May 29, 1968
The Los Angeles Times described the Oregon results as "a body blow" for Kennedy. The Wall Street Journal said Humphrey had been the real winner in Oregon. A New York Times editorial called McCarthy "The Quiet Man" and "Gene the Giant Killer" and said his victory had made him a serious contender for the nomination. The New York Times accused Kennedy and "his entourage" of having been "too aggressive and too relentless in their single-minded pursuit of power," and his campaign of having "too much money, too much glamour, and a faintly overbearing air of natural superiority." It praised McCarthy for avoiding "bombast and conventional oversimplification," and for relying instead on "the intellectual thrust, the witty aside, the reflective understatement—and poetry," a sentence speaking volumes about the estrangement within the Democratic Party between liberal intellectuals and working-class voters.
The next morning, Kennedy flew back to Los Angeles to begin a last week of campaigning in California. At an airport press conference, he was unnecessarily honest, calling Oregon "a setback . . . which I could ill afford," and saying he had agreed to debate McCarthy because "conditions have changed." Asked if he still believed that losing a single primary meant he was no longer "a viable candidate," he said he had changed his mind. Asked if California was now "the ultimate test" of his candidacy, he replied, "That would be very close to describing how I feel."
In previous years the winner-take-all California primary had proven to be pivotal, capable of crippling front-runners and resuscitating a struggling campaign. Senator Barry Goldwater's slim victory in California in 1964 had given him enough momentum to win the nomination, despite his loss of earlier primaries to Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Robert Kennedy came into the state in a stronger position than Goldwater. Although some informal delegate counts showed Humphrey with almost enough votes to capture the nomination, his support was soft, and the leaders of several large state delegations, including Daley, were waiting to see how Kennedy performed in California.
Daley and Wade had met as planned on the Wednesdays following the Indiana and Nebraska primaries. Both times Daley seemed pleased that Kennedy had won, winking broadly, congratulating Wade, and reminding him that "the primaries count . . . the primaries count . . . the primaries count."
Wade was so confident that Kennedy would win Oregon that he had arranged to be away on business the following Wednesday. That evening Daley called and said, "I missed you yesterday. I want to see you." Wade assumed that Daley wanted to inform him that after Kennedy's loss in Oregon he was backing Humphrey. The next morning he went to Daley's office and apologized for missing their meeting. Daley waved a pudgy hand in the air and said, "Don't worry about it." Wade assumed he meant, "Don't worry about the meeting." But when he said, "The primaries cut everything. If he's all right in California, he's going to be all right," Wade realized he was saying that Kennedy should not worry about losing Oregon, and that everything now depended on California. He left their meeting convinced that Daley was hoping that Kennedy would win California so he would have an excuse for supporting him.
The dozens of honorary Kennedys who descended on California during the final week of campaigning believed that a convincing Kennedy victory would eliminate McCarthy and win over some of the uncommitted Democratic leaders. Like Kennedy, they understood that even a narrow loss to McCarthy would be fatal to his candidacy and might cripple his political career, putting the nomination out of reach in 1972.
These high stakes made a campaign that was already emotional and intense enough even more so. Raising the temperature still further was the fact that Kennedy was loved and hated more passionately in California than anywhere else. In a Saturday Evening Post column titled "Why Do They Hate Him So?" political columnist Stewart Alsop speculated that Kennedy frightened middle-class Americans by using fierce words such as indecent and immoral and wearing his hair just long enough to give the impression of him being "a sort of angry, over-aged hippy." He believed that Kennedy's most implacable foes could be found among the upper and upper-middle classes and the business community, and that they did not hate him for being a left-wing ideologue, which he was not, but for being an idealist who was serious about tackling poverty and whose election, Alsop said, "could lead to major redistribution of income in the United States."
Meanwhile, left-wing radicals in California dismissed Kennedy as an establishment sellout who might derail their revolution. They brought SELL-OUT WITH BOBBY and WHO KILLED YOUR BROTHER? signs to rallies and disrupted one of his motorcades.
