10

SLOW BOIL

August 1965–November 1965

The night President Johnson vaulted U.S. troop levels in Vietnam over 125,000, an hourly poll taken by a marketing company and shared with journalists measured the response of the American public. The first hour registered 54 percent support of the administration’s Vietnam policy. Twenty-four percent disagreed and 22 percent replied, “Don’t know.” But by the final hour, support dipped seven points to 47 percent. “Don’t know” had suddenly doubled to 43 percent.1

Johnson was especially sensitive to polls and their findings. In an interview soon after with Newsweek, he produced two thick booklets of polling and proudly chided the press on how wrong they had been to criticize his decisions abroad. “The polls on Vietnam run about eighty to twenty in favor of what we’re doing,” he declared. In his mind, the public wasn’t the problem; it was the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. “Congress isn’t eating out of my hand,” the President said.2

Johnson’s announcement included a request to Congress for an additional $1.7 billion for the war, but members were still bitter about being cornered into May’s funding vote. “Some say privately they will never allow the President to get by with this trick again: he must fully demonstrate the need for any more war funds,” the Wall Street Journal reported.3

The skeptical were tight-lipped on the issue. Supporters were brazen. “Several influential Democrats in Congress” noted to the New York Times “that the principal support for an increasing military commitment came from Republicans who were ardent followers of Barry Goldwater.” South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond said the United States had to go as far as possible to win the war, including “the tactical A-weapon” if necessary. “After all,” he said, “they are coming into South Vietnam and cutting off ears of mayors and other officials. It may take something drastic to bring them to their senses and stop this war.” However, Johnson could not fully enjoy his conservative support. Gerald Ford, leader of the House Republicans, endorsed the Vietnam policy while urging the President to cut back his domestic programs “to marshal the nation’s strength for the military effort.” Johnson responded to such criticism by saying he would not allow “this problem in Vietnam to lock the door of opportunity …”4

The Senate had outright Democratic critics of the policy, such as Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska. But most of the skeptical spoke only in off-the-record interviews. These senators believed the bombing had failed, that Saigon was incapable of gaining popular support, and that more American troops meant taking over the fighting. If the United States was lucky, the war would end in partition like Korea, with an American occupying force needed to prop up the government. These silent senators were also said to question the “domino theory” that Vietnam’s fall would lead to a wave of Communist takeovers—doubting Thurmond’s prediction of Red China reaching “all the way to the shores of Hawaii.” Yet they had no alternative to the President’s course of action and understood the need for a united front while American men were fighting and dying. Many also feared being labeled weak on Communism. Still, a bipartisan handful led by the strident Senator Morse openly called for further Vietnam action to go before the United Nations Security Council.5

On August 9, the President held a briefing for senators to offer what he described as a balanced view of his Vietnam policy. It began with Maxwell Taylor delivering a report on the military, diplomatic, and political situations. Secretaries Rusk and McNamara, Under Secretary Harriman, and newly appointed UN ambassador Arthur Goldberg were all on hand for discussion. Johnson later appeared unexpectedly at Bill Moyers’s press briefing. Asked if members of Congress were “disagreeing privately” with his policy, the President said, “I find that members of my party, and the other party, and people throughout the country frequently disagree with me on a good many things. I don’t think it’s private though.”6

However, Bobby was not one of them. He attended the briefing and had nothing critical to say about the troop increase. Teddy took the lead on Vietnam, championing the budding refugee crisis amid the Vietcong’s butchering of pro-Saigon villagers.7

Teddy spoke for both of them on Vietnam after Bobby’s controversial foreign-policy speeches. Sitting in a high-backed chair in the Senate reception room, the youngest Kennedy brother told Robert Healy of the Boston Globe, “We support the President as much as any senator here.”8

The war was the slow boil of the summer, but Bobby’s attention reached beyond Southeast Asia. After all, 83 more Americans had died in car wrecks over the Fourth of July weekend—553—than in five years of fighting in Vietnam. The rate of U.S. traffic deaths had climbed for a third straight year after a two-decade decline.

Bobby sat on the Senate subcommittee that asked the highly profitable auto industry why it invested so little in protecting its passengers. Executives claimed caution didn’t sell. They said their new safety features led to a sales drop in 1956. Automaker AMC removed seat belts after customer complaints.9 But Bobby believed the car industry would not cut into their profits to understand the problem, let alone spend what it took to reduce it.

Questioning three executives from General Motors, Bobby brought up a study from Cornell University about faulty doors and locks on GM vehicles that spilled passengers onto the pavement, turning fender benders into deadly collisions. The executives said they were unfamiliar with the Cornell report and needed more data to understand why their doors were more likely to fall off.

“What shocks me,” Bobby said, “is that Cornell makes the information available, and here are three top officials of General Motors and they aren’t even aware of it. It doesn’t indicate a very high priority for traffic safety.”10

He dug into their financial statistics, beginning with safety. “Tell me: How much money does General Motors spend on those matters?”

Board chairman Frederic Donner said they were about to spend a million dollars on a university-backed safety study.

“What have you spent so far?” Bobby asked.

Donner said, “We don’t know, Senator, how to add all these things up.”

The admission was stunning. Auto industry executives prided themselves on their data-driven decision making.

Bobby pounced. “You don’t?”

Donner scrambled. “Because they are scattered all over,” the chairman said. “I mean, research may do something in this activity—”

“General Motors doesn’t know how to add them up?” Bobby said.

“—through AMA—what?”

Bobby repeated himself. “General Motors doesn’t know how to add these matters up?”

“It isn’t adding,” Donner said. “It is dividing.”

Bobby quickly reminded Donner that he was the one who used the word add. The rough estimate was $1.25 million. Bobby asked whether GM had any idea how many children had fallen out of their cars.

“Nobody knows that,” said GM’s president.

“I don’t quite know how you would find that out,” said GM’s chairman.

“Nobody knows that answer,” said GM’s vice president for engineering.

