hand in hand to a hilltop monument overlooking miles of bleak prairie.
After Chief Big Foot left his reservation without permission from federal authorities, four hundred soldiers had surrounded his party at Wounded Knee and demanded that they surrender their weapons. Before they could respond, someone fired a shot and the cavalry opened fire. Photographs show soldiers standing over mass graves, guns pointed downward like big game hunters with their kill. A year later, the victims' relatives erected a granite plinth topped by an urn and faced with tablets that said, "Many innocent women and children who knew no wrong died here." After reading it, Kennedy said, "I should have brought flowers."
He added Pine Ridge's desperate poverty to his litany of injustices, mentioning it in his stump speeches and in conversations with friends. While relaxing in a hotel room in Omaha a few weeks later with folk singer John Stewart, he spoke about five-year-old Indian children being sent to schools a thousand miles from their homes. "Who are the people who are doing this?" Stewart asked. Kennedy stared at him and said, "You"—the same answer he would have given if Stewart had asked who was responsible for the dead civilians in South Vietnam. As Stewart rose to leave, Kennedy said he had just ordered eggs for them from room service. Stewart said he felt embarrassed to be eating after hearing about Pine Ridge. "Yeah, I know exactly what you mean," Kennedy said.
Since Robert Kennedy, no presidential candidate has visited Pine Ridge. President Clinton stopped there in 1999 during a whirlwind five-state "Poverty Tour" organized to promote his New Markets Initiative—a plan for increasing jobs and economic activities in impoverished communities with tax incentives that resembled what Robert Kennedy was proposing in 1968. A reporter who returned to Pine Ridge on the fifth anniversary of Clinton's visit found that the hopes he had raised had amounted to little. In fact, statistically, Pine Ridge has scarcely changed since 1968. Its inhabitants remain the poorest in the nation, and live twenty years less than the average American. Its teen suicide rate is still three times the national average, its unemployment rate hovers around 75 percent, only 39 percent of its households have electricity (1 percent less than in 1968), and its people still live in abandoned cars, trailers, and one-room cabins like the one where Kennedy met Pretty Boy.
While Kennedy was flying to Rapid City, he instructed an aide to call the Holy Rosary Mission and tell the Fathers that he had invited Pretty Boy and his sister to spend the summer with his family in Hyannis Port. The invitation, the predictable result of Kennedy imagining himself, or his children, orphaned and living in Calico, would not have surprised his children. Kathleen Kennedy can remember driving with her father through a poor neighborhood in Washington and hearing him say, "Look, there are no playgrounds. There's no place for these kids to play. They're just like you; they have the same wants and needs." Then he raised funds to build a playground and brought his children to the opening ceremony.
Pretty Boy never went to Hyannis Port. Like Kennedy, he was dead within the year. Some at Pine Ridge believe that he died in an automobile accident. Others say he killed himself, although he would have been younger than most Indian suicides. A third theory has him accepting a ride from a despondent older boy who then drove his car off the road on purpose, killing them both.
One of Kennedy's favorite quotations was Camus's observation that "perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if believers don't help us, who in the world can help us do this?" (When he repeated it in a speech he usually changed "tortured" to "suffering.") He had used it as the epigram to his 1967 book To Seek a Newer World, and it expressed two pillars of his faith: that everyone has a duty to alleviate suffering, and that no one can live a fully happy life while surrounded by the unaddressed misery of others.
When the British television personality David Frost asked Kennedy how he would like to be remembered, he replied, "That I'd made some contribution to my country; to those who were less well off. I think back again to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this? I'd like to feel that I'd done something to lessen that suffering." His invitation to Pretty Boy to spend the summer in Hyannis Port was more evidence that Kennedy meant what he said, and would not ask Americans to do anything that he was unwilling to do himself.
A reporter meeting Kennedy's plane in Rapid City described him as "a man who had put in a strenuous day." As a delegation of Indians presented him with a peace pipe and moccasins, he shivered uncontrollably.
He rode into town with Bill Daugherty, a rancher and cattle trader whom he had met in 1959 while canvassing the state for JFK. Daugherty had started a Kennedy for President Organization in the fall of 1967. He had been undeterred by a call from a Kennedy staffer who had told him, "A fellow usually likes to decide for himself if he's going to undertake the effort of running for the presidency of the United States." When McGovern, acting at Ted Kennedy's behest, had asked Daugherty to stop circulating petitions to put Kennedy on the ballot (a candidate could be entered in the South Dakota primary without his signature or permission), he had shot back, "The hell with it, he's going in." But even Daugherty's boundless confidence wavered as he and Kennedy drove through dark, deserted, and heavily Republican Rapid City in the pelting rain to a rally scheduled to begin two hours earlier. Just as Daugherty said, "Bob, I don't think this is going to be a good hit," they turned a comer and four thousand people gathered in a downtown square let loose a tremendous cheer.
