May 3-14, 1968
In 1861, a train carrying President Abraham Lincoln stopped at Greensburg, Indiana, for ten minutes on a day the official town history calls "proudly recalled forever after." It is not what Lincoln said that is remembered, but that the crowd sang "Flag of the Union," and Uncle Joe Doakes, a beloved local character, handed him a big red apple. Robert Kennedy's visit to Greensburg on May 3 was similar in that locals like Jim Ryle are less likely to remember the speech he delivered than how he looked and what he did, memories that Ryle has preserved as lovingly as the 1968 Oldsmobile convertible he keeps in mint condition because Kennedy rode in it.
Ryle was shocked by how exhausted Kennedy looked when he arrived at the Greensburg air strip, and amazed at how quickly the crowd revived him. He noticed Ryle's teenage daughter standing with some friends on the tarmac, lit up "as if someone had flipped a switch," Ryle says, and spent several minutes chatting with the kids. He saw a farmer in overalls and rubber boots, holding a sheet of yellow legal paper with questions about agricultural issues, and spoke with him at length while everyone waited. He slipped the man's questions into his pocket, telling Ryle as they drove into town, "You know, I get a lot of form and typed letters, but when I get a handwritten one, I better pay attention."
A mob of teenagers waving SOCK IT TO ME, BOBBY! signs met him in the courthouse square. He began by saying, "I hope there's someone here who can vote." The Indianapolis Star routinely discounted his crowds on the grounds that they consisted mostly of students. Although most of Greensburg's seven hundred high school students were at the courthouse, many had excused absences, meaning that in this Republican town their parents had given them signed permissions to attend a Kennedy rally.
He asked how many in the crowd knew how to milk a cow. After dozens of hands shot up, and he said, "I have no idea how to milk a cow, but I have a farm program." A light rain began falling, but no one left. He promised that when he became president he would return to Greensburg, where they had listened to him in the rain.
Before leaving Greensburg, Kennedy ducked into Keilor's restaurant for coffee and doughnuts with a women's club and stopped at the offices of the Daily News and posed for a photograph with its editor in chief. (The next edition of this Republican newspaper would contain an adulatory account of his visit under the headline, "Screams, Squeals Welcome Kennedy.") As he was climbing into Ryle's convertible, a boy with a broken arm asked him to sign his cast. He shook his head and said, "I don't want to put my name on any injury or misery."
He flew to three more county seats on May 3. After a fourteen-hour day during which approximately fifty thousand people had seen, touched, and heard him, he boarded the chartered Electra that his staff and press corps had taken to calling "The Mother Ship," and returned to "The Mother Inn," the Indianapolis airport Holiday Inn.
For the last several weeks, he and his entourage had been flying across Indiana on this plane, returning every evening to sleep at this same hotel. The arrangement encouraged an extraordinary intimacy among his press corps and staff. Sylvia Wright called the Mother Inn "our home," and when Dick Harwood returned to Indiana after visiting his family in Washington, she threw her arms around him and whispered, "Welcome home. We've missed you. I've got a husband and family back there somewhere. But this is our real home." When Harwood's daughter asked him what campaigning with Robert Kennedy was like, he had told her, "We all just live together and it's like being at home. And we don't have Mommys and Daddys 'cause we're all old and the same age; but it's a little like all are our brothers and sisters, and we love them the same."
Ethel was the Mother Ship's cruise director, ordering birthday cakes, encouraging sing-alongs, and pulling practical jokes. After CBS correspondent Roger Mudd reported heavy drinking on the Mother Ship (the flight attendants poured generous drinks, and the heaviest drinkers could be found among the press corps), Ethel appeared wearing an apron bearing a picture of the legendary prohibitionist Carrie Nation, and fixed a plaque over the bar announcing that drinking was prohibited by order of Provost Marshal Roger Mudd. Kennedy mingled freely with the press on the flights and at the Mother Inn. Harwood decided that he won them over by drawing a circle around himself "so big that it took us in." Within it, family, class, color, and wealth disappeared, Harwood said, and "you were just people together in a loving and tolerant place." Like Harwood, Loudon Wainwright of Life had initially been lukewarm about Kennedy. He changed his mind after hearing him recount how a study of the artwork of white and black children had revealed that when poor black children drew a house they seldom put a sun overhead. Turning to Wainwright, he asked, "Have you ever noticed that the faces of poor kids are much more alert and bright than the faces of kids who are more comfortable?" He added that once those poor children moved into adolescence all the curiosity and expectation had vanished from their faces. Later, Wainwright wrote, "A candidate who remarks on such matters is going to get harder to hate."