Bobby moved on to the bottom line. “What was the profit of General Motors last year?” he asked.

GM president James Roche began, “I don’t think that has anything to do—”

Bobby cut him off. “I would like to have that answer, if I may. I think I am entitled to know that figure. I think it has been published. You spent one and a quarter million, as I understand it, on this aspect of safety. I would like to know what the profit is.”

Donner interjected, “The one aspect we are talking about is safety.”

“What was the profit of General Motors last year?” Bobby repeated.

Chairman Donner snapped, “I will have to ask one of my associates.”

“Seventeen hundred million dollars,” President Roche offered.

Bobby: “What?”

Donner: “About one and a half billion dollars, I think.”

Bobby: “One billion dollars?”

Donner: “Yes.”

Bobby: “Or one point seven billion dollars. You made one point seven billion dollars last year?”

Donner said, “That is correct.”

“And you spent one million dollars on this?”11

The Washington Post article in the next day’s paper said Bobby dealt with the high-paid executives “as if he were examining a couple of youthful applicants for a driver’s license who hadn’t done their roadwork.” The Wall Street Journal’s reporter wrote that the GM men’s pleas of ignorance “were unconvincing, especially in view of Detroit’s penchant for cranking out figures when they’re more self-serving—the allegedly astronomical cost of switching to the metric system of measurement, for example, or the claimed investment in bringing out each new car model.”12

The questioning got results. When Ford’s chief executive came before the committee next, he was prepared with a lengthy statement addressing all of the senators’ concerns. And within days of their Capitol Hill grillings, both Chrysler and GM released multimillion-dollar figures on their safety spending. Bobby’s high-profile rebukes were prominent in the stories.13

As a senator, Bobby rushed headlong into challenging powerful interests, even when it was futile—such as in his battle with the tobacco industry. An alarming surgeon general’s report publicly released in early 1964 found an inextricable link between smoking and a slew of fatal illnesses. Federal action seemed a given, so the boardrooms of the notoriously competitive “Big Six” tobacco companies banded together to stop it. Through a year and a half of negotiations, whenever regulation began to get any real teeth, their lawyers defanged it.14 One of those lawyers was Robert Wald, a friend of Peter Edelman’s, who met with him for dinner one night and said how upset he was over his work. Wald wondered if Senator Kennedy could do something. Soon after, Bobby passed by Edelman’s desk and his aide mentioned the cigarette lobby’s runaround. Edelman casually suggested that they make a statement.

“That’s fine,” Bobby replied without hesitation.

“Well, you know,” an astonished Edelman said, “don’t you want to think about it a little, because you’re taking on this big, all these big companies—”

“No, that’s fine,” Bobby said, as if he were ordering lunch. “I’m glad you mentioned that. We should do it.”15

They were up against a well-funded lobby marshaled by Abe Fortas, close friend and adviser to President Johnson. Fortas assembled a coalition beyond the crop’s Southern base to include farmers and manufacturers of all stripes, plus every broadcaster and publisher in the country—the recipients of $250 million a year in tobacco advertising. The Federal Trade Commission, regulator of deceptive practices, wanted health warnings in every cigarette billboard, magazine ad, and broadcast commercial. Fortas’s lobby had decided to give way and put labels—CAUTION: CIGARETTE SMOKING MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH—on every pack. But not on the ads. The Senate Commerce Committee slapped a moratorium on the FTC’s regulatory power to insert warnings in cigarette ads for at least three years. Senator Ross Bass of Tennessee said it would allow for “further research” before forcing a company to “contradict its [pro-smoking] views as shown in the advertising.”

The fight went to the floor, with Bobby cosponsoring an amendment. In his speech, he spoke of studies showing that half of high school students were regular smokers by the time of graduation. “The alarming fact is that if present smoking habits continue, one million of the children who are today in school in our country will develop lung cancer,” Kennedy said. “In Congress and around the nation, we have spent a great deal of time talking and debating about American boys dying in South Vietnam … yet our death toll in Vietnam so far is about four hundred.” RFK found no scientific or medical reason justifying a lengthy moratorium.

Senator Bass, a fellow Democrat, challenged his colleague, the former attorney general. “The senator has much experience in the field which concerns the protection of the laws of the country,” Bass said. “Does the senator know of any other item in the nation, in any area … in which, if the manufacturer advertises his commodity, he is required to make the affirmative statement ‘We want you to buy our product, but if you use it, it might kill you?’ ”

Bobby began listing examples of medicines with FTC-mandated warning labels.

Bass interrupted sarcastically, “I appreciate the doctor giving me all of those statistics … If the senator from New York says we should ban the use of all tobacco products, that is his privilege.”16

Bobby’s amendment failed handily, and the final bill overwhelmingly passed against his and four other lonely nays—not even Teddy joined him this time.17 Tobacco and money had won the day, and Abe Fortas would get a seat on the Supreme Court before the summer was out.

Bobby hated losing and hated it even more when people in politics wore “noble” losses like a badge of honor. He said that reform liberals preferred defeat because they were “in love with death … For an awful lot of them in this kind of group,” he said privately, “action or success makes them suspicious, and they almost lose interest.”18

Bobby had failed, but he was failing with a purpose. It was good politics for him to be a liberal warrior, as Stewart Alsop wrote in the Saturday Evening Post. “With Hubert Humphrey boxed in, Robert Kennedy is filling the resulting vacancy as leader of the liberal Democrats.” That summer, he would vote to repeal the federal right-to-work law that hampered union membership, vocally oppose immunity for bankers in an antitrust suit, and fight a controversial measure to give Washington, D.C., police more leverage to extract confessions from suspects. While it was indeed good for him politically, these were battles Bobby cared about. In the case of cigarettes, he was so sincere that the writer Truman Capote would later find him outside their Manhattan apartment tower haranguing two youngsters he caught smoking “like some sort of avenging angel who had fallen out of heaven upon them.”19

Yet his reputation left his sincerity forever in doubt. Stewart Alsop wrote, “Kennedy’s critics in his own party have often expressed doubt that he is a ‘real liberal’ at all.” Bobby agreed, saying he disliked the word liberal since nobody really knew what it meant. And he still refused to condemn Joseph McCarthy to Alsop because, Bobby said, “the man is dead, and I’m not going to do it.”