The most unpleasant confrontation of the entire campaign had occurred when Kennedy spoke at the University of San Francisco on April 19. As he walked through the audience to the podium, a student spat in his face and screamed, "Fascist Pig!" ("There was this guy screaming 'fascist pig' and spitting at me," Kennedy told a friend. "And I was looking around to see who he was talking to, and he was talking to me!") When he began speaking, members of the Peace and Freedom Party chanted, "Victory to the Vietcong!" and "What about Huey Newton?" He finally put away his speech and took questions, shouting into a microphone to be heard over the heckling. After he said he opposed student deferments and amnesty for military deserters, a boy bellowed, "You're a bum, Kennedy!" Asked if he believed in "My country, right or wrong," he replied, "As Camus said, I love my country, but I love my country in justice the most." [Camus had said, "I love my country too much to be a nationalist."] He gave up and told them, "This happy time—this happening—must come to an end. I was about to say it's been a pleasure, but I'm glad I didn't make that mistake." Some students applauded; others pelted him with apple cores.
On May 15 he had spoken at Los Angeles Valley College. Tolan had hoped that adults from the surrounding towns would fill many of the seats. Instead, the students arrived early, packed the hall, and greeted Kennedy with screams of "Where were you in New Hampshire?" Afterward he exploded at Tolan, shouting, "How many times must I tell you I don't want to go to universities anymore, and then you put me in a university." As they drove away, people standing on an overpass pelted his open car with a shower of small objects. Tolan assumed they were pebbles. They turned out to be candy kisses, but Kennedy's assailants had been throwing them hard, trying to hurt him.
No group in California loved Kennedy more than its Chicano farmworkers. They loved him because they were Catholics, and he was the brother of the first Catholic president, and because he had been the first important Anglo politician to pay attention to them, and support their union, the United Farm Workers (UFW). Its leader, Cesar Chavez, had met him when he visited Delano in 1966 as a member of the Senate's migratory labor subcommittee that was holding hearings to determine if the UFW qualified for union status under the terms of the National Labor Relations Act. There was no compelling reason for a senator from New York to champion the cause of farmworkers in California. The Anglo growers opposing the union were wealthy and influential, while many of the Chicanos were aliens, and even those with citizenship seldom voted in large numbers. (Governor Ronald Reagan, reflecting the prevailing wisdom of the state's GOP establishment, had remarked that Chicanos were ideally suited for stoop labor because they were "built close to the ground.") Kennedy had been reluctant to involve himself, but once he saw the farmworkers' housing and the picket lines and heard testimony from the growers and workers, he knew why he was there and proved that his reputation as a ruthless interrogator of the corrupt and powerful was deserved.
Kern County sheriff Roy Gaylen had arrested picketing farmworkers based on rumors that scabs employed by the growers were preparing to assault them. Asked by Kennedy to justify this policy, Gaylen replied, "Well, if I have reason to believe that there's going to be a riot started, and somebody tells me that there's going to be trouble if you don't stop them, then it's my duty to stop them." After more back and forth, Kennedy said, "This is a most interesting concept, I think, that you suddenly hear talk . . . about somebody's going to get out of order, perhaps violate the law, and you go in and arrest them, and they haven't done anything wrong. How do you go arrest somebody if they haven't violated the law?" Gaylen said, "They are ready to violate the law, in other words—" Kennedy cut him off. "[Can] I suggest during the luncheon period that the sheriff and the district attorney read the Constitution of the United States?" Farmworkers in the audience cheered, and news of the exchange quickly spread through the Chicano community. After the hearings concluded, Kennedy joined the UFW picket line.
When Kennedy returned to Delano on March 10, 1968, to join Chavez in breaking his fast, four thousand Chicanos had lined the road leading to the park where he was speaking, waving their baseball caps and shouting "Bobby! Bobby! Bobby!" Men with tears running down their cheeks grabbed at his clothes as he walked to the platform, kissing him on the hands and mouth and shouting "Un gran' hombre! Un gran' hombre!" Dolores Huerta, who was escorting him through the crowd with Peter Edelman, feared he would be injured and shouted, "Get back! Get back!" But Edelman, knowing Kennedy wanted to be touched, said, "Don't tell them anything! Don't worry about it. It's alright."
California's large population of Chicanos, blacks, students, and working-class whites—the kinds of "people with problems" whom Kennedy counted among his base—should have made it a good state for him. But its large size and population also made it poorly suited for his going-into-the-streets style of campaigning, and made running from a television studio more logical. It was also a challenging state for someone promising to bridge America's many gaps and divisions, since nowhere was the generation gap wider, campuses more radicalized, youth more alienated, or blacks angrier.