Columnist Joe Kraft was impressed that Kennedy had won over what he called "the old, tired . . . Willy Lomans of our trade." Tom Wicker of the Times, who managed to resist Kennedy's charm, called him "an easy man to fall in love with . . . if you were a reporter, and too many people did."
The romance between Kennedy and the press was surprising because he had entered the campaign with a reputation for being prickly and difficult. John Lindsay, who had accompanied him to West Virginia during the 1966 midterm elections, remembered him being "wooden as a stick" and "very cold," with an irritating habit of gazing out the window for several minutes when asked a question.
Harwood called the Kennedy campaign a "fun enterprise." Charles Quinn of CBS remembered it as a "huge, joyous adventure," adding, "It was an important adventure and had great significance. But we weren't exactly sure how it was all going to turn out, and neither was Kennedy.... It was really a lot of fun." Wainwright believed by early May that the Kennedy press corps had become "a partisan band, obsessed with the fortunes of our candidate . . . concerned to the point of anxiety about his safety and success." When the San Francisco Examiner published an article that was critical of Kennedy, New York Post columnist Jimmy Breslin bought all the Examiners from the machine outside his motel and burned them in the street. Some reporters, fearing that the enthusiastic crowds might injure Kennedy, pitched in to help manage them. Joe Mohbat sometimes found himself gripping Kennedy around the waist to prevent him being yanked from a convertible. Mohbat knew he was crossing a line, but could not bear the thought of Kennedy being hurt.
AFTER RETURNING TO the Mother Inn from campaigning in Greensburg on May 3, Kennedy ate a late dinner with a group of reporters and aides including Jim Tolan, Warren Rogers of Look, director John Frankenheimer, David Brinkley of NBC, and speechwriter Richard Goodwin. He viewed these dinners as a way of learning more about what had gone on during his rallies, and he often sought the advice of the still photographers and television cameramen, asking what they had seen, and what he could do to engage and move his audiences. Jim Stevenson of The New Yorker, who had attended several dinners like this one, recalled that reporters and aides would try to entertain him, "but it was 12:30 at night, and his face was exhausted. And he would smile and try to respond and be nice. Then he would turn and look out the dark window, out at the Indiana night, and he would be miles and miles away."
On May 3, the conversation revolved around whether Kennedy should continue campaigning in the streets or rely more on a media campaign, as some advisers were urging. One man argued that television could be a force for good, helping to "throw the rascals out." Another countered, "But what about the rascals it throws in?" and mentioned Governor Ronald Reagan. After several patrons had badgered Kennedy for autographs he appeared to switch sides, saying that perhaps he should just campaign from a television studio and avoid these kinds of hassles. But Richard Goodwin, who usually argued for a greater use of television, said, "No. You have to go out there . . . and you have to show that you don't have contempt for them, that you value who they are."
Kennedy polled the table, framing the choice as one between continuing with the rallies and motorcades that enabled tens of thousands of people to see him every day, or relying on what he called "slick, packaged TV pitches."
Warren Rogers accused Kennedy of preferring the streets because he was good at it. "If you were as good as McCarthy on TV you'd be arguing for that technique," he said.
"Yeah, I guess you're right," Kennedy conceded, rubbing one hand over his face as he spoke to stay awake. "But we're still going to do it my way."
"You're a political dinosaur, the last we'll probably ever see," Rogers replied, predicting that in the future, candidates would run from television studios.
"That may be. But you know something? I just can't campaign that way."
Kennedy preferred campaigning in the streets because he knew it worked. He knew that when he appeared before a skeptical audience, the applause was always louder at the end than at the beginning, and he had noticed that people watching his motorcades seemed as moved as those hearing him speak. He knew that the same qualities hurting him on television—his halting speech, shyness, and stridency—made him seem more human and approachable in person and that going into the streets was the best way to reach the poor, who were more likely to turn out for a candidate they had met and touched. He also understood that because his charisma was more tactile and mystical than physical and rhetorical, he had to let people see, touch, and commune with him.