Kennedy tried to rise to the occasion, joking that when he flew over Mount Rushmore on the way to Rapid City, he had noticed that "there's still lots of room." But he was exhausted and gave a second- rate stump speech.
McGovern delivered the evening's most memorable lines. Kennedy's candidacy had placed him in a difficult position. Not only were Humphrey and McCarthy personal friends and popular in South Dakota, but he also needed their support in his own difficult reelection campaign that fall. He had told friends that he planned to remain officially neutral, helping Kennedy "in a discreet way." But after spending the day with Kennedy at Pine Ridge, he told the crowd at Rapid City that Kennedy possessed "the absolute personal honesty of a Woodrow Wilson, the stirring passion for leadership of Andrew Jackson, and the profound acquaintance with personal tragedy of Abraham Lincoln." Then, unwilling or unable to hide his true feelings any longer, he added, "You people know the affection and esteem I held for President Kennedy, but it is my carefully measured conviction that Senator Robert Kennedy, even more than our late beloved President, would now bring to the Presidency a deeper measure of experience and a more profound capacity to lead our troubled land into the light of a new day. . . . If he is elected President of the United States, he will, in my judgment, become one of the three or four greatest Presidents in our national history."
What could this be but an endorsement? None of Kennedy's opponents would have dared suggest that they might be better presidents than JFK. After McGovern finished, Kennedy grabbed his hand and squeezed it. During his own speech he did not dispute McGovern's introduction, perhaps because he had reached the same conclusion.
Kennedy returned to South Dakota for a second and final day of campaigning on May 10. He ended that day with a speech at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, McGovern's hometown. This time, McGovern introduced him with a quotation from "The Impossible Dream," a song from The Man of La Mancha, the 1966 musical about Don Quixote that Robert Kennedy listened to as obsessively as JFK had to the Camelot sound track. Kennedy repaid McGovern for his Rapid City introduction by saying that of all the U.S. senators, he was "the person who has the most feeling and does things in the most genuine way."
McGovern had not seen Kennedy for almost a month and was shocked by his lifeless eyes and deeply lined face. Kennedy delivered a rambling speech, slurring his words and repeating his favorite George Bernard Shaw quotation three times. At dinner afterward he scarcely spoke. After one painful silence he said, as if talking to himself, "I know there are times when I am not as capable or as forceful as Jack was. There are times like today, when I realize I just don't perform very well. Jack was the one. I just am not Jack. I can't do what he did. I am not Jack."
McGovern and the others at the table were shocked into silence.
In a low voice, Kennedy asked, "George, going back to what you said earlier, do you really think the dream is impossible?"
McGovern replied that winning the nomination was not impossible, just tough. Johnson would back Humphrey, and so would the party regulars. "But the point is you're willing to make the fight and I think you're doing well," he said, "and I wanted the audience to understand that it's worth making the effort—whether you win or lose."
"Well, that's what I think," he said.
The next morning, McGovern drove Kennedy to the airport, watching as he walked through the mist to a small chartered plane. McGovern had found that at different times and in different places, Robert Kennedy appeared to be a man of different sizes, sometimes large, but at other times slight and frail. (He was actually five feet nine and weighed between 150 and 160 pounds.) This morning he struck McGovern as being very small. As he crossed the tarmac, alone and stoop-shouldered, head down, his jacket slung over his shoulder, he looked so vulnerable that McGovern claims to have been seized by "a deep and profound feeling of sadness."
It would be the last time he would see Kennedy alive, so perhaps that colored his memory of this moment. But others made similar observations during the campaign. NBC took some still photographs of Kennedy during his Indiana whistle-stop. The one he liked best showed him sitting alone in the Pullman car. David Brinkley called it "a terribly poignant little picture, just a picture of Bobby, looking sort of lonesome, kind of small . . . in the middle of that big political entourage." After traveling with him for weeks in Indiana, John Bartlow Martin observed, "More than most candidates, despite his big staff, he seemed alone. What he did and said was largely his own. . . . He also looked so alone, too, standing up by himself on the lid of his convertible—so alone, so vulnerable, so fragile, you feared he might break."