As in Oregon, his California campaign had drifted during the early days of his candidacy, and an internal April 25 memorandum described it as "standing still." Some staffers blamed Jesse Unruh, the formidable speaker of the California State Assembly, who had been the most influential national Democrat to endorse Kennedy. Instead of confronting the mercurial Unruh, the Kennedy people set up a parallel organization called Volunteers for Kennedy and operated independently. Unruh wanted to mount a traditional California campaign of direct mail and television spots targeting suburban voters. He dismissed courting blacks and Chicanos as a waste of time because, he claimed, their votes could easily be bought. He argued that sending a Kennedy motorcade through Hispanic neighborhoods was futile because they did not respond to that kind of campaigning, and that sending one through black ghettos was unwise, because it might alienate suburban whites.
Some of the native Californians on Kennedy's staff agreed that Kennedy was lavishing too much attention on minorities who would vote for him anyway, and too little on the million registered Democrats in suburban Orange County; spending too much time in liberal San Francisco and too little in the rest of the state. Like Unruh, they wanted him to campaign from television studios and court middle-class voters.
Ed Guthman, a former Kennedy Justice Department aide who had become an editor at the Los Angeles Times, recommended cutting back on the rallies and motorcades and holding a series of reassuring, low-key conversations about race relations with small groups of white suburbanites that could be broadcast across the state. Had Kennedy won Oregon he might have been more receptive to this advice, but after losing one overwhelmingly white and suburban state, he was reluctant to place his political future in the hands of the same kinds of voters again. Instead, during the final week he largely suspended his efforts to awaken the consciences of middle-class voters and concentrated on encouraging those who already liked him to turn out to vote for him. He did not entirely abandon the rest of the electorate. He handed the campuses and Beverly Hills drawing rooms over to East Cost Honorary Kennedys like Arthur Schlesinger, Pat Moynihan, and George Plimpton, and made a few forays into the suburbs. Nor did he ignore television, and on many days he appeared in all three of the state's major media markets, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, so he could make the evening news in each. But he continued with the whistle-stops, motorcades, and street rallies that excited minority voters.
Whether Kennedy's frenetic campaign style encouraged his assassin is unknowable. But it is possible that if he had won Oregon he might not have pushed himself so hard in California, engaging in the kind of frenzied campaigning that excited his base, but also increased the hysteria in a state that was already hysterical enough. And it is possible that his strategy of encouraging those who loved him to love him still more may have had a similar effect on those who hated him, and on California's considerable population of the disgruntled, disturbed, and alienated.
Journalist Theodore White, who traveled with him during this final week, believed that his intensity sometimes disturbed the peace of those who wanted to be left alone, writing that residents of Beverly Hills and Pasadena would see a televised clip of Kennedy campaigning in Watts—see his "exhausted outburst to a minority group"—and feel threatened. White thought that, more than elsewhere, Kennedy came across in California as someone who wanted to churn the political waters rather than calm them: "He was the disturber. . . . He meant what he said. If he were elected, he would perform as he promised and the country would change."
During a Los Angeles symposium in 2000 marking what would have been Robert Kennedy's seventy-fifth birthday, Ted Sorensen blamed himself for contributing to a situation that had prompted Kennedy to campaign so passionately and recklessly, and drew an oblique connection between the way he ran for president and his assassination. "I find it hard to talk about the '68 campaign for many reasons, and I'm sure some of them are reasons of guilt," Sorensen said, adding, "It's no secret that I was opposed to Bobby running. . . . I have since worried and wondered as to whether or not that delayed his entry into the presidential race. I have wondered whether that delay made the race that much more frantic and difficult, and whether something better might have come out of it all." By "something better," he presumably meant Robert Kennedy surviving.