His wordless communion worked best with children. Photographer Burt Glinn sometimes brought his wife along while covering Kennedy. She was struck by the gentle way he brushed a child's face with the first two fingers of his hand, or just touched their fingers with his fingers, and was impressed that he refused to kiss youngsters, as other politicians did. Instead, he liked to touch them gently on their heads, as if trying to feel their thoughts.
Two days earlier, Kennedy had made the obligatory pilgrimage to the gloomy Victorian home of famed Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley in Indianapolis. Afterward, he walked next door to a nursery where children from broken homes were playing in a scruffy playground. They ran over when they saw him and pushed their fingers through a chain-link fence. Then he walked into their playground, and according to David Murray of the Chicago Sun-Times, "Two little girls came up and put their heads against his waist and he put his hands on their heads. And suddenly it was hard to watch, because he had become in that moment the father they did not know or the elder brother who couldn't talk to them. . . . The word that came on strongest as he sat and listened to the children and made a quiet remark now and then, was the word 'compassion.' This is because—and anyone who has ever dealt with five-year-olds knows this—you can fool a lot of people in a campaign. . . . But lonely little children don't come up and put their heads on your lap unless you mean it."
Kennedy needed crowds for the energy he drew from them and the way they revived him, "like a couple of drinks" according to Fred Dutton.* He believed that letting voters see him in person was the only way to prove that the "ruthless" epithet—one Theodore White said had "seared his spirit"—was unwarranted. If an audience was enthusiastic and responsive, then he became more forceful and eloquent. If it was small and flat, then he was, too. He liked sending aides into crowds to conduct informal polls, and Dutton sometimes found himself jogging alongside a motorcade, peppering spectators with questions and sprinting back with a report.
[*According to John Nolan, who scheduled many of his appearances, "He liked kids, and he liked black people, and he liked Indians, and he liked crowds—crowds most of all. He really liked crowds."]
Some of the energy flowing between Kennedy and a crowd was sexual. Photographer Bill Eppridge, who had covered the Beatles' first American tour, sensed the same sexual tension that had existed between the Beatles and their audiences. Joe Mohbat, who spent more time in closer physical proximity to Kennedy than anyone in his press corps, believes that because Kennedy stirred up such deep passions, reporters who wanted to fool around on the campaign trail discovered that he had, quite literally, done the foreplay for them. Mohbat noticed a glazed, almost rapturous look crossing Kennedy's face as he motorcaded past miles of outstretched hands and ecstatic faces, and is certain he was experiencing a joy that was almost sexual. At an outdoor rally in San Diego, a young female volunteer who had been standing close to the stage suddenly uttered a loud moan as he was speaking. Her knees buckled and, Mohbat says, "I'll be convinced until the day I die that she was having a climax."
Small crowds upset Kennedy more than hostile ones. When Cesar Chavez tried to apologize for an unruly audience of farmworkers he told him, "The important thing is that they're here." He noticed Bill Barry chopping away at outstretched hands as if they were vines and shouted, "No. No. No. Don't hurt them."
Because Kennedy was a shy man, campaigning this way was hard for him, and he sometimes appeared to be steeling himself before diving into a crowd. Journalist Gail Sheehy asked him how he endured the mob scenes. "I remove myself," he said. "My mind is somewhere else a lot of the time."
But did he like campaigning this way? she wondered.
"I'd rather be home, or anywhere else. That being touched all the time, I don't like it. But people can hear everything about a candidate, and it's the touching him they never forget."
He took risks by making himself so accessible. A woman in Mishawaka, Indiana, yanked him from the back of his convertible and he chipped a tooth against the curb. A woman in Kalamazoo, Michigan, stole a shoe, a boy in Los Angeles stole two and wore them to his prom.
Some people cursed him, tried to hurt him, and shouted questions such as "Can you tell us what is the difference between you and your brother Jack, other than he is dead and you are alive?" and "If your name was anything but Kennedy, could you mount a campaign for the presidency on any grounds other than opportunism and ruthlessness?"
Comedian Alan King warned that by making himself so accessible, he was giving his enemies a chance to hurt him. "Well, so many people hate me that I've got to give the people who love me a chance to get at me," he replied.