“McCarthy was hated more by liberals than any other politician in modern times,” Alsop wrote, “and yet the man who refuses to say bad things about him is becoming sort of a liberal lodestar.”

“I hope I’ve learned something in the last ten years,” Bobby told him.20

The children of the city concerned Bobby. He had walked the broken concrete lots of New York City, littered with shards of glass and metal, and stained by exploded trash bags tossed from apartment windows high above. A federal program paid youths to convert these disasters into tiny parks. Alongside Senator Javits, Bobby was constantly announcing federal funds to fight poverty, introducing new projects and initiatives.21

A thousand people filled a block and hung out of brownstones in the Puerto Rican section of Harlem on August 12 to see him and Ethel take part in an induction ceremony for Volunteers in Service to America—a kind of domestic Peace Corps. The forty-three new VISTA workers would spend the next year on projects to help alleviate poverty in the community. Under floodlights, Bobby gave a short speech: “Your job is to help relieve poverty; to make the people dissatisfied with landlords and politicians—dissatisfied even with this United States senator.” He was surprised to hear that there was no official swearing in, so he decided to make up an oath, telling the workers to raise their right hands and repeat after him, “I solemnly swear … that I will be faithful and true to the VISTA concept … and help my own and take care of my baby brothers and sisters … and vote for Robert Kennedy in 1970.” After, he and Ethel wandered off into the crowd as hundreds of children moved in to touch him. They joked how they would love to get a game of stickball going. “You be Willie Mays,” Bobby said to one child, “and you be [Orlando] Cepeda … And who will I be?” he wondered. “Well, I’ll just be myself.”22

He knew the smiling faces in the streets would return to homes stricken by poverty. “I have been in tenements in Harlem,” Bobby had said in Chicago that April, “where the smell of rats was so strong that it was difficult to stay there for five minutes, and where children slept with lights turned on their feet to discourage attacks.” He talked about crumbling homes, failing schools, and an infant-mortality rate in Bedford-Stuyvesant that was twice the rate in more affluent parts of the city. “Thousands marched for James Reeb”—the Boston minister clubbed to death in Alabama—“but who marches for our own dead children?”23 No one would, until something got their attention.

That began in August, nearly as far as could be from Selma, in a poor Negro section of Los Angeles. The Watts neighborhood was demographically separated from much of the city: 93 percent black, four times as overcrowded, a fifth of its homes crumbling, lower incomes and higher crime. Then one night the drawn-out drunk-driving arrest of a black youth created a spectacle, turning into rumors and then a riot. The police pulled out and sealed the neighborhood off from the city, letting it burn. More than thirteen thousand National Guardsmen mobilized to regain control as the crisis spread over six days. Then followed an eruption in Chicago after an undermanned fire truck killed a black woman. In Springfield, Massachusetts, the arrest of civil rights demonstrators led to arsonists marauding through the streets.24

At least one California politician blamed Bobby for Watts in the immediate aftermath. Joe Shell, the former Republican leader in the state legislature, told the New York Times, “When Bobby Kennedy was attorney general, he said as long as people are mistreated, they are going to riot. This is no attitude for an attorney general to take. The moment we accept violation of law, we are giving open sesame to this kind of action.”25 More criticism was to come, especially once Bobby began sharing his thoughts. General Dwight Eisenhower said in a Capitol Hill news conference, “I believe the United States as a whole has been becoming atmosphered, you might say, in a policy of lawlessness. If we like a law, we obey it; if we don’t, we are told, ‘You can disobey it.’ ”

Bobby took on the former president in interviews. “There is no point in telling Negroes to obey the law,” he told David Broder. “To many Negroes, the law is the enemy. In Harlem, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, it has almost always been used against him.” The challenge was greater because it concerned pocketbooks, not ballots—housing, not drinking fountains. Securing rights in the South, he said, “was an easy job compared to what we face in the North.”

“The only answer is massive relief with the real help going to the young,” Bobby said, though Los Angeles already received millions in antipoverty funds—some of it locked up in political disputes. The Herald Tribune’s Andy Glass wrote that Bobby “acknowledged there would be ample stealing and graft in the programs. But, he added, people will just have to live with it and understand it.” The next day’s Boston Globe juxtaposed thirty-nine-year-old Bobby’s and seventy-four-year-old Eisenhower’s quotes in large type. They epitomized the coming generational and ideological divides of white major-party leadership in what some called the Negro Revolution.26

But Bobby also spoke of a geographic divide. The United States is “strangely insensitive to the problems of the Northern Negro,” he said to a largely white civic group in a New York suburb later that week.

“In the last four years, the Negro has made great progress; and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are rightfully regarded as achievements of which we can all be proud. But as we are learning now, it is one thing to assure a man the legal right to eat in a restaurant; it is another thing to assure that he can earn the money to eat there …”

The Southern model was not applicable for Negroes in the North. “Civil rights leaders cannot, with sit-ins, change the fact that adults are illiterate. Marches do not create jobs for their children.” And so, Northern slums were “places of blighted hopes and disappointment”—ignited by injustice to violence.

And while Bobby said many rioters were “simply hoodlums” and “only a small minority” of Negroes, he reminded his white audience of “the harsh fact” that “just saying ‘Obey the law’ is not going to work.”

“The law to us is a friend, which preserves our property and our personal safety. But for the Negro, law means something different … The law does not fully protect their lives—their dignity—or encourage their hope and trust for the future.”