THE MOST FRENZIED event of Kennedy's last week was its first one, his May 29 motorcade from the airport to downtown Los Angeles. He concluded his airport news conference by telling reporters, "I think I probably have to win here. I have to go now because I have thousands of fans waiting for me—I hope," then climbed into a convertible and began a two-hour, thirteen-vehicle motorcade through black and Mexican-American neighborhoods and downtown Los Angeles that ended at the Beverly Hilton. His May 6 Indiana motorcade had been the longest in the annals of American politics. His one through Los Angeles on March 24 had been the wildest in that city's history, but the one on May 29 was even wilder. People filled the streets in minority neighborhoods, slowing his motorcade to a crawl, thrusting scraps of paper at him for autographs, and screaming his name. The moment he shook one hand, several more gripped his wrist, his fingers, his arm, anything. Sometimes he gave a brief speech, shouting through a bullhorn and encouraging them to vote. As they cheered and swirled around his car he pumped his fist in the air and shouted, "These are my people! These are my people!" At one point, he dashed back to the car carrying the photographers, yelling, "From now on Los Angeles is my Resurrection City!"
He had never needed his people more, and they knew it. A middle- aged woman in a chorus-girl costume chased his car for blocks, screaming "Piss on Oregon! Piss on Oregon!" Chicanos shouted "Viva Kennedy!" as they stroked his hair. A boy poked his head into the window of the press bus and yelled, "Remember my name, Ernesto Juarez!" as if seeing Kennedy had suddenly made him important. A Chicano crowd pulled Kennedy from his car and a uniformed LAPD sergeant attempted to rescue him. Kennedy yelled, "We're all right, can't you leave us alone?"
Kennedy disliked being surrounded by uniformed officers, but he and his aides recognized that he needed the police to halt traffic and close streets for his motorcades. Police departments had provided this service in other cities, but the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) refused on grounds that Kennedy was, as one official put it, "nobody special." His campaign hired a squad of retired LAPD motorcycle officers who usually managed traffic for movie studios and funeral homes. But despite their presence on May 29, an LAPD spokesman accused the Kennedy motorcade of committing a hundred traffic violations, mostly running stop signs and red lights. On orders from Mayor Sam Yorty, police issued the campaign twenty-three tickets.*
[*The traffic tickets were the final fruit of a Yorty-Kennedy feud that had begun in 1960 when Yorty crossed party lines to support Richard Nixon. Just as Kennedy had cemented his popularity with Chicanos by his interrogation of Sheriff Gaylen, he had turned Yorty into an enemy while interrogating him during hearings on the 1965 Watts riots. After Yorty testified that every problem contributing to the riots had not been his responsibility, Kennedy had snapped, "The Mayor . . . [should] stay here through all of these hearings, and I think he could safely do so, because as 1 understand from your testimony, you have nothing to get back to."]
When Kennedy's motorcade reached the narrow, urban streets of downtown Los Angeles, office workers showered him with cut-up newspapers and phone books. His shirt was soaked with perspiration and stuck to his back. He stood on the backseat of a convertible, punching his fist in the air as a blizzard of paper swirled around him and shouting, "I need your help! I need your help!"
"You've got it! You've got it!" the crowd screamed. "Sock it to 'em, Bobby!"
"Will you give me a hand on June 4?" he yelled.
"Yes! Yes! Yes!"
At the Beverly Hilton, he told his campaign workers, "If I died in Oregon, I hope Los Angeles is Resurrection City." Hays Gorey, who was in the audience, thought he seemed more nervous than usual; he detected "a slight but real lessening of confidence, a bit more stammering," and concluded that "Oregon had shaken Kennedy— severely."
After leaving the Hilton, Kennedy spent eight hours motorcading through middle-class and working-class towns in the San Gabriel Valley and in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. He opened a campaign headquarters and spoke in a high school auditorium and at street rallies. This was not supposed to be friendly territory. After the Watts riots, Californians had voted to repeal the state's antidiscrimination housing law, and a recent poll showed 61 percent believing that "Robert Kennedy spends most of [his] time courting minority groups." But although San Bernardino mayor Al Ballard had equipped city fire trucks with shotguns during the Watts riots and had become notorious for urging residents to arm themselves, he gave Kennedy a rousing introduction. Kennedy did not finish campaigning until midnight. He had again lost his shoes to a souvenir hunter. After returning a borrowed pair, he limped down the aisle of his chartered plane. As he passed John Lindsay he put a stockinged foot on the armrest of Lindsay's chair and said, "Don't tell me the people of this country don't love me. . . . On the other hand, perhaps all they wanted was a shoe."