Folk singer John Stewart, the campaign's unofficial troubadour, was shocked by how Kennedy would sit on the trunk of his convertible, not holding on to anything while traveling at breakneck speed through the countryside. Then he would stop in a small town, Stewart says, and plow into the "redneck crowds." Kennedy was "almost laughing in their faces," he remembers. "Not, you know, jeering them, but feeding off this danger."
The way the crowds swarmed over Kennedy reminded Fran Martin, John Bartlow Martin's wife, of the relationship between the famed Spanish matador Manolete and his voracious fans. Martin agreed with her, recalling that Manolete's biographer, Barnaby Conrad, had written that his fans kept demanding more and more and he kept giving it, "until there was nothing left to give but his life, and he gave them that."
Kennedy's advisers disagreed over the wisdom of his crowd- centered strategy. Fred Dutton believed that if Kennedy wanted to stop the war, educate Americans about poverty, and unite black and backlash votes, "he had to see the people. He had to be with them. . . . You can lead other human beings only if you're out there. If you're in front of them. If you've got courage." But Arthur Schlesinger predicted in a prescient April memorandum that 1968 would witness "the death of the old-fashioned political organization." He argued that Humphrey would be the last candidate of the big-city machines, Southern governors, and labor and farm leaders, whereas McCarthy's languid style was perfect for the New Politics in which "two minutes on the Cronkite show before fifty million people is more important than the hysteria of twelve hundred people in a hall." He concluded that while McCarthy disappointed his live audiences, he came over as reasonable and thoughtful on television. Kennedy, however, was great with a live audience, "but will very likely seem emotional, pressing too hard, even demagogic in a two-minute excerpt before the great audience."
Kennedy's television spots in Indiana were long and talky affairs, versions of the thirty-minute spot that Fred Papert had crafted from his 1964 appearance at Columbia. They showed him fielding questions from students, veterans, housewives, and senior citizens. He sat with students in an elementary school classroom and instead of reading them a story, told them how poor children lived. He described conditions in inner-city schools to housewives sitting in a suburban living room, warning, "We're destroying the lives of these people." He offered veterans an apology for involving America in Vietnam, saying, "The administration of which I was intimately associated is also going to have to share the responsibility when blame is assessed—not just the administration, but me personally." He never mentioned his opponents by name, or questioned their character or patriotism.
AFTER DEBATING THE merits of campaigning in the streets versus television, Kennedy left the restaurant and took a walk with Jim Tolan. He wondered out loud if he really might be a dinosaur, the last candidate to campaign this way. The possibility disturbed him because he believed a politician had a duty to make himself accessible to voters, whether or not he was good at it. He told Tolan, "Just as de Tocqueville said that the people in a democracy reign supreme as the deities in the universe, and just as you go to church to worship your deity—your God—so, too, when you seek the highest laurels in the country, you have to go before the people, where the power is. And you can't just do it by sitting in front of a TV camera . . . that's not what it's all about. You become isolated from the wants of the people."
De Tocqueville would have liked political motorcades for the same reason Kennedy did: because no other form of campaigning enabled a candidate to go before so many people in such a short period of time. Slow-moving motorcades in open cars have fallen out of favor, not only because of the risk of an assassination, but because, unlike people attending rallies or "town meetings," those lining a highway are impossible to screen or manage, and anyone can turn up and boo or wave a nasty sign, and appear on the evening news.
On May 6, the eve of the Indiana primary, Kennedy embarked upon the longest and wildest motorcade in U.S. political history, a nine-hour, hundred-mile trip across northern Indiana that reporter Jules Witcover called "one of the most incredible outpourings of sentiment for a political candidate in all the annals of American campaigning."
He started the day with a breakfast meeting in Indianapolis, an airport rally in Evansville, and a flight to Fort Wayne where a boisterous crowd at the courthouse cheered his "we cannot accept violence or injustice" line. On his way back to the airport he insisted on stopping when he noticed a sign at Zoli's Continental Restaurant for HUNGARIAN PIZZA. Throughout the Indiana Kennedy had been telling aides, "I'm going to win the blue-collar vote . . . I'm going to win the blue-collar vote . . ." and making unscheduled stops at factory gates, Catholic churches, and restaurants like Zoli's. Proprietor Zoltan Herman, a former Hungarian freedom fighter, opened a bottle of wine that he had put away for a special occasion, and Kennedy had a lunch of beer, pizza, and apple strudel. After seeing Dutton and Barry nervously checking their watches, he stood on the seat of one of the booths and said, "As George Bernard Shaw once said . . . " Reporters laughed and bolted their drinks. Kennedy arrived at the airport almost two hours late.