Bobby noted how a Time magazine report said that one leader of the Los Angeles riots was a biochemistry graduate. “We should not be surprised,” he said. “After all, we are very proud of the fact that we had a revolution and overthrew a government because we were taxed without representation. I think there is no doubt that if Washington or Jefferson or Adams were Negroes in a Northern city today, they would be in the forefront of the effort to change the conditions under which Negroes live in our society.”27

The reaction to Bobby’s diagnosis was profoundly negative. The Christian Science Monitor editorial board called his statements “deeply disturbing” and warned that it gave rioters “the impression that influential national figures look with sympathy upon their breaking of the law.” The Times’ Tom Wicker observed with irony that Bobby, whose name was “a cussword” in the South over civil rights, was now declaring Northern racial problems to be “more urgent.” Time magazine included the statement with other “irresponsible post-mortems,” including that of a “husky [Negro] youth” who said, “Last time we weren’t out to kill whites. Next time is going to be different.”28

But in an interview in his office on September 3, Bobby stood by his radical words, calling Watts a “clear warning of what will happen in other cities, all across the nation, if we don’t act quickly.” He had vague ideas of what needed to be done, including that the solution needed to come from within the Negro community. He said that many blacks “who succeeded in climbing the ladder of education and well-being fail to extend a helping hand to their fellows on the rungs below. I think we white people must demand a lot of ourselves in the years ahead. We should demand as much from the many Negroes who already share the advantages of our affluent society.” Meeting at Hickory Hill, he instructed his Senate staff to begin researching a program—a plan to attack conditions in the slums and redirect the energy of the Negro Revolution.29

Two years earlier, Bobby might have done things differently—tempered his rhetoric and found a compromise. It might have even achieved something. But he was a legislator now, and the swiftness of executive office was gone, as he told Jack Bell of the Associated Press:

“As attorney general I was involved in matters in which action could be taken quite quickly, and also, of course, I had a particular relationship with the President of the United States,” he said. “In the Senate … my decisions have less of an immediate effect, and of course, legislation is not passed as rapidly as action can be taken in the executive branch.”

“Would you say that you get somewhat less satisfaction out of it?” Bell asked.

“No. A senator is free to range over a broad area. They are matters of considerable significance. So although my role is quite different from what it was when I was attorney general, the job is still of great interest and offers great satisfaction.”

Bell measured Bobby’s interest in returning to the executive branch. “Have you any present intention of running for any other office in 1968?”

“No, no.”

“How about 1972?”

“No,” Bobby said. “No. I have none.”

“You’d like to stay in the Senate?”

“Yes. I run again in 1970 for the Senate.”

“You intend to do that?”

“I intend to do that,” he said.30

Bobby talked about the reports of his single-handed attempt to remove Johnson from the ticket at the 1960 Democratic National Convention, insisting he did everything “at President Kennedy’s request.” Whatever “erroneous conclusions” others made resulted from their applying “preconceived notions” to “a particular sentence or phrase of a sentence without knowing what the rest of the conversation was.” Even one of the controversy-stirring authors, Ted Sorensen, would soon tell CBS’s Mike Wallace in an interview that the stories of Lyndon Johnson’s selection didn’t conflict, and Bobby had merely played his role “of delivering bad news to the Johnson camp.”31

Bobby also defended LBJ when Bell asked, “Are we following the right course in Vietnam?”

“I support the effort that’s being made in Vietnam by President Johnson. I believe this to be most important. If the effort in Vietnam becomes merely a military effort, we shall win some of the battles, but we will lose the overall struggle. The people of Vietnam need to feel that their future should rest with Saigon and not Hanoi. We need to give them security—that is going to require police and military action—but at the same time, social, political, economic, educational, agriculture progress has to be made for the peasants of that tragic land. And we need to do much in this field.”32

After the foreign-policy sniping of early summer, some saw reconciliation. The Kennedy office’s constituent newsletter featured a smiling picture of the senator and President Johnson at the White House, which Evans and Novak wrote “symbolizes a cooling of the country’s hottest political feud.” The books from JFK’s aides kept coming, with longtime personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln releasing hers, which included an account of the selection of Lyndon Johnson. UPI wrote that Lincoln’s book upset Bobby as much as Schlesinger’s had, and that President Kennedy’s widow shared this feeling. The report said Jackie had read parts of Schlesinger’s and Sorensen’s books, and “insiders said she was displeased with some of the reminiscences.” The first lady had made White House residential staffers sign papers that they would not write about their relationship with the Kennedys, and Evelyn Lincoln had allegedly received a copy of such an agreement, but never signed. Jackie was intensely private, secluding herself and her children as best she could on the fifteenth-floor apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, accessible only by private elevator. She was hounded by the press, and it sometimes fell to her brother-in-law to manage her image. When newspapers published photos of a woman in light-colored slacks and a black sweater aboard Frank Sinatra’s yacht in Hyannis Port, Bobby personally telephoned to clarify that it was not Jackie.33

Bobby was still the protector of his family. Late that summer, his eldest, Kathleen, was show jumping in front of five hundred people when her horse, Attorney General, somersaulted over a barrier and landed on her. She was still unconscious when they removed her from the field. Bobby and Ethel were aboard a boat with their other children, sailing on Long Island Sound, and the Coast Guard dispatched a cutter to inform them of Kathleen’s accident. There had been seventy-mile-an-hour winds the night before, and fifteen-foot-high waves made it impossible for the boats to heave. Coast Guard coxswain Sam Harris yelled through a bullhorn that Kathleen had been injured. “Don’t be concerned,” Harris announced. But Bobby was determined. He stripped off his shirt and shoes, fastened a small orange floater around his neck, and jumped overboard into the waves. With all his might, he swam the fifty yards to the cutter in a few tense minutes, his head at times disappearing amid the swells.34

Some saw recklessness in the dangerous swim, likening it to his mountain climbing and white-water-rapids shooting.35 But fear had driven him into the water. Bobby knew little more than his daughter had a serious head injury. While Kathleen would be okay, with a mild concussion and some internal bleeding, the outcome could have been much worse. The Kennedys had faced such things before.

President Kennedy had been nearly two years into his term before the family finally revealed his nearest sister, Rosemary, was mentally retarded. A single sentence in 1960’s The Remarkable Kennedys explained the “quiet” and “only unmarried” sister’s absence from her photogenic family’s exploits: “teaching in a school for retarded children in Wisconsin.” In truth, Joseph Kennedy’s attempt to improve Rosemary’s mind through a lobotomy had left her mute and memoryless at age twenty-three—what her mother called “the first of the tragedies that were to befall us.” She disappeared from her mother’s round-robin letters within a month of the 1941 surgery, and as Jack’s political career took off in 1947, the family moved her a thousand miles away to Jefferson, Wisconsin, on the advice of Boston archbishop Richard Cushing, who feared the “publicity” of her living in New England. Her mother, sisters, and brothers waited until after her father’s stroke before visiting or publicly acknowledging her condition. Rose would speak out about feeling “frustrated and heartbroken” for the lack of “concrete information” to help Rosemary when she was a child.36 The Kennedys atoned by becoming the highest-profile champions for the mentally retarded.

In the summer of 1965, Bobby’s Senate office began receiving desperate letters from mothers of children at the Willowbrook State School. Located on Staten Island, Willowbrook housed over six thousand patients from infants to the elderly, making it one of the country’s largest state-run institutions for the mentally retarded. The letters claimed the patients—often called “inmates”—were filthy, idle, and abandoned. Some died from the neglect, like eight-year-old John Taylor when he was taken for a shower. Faulty plumbing had corroded the cold-water pipes, and an inexperienced ward attendant did not notice that the water she was spraying on the boy was boiling. Taylor screamed in agony, but the ward attendant did not heed him—patients at Willowbrook often screamed for no reason. The boy was taken back to an isolation room, where he butted his head against the wall until a doctor came to stitch him up. Stripping the child for a penicillin shot, the doctor discovered the blackened burns covering his body. It was too late to save him. Taylor died the next morning. Willowbrook merely dismissed the young ward attendant responsible and put up a sign reminding others to check the water temperature before administering showers. Many others died for the lack or inattention of staff. A patient died after another pushed his wheelchair under a burning-hot shower. A severely retarded child was beaten to death by an older, more capable boy, put in with the slower ones as punishment. One inmate punched another in the neck, breaking his larynx and suffocating him.37

The letters arriving at Kennedy’s office told similar stories of misery. Their children were supposed to be in the care of the state and Governor Rockefeller, except Rockefeller wasn’t helping them. No one was. Some letters had clippings from a New York Daily News series on the school’s conditions, validating their claims. The parents reached out to Bobby because the state wouldn’t act … because he was their senator … because he, more than anyone else in power, might understand.

The letters landed on Adam Walinsky’s desk, and he sent for a complete set of the Daily News stories from the Library of Congress. He put them with the letters in a packet for the senator, and just days after Kathleen fell from her horse, Bobby took the Daily News reporter with him for a surprise inspection of the Willowbrook State School.38

As they entered Ward C in Building 9, the smell of urine fell like a damp cloud, accompanied by the sounds of seventy-five severely retarded men, grunting and gibbering, shuffling feet and rustling clothes. The quarters were decades old and overcrowded. Rows of metal beds lined a narrow aisle, spaced ten inches apart. Bobby thought it looked like three inches. Patients had to walk across one another’s beds to get in and out of their own. The dayroom walls were drab; urine and spit puddled on the floor. Everywhere was “dimness and gloom and idleness and stench.” Their clothing looked like rags. Fights were common. There were too few attendants for too many men. And it was the same throughout Willowbrook.39

Two hundred children under the age of five lived in Building 12. Some had been abandoned at birth by parents who wouldn’t even look at them. Bobby would later talk about seeing “young children slipping into blankness and lifelong dependence.”40 He walked through the children’s dayrooms and saw no toys or books or games—no space for personal possessions—“for any shred of individuality.” Bobby said he thought of his own children, and how they prized their toys and books—the only things they knew were truly and fully theirs. These children would never get to experience that feeling.

As they toured the grounds, Willowbrook’s director told Bobby that his staff were doing all they could—and he was right. However, the State of New York was not providing the funding to hire the people they needed. The director had less than half the number of teachers he requested—only an eighth of the therapists he wanted. The rest were overworked—a staff defeated by the stink of it. When a reporter later asked the director whether Bobby’s criticisms were more or less true, he said they were, though he wished he had offered a kind word for the men and women doing the best they could.41

Bobby phoned Walinsky in Washington and told him he had to visit and collect more information. “I’ve got to say something about this.” Walinsky had never heard the senator so outraged. Walinsky arranged to go to Willowbrook, and to take the Caroline up to another institution in Rome, New York, with Kennedy family friend and physician Dr. George W. Thorn. It was better at Rome, but not by much. The problem wasn’t Willowbrook; it was statewide, with a badly neglected mental health system. Thorn helped Walinsky devise a list of recommendations, with a list of federal programs that could make up for the state’s financial shortcomings.42

Bobby took the findings and his outrage to the New York Joint Legislative Committee on Mental Retardation’s hearing in the Bronx, where he testified a little more than a week after Kathleen’s fall from her horse. His words were righteous and inflammatory—written for people to notice, to make them remember, to make things change.

He spoke of children “living in filth and dirt, their clothing in rags, in rooms less comfortable and cheerful than the cages in which we put animals in a zoo—without adequate supervision or a bit of affection—condemned to a life without hope.” He told of the misery he saw, the men walking over one another’s beds, the smells and the sounds. He spoke of the children with no toys or play or teachers in their lives. “We hear a great deal, these days, about civil rights, and civil liberties, and equality of opportunity, and justice. But there are no civil rights for young retarded adults—when they are denied the protection of the State Education Law.” The law commanded that every child between the age of five and twenty-one receive the fullest education he could absorb. This was nowhere near the case in Willowbrook, where one misbehaving seven-year-old boy was placed with low-functioning adults for five years. Now at twelve years old, his exile from childhood had destroyed him. All that could have been salvaged from this boy’s mind was gone. His life was over.