Kennedy was supposed to cover the hundred miles from South Bend to Chicago in three and a half hours and make brief stops in La Porte and Whiting. Instead, his motorcade traveled so slowly and stopped so often that the trip took nine hours, and it was almost midnight when he finished.
Huge crowds lined rural highways in St. Joseph and La Porte counties, forcing him to travel so slowly that boys on bicycles were able to keep pace with his car. He tossed a basketball back and forth with a boy jogging alongside, and some young women greeted him at one crossroad, then raced down back roads and met him at the next, repeating the feat a dozen times. He stood on the backseat, holding out both hands so people could slap and grab them.
The brilliant spring afternoon turned chilly and at sunset, as the motorcade neared Gary, Kennedy's car suddenly swerved off the road. Reporters in the press bus became nervous when they saw people crouched down in the backseat, but Ethel Kennedy had simply become cold and was bending down to slip on an overcoat.
Kennedy's motorcade took a circuitous route through Gary and Hammond, rattling over level crossings, passing underneath tangles of high-tension wires, and driving past hulking mills and smokestacks shooting flames. He sped through industrial neighborhoods and crawled down streets lined with brick and wood-framed bungalows. White neighborhoods sat jammed against black ones, black against Hispanic. Black, brown, and white arms waved like grain as he passed. If you shut your eyes it was impossible to know if you were in white Hammond or black Gary because the cheering was as loud in both.
He stood on the backseat of the convertible, sandwiched between Richard Hatcher, the first black mayor of an American city, and Tony Zale, the "Man of Steel," a Polish-American two-time middleweight boxing champion who was Gary's most celebrated white resident. Instead of delivering a televised speech in front of a backdrop of white hands grasping black ones, or traveling through the black neighborhoods with Hatcher, and the white ones with Zale, he rode with his arms around both men's waists, past crowds changing from black to white to black again, through Gary's decaying downtown and into its suburban Miller district where the white holdouts lived. It was a dramatic but risky tableau. If black militants had gone on a rampage that evening, he would have been blamed for inciting them. If he and Hatcher had been booed by whites, or if he and Zale had been booed by blacks, Mayor Daley would have heard about it, since Lake County was in his backyard.
Zale and Hatcher remained with Kennedy when he crossed into Hammond and picked up Mayor Joseph Klen. After riding through Hammond with Kennedy the week before, and witnessing his popularity, Klen had shocked the crowd at a rally at St. Michael's Ukrainian Hall by introducing him as the "next President of the United States of America." Klen had previously declared that he was neutral, and Richard Wade believes it was the first time that a politician had changed his mind about an endorsement while addressing a rally.
Kennedy made fifteen unscheduled stops in Hammond and Whiting. He chatted with a priest in St. Casimir's Church. He noticed three children in pajamas sleeping on a mattress strapped to the roof of a car, woke them, and had coffee with their parents and neighbors. When a woman told him that her mother had suffered a stroke, like Kennedy's father, he stopped the motorcade and climbed a hill to the house where the afflicted woman was living. He told Hammond's whites what he had told Gary's blacks: poverty was indecent, welfare was destructive, jobs were better than handouts, and only negotiations could end the Vietnam War.
France Soir correspondent Adalbert de Segonzac had found Kennedy to be maddeningly silent and monosyllabic during their interviews, until de Segonzac hit on a subject that moved him. Then, he said, "it all came out; [and] you felt it came from very, very deep inside him ... all the things he believed in." De Segonzac noticed the same thing happening as Kennedy spoke to working-class whites in cities like Hammond. It was so obvious that he believed what he was saying that even those disagreeing with him found themselves applauding.
Whiting, Kennedy's last stop, was a tidy blue-collar village of Eastern Europeans and Appalachian whites living in two-story homes on postage-stamp-sized lots hemmed in by refineries, Lake Michigan, and the Illinois state line. There is not a single black face in the 1968 Whiting High School yearbook, and blacks working in the nearby refinery were discouraged from lingering in town, so the fifteen hundred people filling the street in front of the Whiting High School and City Hall were presumably all white and had been waiting almost four hours to greet him. They mobbed him when he arrived and cheered when he joked about the town's notoriously polluted air. Whatever he said must have touched them, since Whiting would be among the more unlikely towns that he would win the following day.