“There are no civil liberties for those put in the cells of Willowbrook—living amidst brutality and human excrement and intestinal disease … Nobody who has ever raised a child would want him to live for a moment as thousands of the mentally retarded now live in New York,” Bobby said. “I have an older sister in an institution. She’s fortunate not to be in this type of institution.”43

He gave his report and recommendations and said that it was just a matter of action. “Nothing that I have said today is new,” he noted, inviting the committee members to read a pamphlet on mental deficiency. “You can open it to almost any page and measure another way in which we fail to meet these standards … We cannot tolerate a new snake pit in New York.” Bobby quoted Sophocles asking, “What joy is there in day that follows day, some swift, some slow, with death the only goal?”

“We can do better,” he said. “We must do better.”44

The testimony had its intended effect. The committee chairman sent two state senators straight from the hearing to Willowbrook for an inspection. Governor Rockefeller’s spokesman said they were aware of the “difficulties” within the system. The committee had already commissioned a report, which Rockefeller had bottled up. Bobby wanted its release, not a political fight. “Our shortcomings are due to no one man, and no one single administration,” he said in his testimony.45

Only Rockefeller, a year from reelection, didn’t trust him. The report leaked anyhow, and within days of Bobby’s testimony, the governor’s office released a master plan on overhauling the state’s mental health institutions with a network of small community centers. Within another month, Rockefeller authorized the immediate hiring of dozens of therapists and teachers to fully staff Willowbrook. Bobby’s words would appear again and again as the story went on, and patients’ families felt heard, blasting the Rockefeller administration. “For years you’ve called us paranoid every time we complain,” one mother shouted at a hearing of the State Department of Mental Hygiene. “When Senator Kennedy told the public how bad things are at Willowbrook and Rome, you said he was exaggerating, too. Then public opinion forced you to take a few short steps in the right direction.”46

Words were the only lever of power Bobby had, and Rockefeller had many. Bobby’s office wrote the governor multiple times offering to partner on securing federal funds, but the letters went unanswered. In December, Rockefeller would tell reporters Bobby’s testimony on Willowbrook was wrong. “In sum, he was misrepresenting the situation,” he said. “A responsible official should know the facts, and he has the responsibility to tell the public all the facts.” The governor paused for emphasis. “Of course, he is new here.”47 Bobby let the dig slide and continued to write, pointing out all the places the state wasn’t taking advantage of federal funds. Rockefeller replied with a telegram calling Bobby ruthless.

“I trust that the continuing relations of state officials with their Federal counterparts and the obtaining of assistance for the mentally retarded will not depend on your acting as the political broker,” Rockefeller’s letter said. Bobby countered with a press conference at the Carlyle, but there was no way for him to win in a contest of ruthlessness. With the 1966 governor’s race around the corner, Bobby backed down. “We had to go away from it,” Walinsky would say years later. “We got out of it during the whole election campaign of 1966 because the senator just didn’t want it to be a political thing.” When Bobby returned to the topic after the election, Rockefeller was still in control, and the governor’s office “wanted to do it their own way,” Walinsky said.48 In a short time, the children of Willowbrook would be forgotten and abandoned once again. Robert Kennedy’s retreat was one of the few times he removed himself from an issue he cared about over such a small personality clash. It was the worst of politics.

Politics was just as difficult in the Senate with the profile of a Kennedy.

Francis X. Morrissey was a loyal man. From South Boston, he had an up-by-the-bootstraps story and was dispatched by Ambassador Kennedy to guide Jack through his first congressional race in 1946. Morrissey continued to squire JFK and then Teddy through the political world, while looking after any other needs. He was always at the airport or train station, no matter the time or weather, with a car and reservation in hand.49 “A kind of personal factotum,” as Dick Goodwin described him.50 By the time Jack reached the White House, he was a Boston municipal court judge. The Ambassador thought he deserved a spot on the federal district bench.

But opposition to his ascension was overwhelming. Critics said he lacked trial experience and the proper education. He was a laughingstock to the faculty of Harvard Law School. The Boston Bar Association unanimously voted against a recommendation in 1962, writing to then–Attorney General Kennedy that he “is entirely lacking in the qualifications of education and training necessary to carry out the duties of the office of a federal judge.” The district was too important to let someone of his caliber preside over it. President Kennedy took the nomination under consideration but never moved on it.51 Morrissey’s chance had passed him by.

Then with Jack gone from power and the Ambassador’s stroke leaving him wheelchairbound and incapable of communicating, many friends stopped visiting lonely Joseph Kennedy. But not Frank Morrissey. “He came to see him almost every week,” one aide to Teddy would recall. “He didn’t do it to ask him to propose his nomination. He came to see the Ambassador as a longtime friend.” The only favor Joe Kennedy ever asked of Teddy—or of Jack, Ted had heard—was that Morrissey be nominated. And so Ted nudged the White House, without any anticipation of the President’s sending it on.52

Then on September 23, Johnson did. “I don’t believe it,” Teddy said to his staffer Milt Gwirtzman. “Johnson’s just nominated Frank Morrissey for district judge.”

“He wasn’t tossing any bouquet” with Morrissey, Walinsky later said. Gwirtzman thought Johnson was genuinely doing a favor for Teddy. The suggestion of Johnson’s sabotaging the nomination before making it was dismissed as a “cocktail theory” in the New York Times. In reality, the President only decided to make the appointment after he knew Morrissey was unconfirmable. The nominee was more than inept—he was duplicitous, as his Senate confirmation hearings would soon reveal.53

Gwirtzman warned Morrissey not to trust Republican minority leader Everett Dirksen to give him a fair hearing, but Morrissey didn’t listen. “Frank felt that if he could show the senators that he was a nice obliging fellow,” Gwirtzman said, “they would confirm him. He regarded it sort of like being interviewed for admission to a Boston club.” Morrissey had taken three tries to pass the bar exam, and Dirksen genially mentioned how he had “flunked” the bar exam on the first pass. Then his sandy, mellifluous voice transformed into a growl. Morrissey and his family watched from red leather chairs as Dirksen turned to his character witness, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. “Tell me, Senator, do you regard the federal court as an in-training court?”

“No, I do not.”

“Does the Boston Municipal Court try jury cases?”

“No.”

“Was Judge Morrissey endorsed by the Boston Bar?”

“No.” The questioning went on like that.54

Morrissey had to come clean when the Bar Association revealed his secret.

Morrissey had had trouble getting his start as an ambitious young man from a poor family in Depression-era Boston. An older friend advised him that Georgia allowed anyone with a degree from a state law school immediate entry to the bar. The friend told him about a fancy-titled crash course that would give him a diploma—and thereby, a law license—within weeks. And so, Morrissey paid for the “quickie” degree and entry to the bar, bypassing years of learning and expenses. He would later spend nights attending Suffolk University Law School in Boston and graduate at the top of his ninety-six-member class, but his youthful mistake followed him. In his application, Morrissey listed his Georgia law license without mentioning his so-called degree from the Southern University Law School.55

The Bar Association officials revealed this information at his hearing, and when Morrissey’s turn to testify came, the room became quiet as he spoke of his shame. He said he spent six months in Atlanta, trying to find cases, only no one would hire him, so he returned to Boston. The ballet of political loyalties got more insidious when the Boston Globe revealed Morrissey’s sworn testimony about trying to make an honest go of it in Georgia conflicted with his simultaneous candidacy for the Massachusetts state legislature. The Globe won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage, and the lead reporter later revealed that he was tipped off by Kenny O’Donnell, Bobby’s teammate and one of Jack’s closest aides, who disliked Morrissey.56

Other Kennedy allies began to peel off, so Bobby entered the picture to help. He had paid his dues that summer, leading former Mississippi governor James P. Coleman along the path to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The appointment gave Coleman—whom the New Republic labeled a “stout segregationist”—jurisdiction over several Southern states and many civil rights cases. Baseball great Jackie Robinson wrote in his column that “Senator Bob” had backed Coleman “to repair some of those Dixie fences he has broken down” and restore his national chances in the South. Coleman’s friends stressed that his support for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket had probably ended his political career, and Bobby was acting out of loyalty. Edelman later said that on nominees like Coleman, the senator would look at him and shake his head as if to say, “Sorry about that.” Bobby, the only Kennedy male who never required Morrissey’s services, had actually been influential in blocking his nomination in 1961, though in 1964 Bobby thanked Johnson for considering the Morrissey nomination—in writing. Now, he had no choice but to back the family friend. “I’m supporting him,” he said at a campaign stop on behalf of New Jersey’s Democratic governor. “He’s a good judge. The mere fact that he was associated with the Kennedy family should not make him unavailable.”57

This was the Kennedys’ view—that they received no senatorial “courtesy.” The Globe reported that Teddy “complained privately that if Morrissey had not been sponsored by him he would probably be confirmed without a whisper.” Then again, most senators were not considered presidents-in-waiting, and both Kennedys were. Bobby, now head of the family, believed he was the only one who could reason with Everett Dirksen, who saw the Morrissey nomination as a shaft of light after spending the session buried under Johnson’s agenda. In opposing the appointment, the minority leader finally had a fight he could win. Bob went to see him in his office, where the Republican claimed at least forty votes likely to oppose. Dirksen was still holding even more embarrassing information about Morrissey and Teddy’s consorting with a deported Mafia hit man on a 1961 trip to Italy.

Bobby erupted at the minority leader and said bitterly, “You hate the Kennedys.”58

“I’m not interested in you or Teddy,” Dirksen responded, “but I’m out to get Morrissey. You think I’m out to cut your neck—to ax you.” He extended his arm toward a likeness of President Kennedy. “You see that bust on the mantel?” Dirksen said in his smooth voice. “That was one of the best friends I ever had.”59

Bobby and Teddy furiously worked the phones during the final hours of the Morrissey lobbying, with one senator receiving calls from both brothers as well as two Kennedy staffers. But the votes weren’t there. Even if Morrissey could be confirmed, Dirksen and others would continue to drag his name through the mud, with the prospect of impeachment if more damning details emerged. The brothers decided they had gone as far as they could. Teddy would recommit the nomination, sending it back to committee to expire within thirty days—the least humiliating option.60

Milt Gwirtzman was the first staffer they told. “It’s a fine strategy,” he said, “but how about your commitment to Frank Morrissey?”

Bobby fixed on him and said directly, “I think we’ve more than fulfilled our commitment to Frank Morrissey.” Bobby believed that if Morrissey were truly loyal, he would have withdrawn voluntarily after all of the trouble he caused.61

Teddy informed the President, but few others knew what he had planned. The younger brother entered the Senate Thursday morning, his desk stacked with folders, law books, and documents—signals of a long night ahead to the observers in the gallery. Some guessed the debate could delay the vote into Friday. Only when Teddy began his sentence “If we took up the nomination this morning …” did it dawn on the reporters that something else was happening. His voice cracked while praising his family’s friend and admonishing the American Bar Association for attacking Morrissey’s character and training “perhaps because he attended a local law school at night rather than a national law school by day.” Teddy’s voice trembled as he recalled the poverty Morrissey sought to escape pursuing his dream of a legal career: “one of twelve children, his father a dockworker, the family living in a home without gas, electricity, or heat in the bedrooms; their shoes held together with wooden pegs their father made …” He then asked for unanimous consent to recommit the nomination. The first one to cross the aisle and pump Ted’s hand was Ev Dirksen.62