He arrived back in Indianapolis after midnight, missing his own election eve party. After shaking thousands of hands, delivering dozens of speeches, and being seen by an estimated one hundred thousand people, he was too keyed up to sleep. He wandered into the bar at the Mother Inn, stopping at a table where reporters Jules Witcover and Jack Germond were having a nightcap. "Well, I've done all I could do," he said. "Maybe it's just my time. But I've learned something from Indiana. The country is changing."
He invited some aides and reporters to join him for a late dinner at Sam's Attic, the only restaurant in Indianapolis open after midnight. They pushed two tables together and he launched into a disjointed monologue about the campaign. "I like Indiana. The people here were fair to me. They gave me a chance. They listened to me," he said. "The people here are not so neurotic and hypocritical as in Washington or New York. If they don't like you, they let you know; if they do like you, they let you know that, too. They're more direct. I like rural people, who work hard with their hands. There is something healthy about them. I gave it everything I had here, and if I lose, then, well, I'm just out of tune with the rest of the country."
He described the faces of the farmers and steelworkers he had seen during the motorcade, and told them about the children sleeping on the roof of the car. But throughout dinner he kept returning to a man who had run alongside his car waving a sign saying, YOU PUNK; His face had been twisted with hate and anger, Kennedy said, and he had grabbed his outstretched hand in a bone-crushing grip, "as if he was trying to break every bone in it." Why would someone want to hurt him? he asked. Why did some people hate him so much?
It was not the first time that an unpleasant incident had spooked Kennedy, and he had dwelled on it. Some reporters thought he was thin-skinned. But none of them knew what it was like to excite such hatred in a stranger, or face an adoring crowd that could conceal someone who wanted to harm you.
KENNEDY WON THE Indiana primary with 42 percent of the vote. Branigin received 31 percent; McCarthy 27 percent. It was not the 50 percent plurality that he had wanted and the press had set as his goal. Nor was it decisive enough to eliminate McCarthy or prove to Daley and the other bosses that Kennedy had the kind of wide-spectrum appeal that would make him a stronger candidate than Humphrey. Still, given the obstacles he had faced—his late entry into the contest, the large backlash vote, the opposition of the powerful Democratic machine and the state's most influential newspaper—it was an encouraging victory.
He had won ten of the state's eleven congressional districts, and fifty-one of its ninety-two counties, including most of the former Klan strongholds. He had won Governor Branigin's home county, town, and precinct, and seventeen of twenty-five counties in its southern tier, a region containing a sizable population of first-generation white migrants from below the Mason-Dixon Line.
The results seemed to vindicate his insistence on campaigning in the streets. He took all of the counties in the southeastern corner of the state where he had campaigned, all of the rural counties that he had whistle-stopped through on the Wabash Cannonball, and all but one of the counties he had driven through on the Lincoln Trail. He had also won cities like Muncie, Logansport, Fort Wayne, Terre Haute, and Kokomo that had large populations of blue-collar workers and union members. In Lake County, he had won 85 percent of the black vote, and 46 percent of the total vote, bettering his statewide margin by four percentage points, and earning the votes of some former Wallace supporters.
After declaring victory, he told Larry O'Brien, "I've proved I can really be a leader of a broad spectrum. I can be a bridge between blacks and whites without stepping back from my positions."
Many reporters and political experts agreed. Newsweek observed, "The way Kennedy won was more significant than the cold statistics," and reported him sweeping the black vote while also piling up big leads among backlashy white working men. The New York Times credited him with assembling "an unusual coalition of Negroes and lower income whites," and reported him doing well "with blue collar workers in the industrial areas and with rural whites." Columnists Evans and Novak wrote that he had won some Polish precincts in Gary and South Bend by a two-to-one margin, citing St. Adelbert's parish in South Bend where he had taken 65 percent of the vote. An analysis of the results by pollster Lou Harris showed him easily winning the cities, running even with Branigin in small towns and rural areas, and losing only the college towns and most educated and affluent voters to McCarthy. Harris concluded that his victory "went a long way toward establishing his claim as perhaps the likeliest Democrat in 1968 who can deliver both the Negro and the lower- income white urban vote."
In 1970, two former Kennedy campaign aides, William vanden Heuvel and Milton Gwirtzman, questioned this interpretation of the Indiana results in On His Own: RFK1964-68, a generally laudatory account of the last four years of Kennedy's life. They concluded on the basis of the returns from Lake County, "His [Kennedy's] message of reconciliation had been powerfully articulated, but those whites who needed to hear it most desperately were not listening." They based this conclusion on their interpretation of the Lake County results, justifying their narrow focus on the grounds that Lake County was usually cited as proof that Kennedy had succeeded in forging a coalition of black and lower-middle-income white voters. They said that their own study of the Lake County returns showed Kennedy had lost fifty-nine of Gary's seventy overwhelmingly white precincts, and had won only two of Gary's Polish precincts by two-to-one margins. They pointed out that Kennedy's 15,500-vote margin in Lake County had come entirely from Gary, where he had won 80 percent of the vote in the black community, while in the seventy precincts where Gary's white voters lived he had received "only" 34 percent of the vote.
Kennedy debunkers such as Ronald Steel would later embrace vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman's analysis of Lake County. Steel identifies Kennedy's purported success at winning votes from working-class whites as a "central part of the Kennedy legend," and writes in In Love with Night: The American Romance with Robert Kennedy (2002) that "on analysis it [this success] has turned out to be a combination of wishful thinking, misperception, and spin control." To back up this statement Steel cites vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman's analysis of the Lake County returns.
Roger Dooley, author of Robert Kennedy: The Final Years (1996), also relies on vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman for his conclusion that "the truth, however, was that Kennedy had depended on blacks for nearly half of the votes he took to win the Indiana primary, and that support [for Kennedy] from 'white backlash' areas was not impressive at all."
But vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman's analysis is not only too narrow a foundation for such sweeping pronouncements, it is also flawed. They ignore that approximately 10 percent of the 700,000 votes cast in the Indiana Democratic primary were cast for McCarthy or Branigin by Republican crossover voters, and that otherwise Kennedy would have won almost 50 percent of the vote. They state that "in the seventy precincts of Gary where all the white voters live, Kennedy received only 34 per cent of the vote." The word only implies that this was a disappointing result. But considering that Gary was the most racially polarized city in the North, that in 1967 over 95 percent of white voters in these same seventy precincts had supported the white mayoral candidate rather than Richard Hatcher, that it was a strong union town where the United Steelworkers Union had mounted a vigorous anti- Kennedy campaign, that the eighty-thousand-member-strong AFL- CIO Central Labor Council of Lake and Porter counties had endorsed Branigin, and that Kennedy had once prosecuted popular Gary mayor George Cacharis on corruption charges—considering all this, winning a third of the vote in Gary's white precincts was a considerable accomplishment. And losing fifty-nine of those seventy white precincts was not the damning statistic that vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman implied. These precincts were not winner-take-all propositions, like states in the electoral college. The ones where Kennedy was weakest and McCarthy strongest were middle-class ones on Gary's southern perimeter, the kinds of suburban neighborhoods where McCarthy always did well.
Vanden Heuvel and Gwirtzman also erred by focusing solely on Gary, and assuming that because Kennedy had not done well among its backlash whites, at least by their reckoning, he had also done poorly among similar white voters elsewhere in Lake County, and across Indiana.
In fact, Kennedy won the all-white city of Whiting, other former backlash cities outside Lake County, and even took rural Scott County, once considered the most racist in Indiana, by thirteen hundred votes to only nine hundred for Branigin and five hundred for McCarthy. He had also demonstrated surprising strength among rural whites, taking two thirds of the counties in southern Indiana and every one of the seven counties that Wallace had won in 1964.
New York Times columnist Tom Wicker pointed out that Kennedy's victory was not just won among the blacks of Gary and Indianapolis, but that he had "carried the Southern-oriented counties along the Ohio river, scored a clear majority among the Slavic minorities in the industrial cities . . . carrying rural and urban [counties] alike." Kennedy's strong showing in the pro-Wallace counties coincided with a May 7 Gallup poll reporting the "strong possibility" that if the general election was held now, Wallace would capture enough electoral votes to prevent either the Republican or Democratic candidate from winning the presidency—a poll making Kennedy's success with former Wallace voters even more significant.
Kennedy's appeal to backlash whites had more to do with character than policy. Jim Tolan believed they liked him, despite his identification with black aspirations, because he came across as a "tough Irish cop." Steve Bell of ABC had been stunned to discover that many of the blue-collar workers he interviewed outside a factory gate in Wisconsin before that state's April 2 primary had no intention of voting for Johnson or McCarthy. Instead, they told him they could not decide if they were for Kennedy or Wallace. Bell decided that the only rational explanation was that Wallace and Kennedy were both tough guys who were going to stick it to the establishment.
Columnist and Honorary Kennedy Art Buchwald reached a similar conclusion, and after interviewing people who later voted for Wallace in the 1968 general election but had previously supported Bobby, he decided that they had identified both as "strong individuals who would protect their individual rights."
Kennedy confirmed his appeal to rural white voters by winning the May 14 Nebraska primary with 51 percent of the vote. He took eighty- eight of ninety-three counties in a state even more conservative and white than Indiana. These included twenty-four of the twenty-five counties where he had campaigned, 60 percent of its farm vote, and 60 percent of the blue-collar vote. McCarthy, who had written off Nebraska after polls showed him doing poorly, got 31 percent, President Johnson, whose name could not be removed from the ballot, had 8 percent, and Vice President Humphrey, 6 percent, despite an energetic write-in campaign waged by his supporters and his appearance as the featured speaker at the Omaha Jackson-Jefferson Day dinner.
Kennedy had a sound organization in Nebraska, had received good advice from Ted Sorensen's brother, former Nebraska lieutenant governor Phil Sorensen, and had campaigned in every town with a population over eight thousand. The New York Times said, "Equally important is the fact that he ran well among farmers and in small towns as well as in the cities," and Time magazine, not usually a friendly publication, concluded that Nebraska had "crushed the argument that his appeal is restricted to city dwellers, the black and the poor."
An event almost as significant as Kennedy's two primary victories occurred when he met members of the uncommitted Ohio delegation in Columbus on the evening of May 13. Kenny O'Donnell, a former adviser to JFK and Bobby's former Harvard classmate, had arranged the event. He called Kennedy throughout the day, begging him to be on time and telling him, "They [the delegates] don't care how many crowds you get. They want to know whether you can win the election and what kind of guy you are. As of right now they don't like you! Don't be late for this meeting, because they think they're 'King for a Day.'"
Kennedy landed in Columbus ahead of schedule. Instead of driving to the Neil House Hotel where the delegates were waiting, he detoured through a black neighborhood. Wall-to-wall crowds engulfed him, creating epic traffic jams. One local political observer said he "could not recall a more exuberant demonstration for a political candidate in this city's history."
Kennedy arrived at the hotel almost three hours late, shirttails flapping and cuff links missing. He walked into a room filled with angry, sullen, and inebriated delegates, and saved himself by delivering what O'Donnell called "the best damn speech I have ever heard in my life."
He began by distancing himself from his late brother, saying, "I'm not asking favors. I'm not asking your support on the basis that you were friendly to a relative of mine eight years ago." He continued, "Look, if I were you fellows I'd be doing just what you're doing, be uncommitted. . . . Bob Kennedy may go out to California and get murdered [Kennedy was presumably speaking metaphorically]. . . . If I can't get elected president of the United States I don't want you to vote for me, and if I can't win in California, I can't be elected president of the United States. All I am here for is just to ask if you would please wait and give me a chance to talk to each one of you individually and tell you what I am going to do if I am president."
O'Donnell was ecstatic, saying later, "He knew just what they wanted to hear and acted as if he loved being there. . . . He just handled himself beautifully. He was his brother. It was fantastic. The women just went ga-ga over him. They were unanimous—all the old pros were just taken aback by how much they liked him. This was not the Bob Kennedy they had read about. This was not the ruthless arrogant young fellow. All they kept saying was, 'He's just like Jack! He's just like Jack!' I knew he could go all the way, then. Once he had California in his pocket, he would have Daley and all the pros were going to love him. I was never worried about the general election."
He was not "just like Jack," at least not any longer. But he wanted to win the nomination as badly as Jack had, and because he did, he charmed these delegates just as Jack would have. After he left, 80 members of Ohio's pivotal 115-vote delegation announced that they would wait until the primaries concluded before declaring for a candidate. Kennedy's performance in Columbus had proved that when he told Hays Gorey that he would "break his neck" to win the presidency, he had meant it.