It had all been a test of loyalty. Of the fourteen senators who had not responded to the quorum call the morning of the Morrissey vote, all were Democrats and many of them were Kennedy allies—members of the liberal bloc they were supposedly leading. One frequently mentioned ally, Joseph Tydings of Maryland, was present and waiting on the floor. Tydings, who owed his political career to a U.S. attorney appointment from President Kennedy, was holding a high-handed speech to reject the Morrissey nomination as a matter of conscience, borrowing the spirit of JFK’s private words to Schlesinger, just published in A Thousand Days: “Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.” Edelman, there to staff Bobby, watched Tydings’s face fall as Ted revealed the motion to recommit. Bobby and Teddy felt betrayed.63

On its surface, the Morrissey nomination was about one man’s lack of qualifications for a lifetime appointment. Within, it showed how fragile loyalty could be in Washington, D.C. Morrissey’s defeat was also a harbinger for what would be done in the name of John F. Kennedy. Jacqueline once said Bobby would have her “put on my widow’s weeds … and ask [LBJ] for tremendous things like renaming Cape Canaveral after Jack.”64 No longer. The period of mourning that had got the Kennedys whatever they wanted was over. Loyalty only lasted so long.

Bobby had a bad reputation for senatorial courtesy. Where others would interrupt a speech by asking “the distinguished senator” or “my friend,” Bobby would simply nod his head or wave his hand.65 Teddy kept a cooler head, capable of engaging with disagreeable senators without antagonizing them. He was the floor manager of the administration’s immigration bill, the picture of Senate decorum in a debate with Southern Democrat Spessard Holland. Florida’s senior senator was dismayed that newly organized African nations were receiving what he considered “equal status” with “our mother nations of Western Europe” under the proposed revisions to the immigration quota system.

“I believe that one of the most laudable aspects of the entire bill is the elimination of the racist factor,” Teddy said of easing restrictions on immigration from non-European nations. But Holland kept on until Bobby rose to ask if the senator believed Americans with roots in Africa had the same right to be here as those with European ancestors.

Holland said yes, but he did not know many African Americans “who have the slightest ideas as to what tribe or nation or area or geographic region their people came from.”

Bobby asked, “Perhaps he could suggest to the Senate why it is that those who came from Africa are unable to say where they came from.”

“They did not come as immigrants, let us put it that way,” Holland said in a strained acknowledgment of the slave trade. “I have no fault to find with them. I am only stating what is the fact, that those good people have no nationality now, no race to look to, and no home country to look to except the United States, whereas the distinguished senator from New York has a mother country to which he can look, as I think every senator present has.”

Whether Holland truly cared or not, he believed there was no solution to the problem. Bobby felt otherwise. “I am very pleased of the fact our family came from Ireland. I think some of the people the senator has described to us, whose mother countries are the Scandinavian countries or perhaps Ireland or England or some other countries, were responsible for bringing the people from Africa to the United States in the first place, as slaves. So when the senator says, after we have performed that kind of unforgivable act, that we should penalize them because they do not know where they came from, nor where in Africa their grandfather was born, as I am fortunate enough to know, I am surprised to hear the senator from Florida suggest such a philosophy, and that is why I rise in the back row of the U.S. Senate to speak.”66

Holland was an outlier. Immigration reform passed the Senate 76–18, and Johnson signed it into law on October 3 near Ellis Island, with the Statue of Liberty towering above. Bobby and Teddy were there standing around the President smiling. Bobby’s Justice Department had helped sculpt the bill, but diminished from his powers, his contributions as a senator amounted to rising in the back row to speak. Yet many saw value in this. People even began to see new dimensions to the win-at-all-costs younger brother. In another revelation from Sorensen’s book, Bobby was named “the best performer” among the cabinet during the Cuban missile crisis, one of the dual shocks to the national psyche of the early 1960s. Sorensen wrote of Bobby’s standing against a preemptive strike against Cuba without warning, calling it “a Pearl Harbor in reverse [that] would blacken the name of the United States in the pages of history.”67

Fred Dutton had advised Bobby not to spread his portfolio too thin—to bear down on one or two topics and establish his credentials. As early as July, Dutton was pressing for a second major address on nuclear weapons. Bobby had told Walinsky immediately after the June 23 speech that there was going to have to be another on Red China and the bomb—“a policy maker’s speech,” with direct suggestions for containing the nuclear threat.68 And so, Bobby’s second major Senate address suggested inviting the Chinese to disarmament talks in Geneva.

“If they accept,” he said on the Senate floor that October 13, “the negotiations will be more meaningful—for they will then include all nuclear powers. If the Chinese refuse, we will have lost nothing,” reminding them that the United States was already in talks with China’s ambassador in Poland. “We will have opened another door to peace, and the Chinese will show to the world that they are not interested. I think no one, looking at United States foreign policy since 1961, will interpret our civility as a sign of weakness.” He added, “We can never know the results until we make the attempt.”69

Kennedy used floor debate to drive his point home. He sent out advance copies of his speech to draw other senators into a colloquy with him. Six senators were there to comment on Bobby’s remarks, while Ethel watched from the gallery. Senator Ralph Yarborough of Texas came down to praise the men for continuing “the best tradition of the Senate” in developing “ideas on the floor.” Neither the White House nor the Chinese engaged the proposal, and the State Department declared China had shown no “serious interest” in nonproliferation.70 Nuclear politics took a back seat to the issue driving world affairs: the conflict in Vietnam.

Fifty-eight Americans died there one week in early October 1965, bringing the U.S. military’s killed-in-action list to 806. Another twenty-five had died by the time that week’s casualty number could be reported. On the day Bobby spoke out against nuclear proliferation, students burned their draft cards in defiance of a new, largely symbolic law. That weekend, ten thousand people marched in Berkeley, California, while smaller demonstrations came together in New York, Michigan, Chicago, and Columbus, Ohio. A student marching in Berkeley said, “We won’t end the war. Bobby Kennedy, or someone like that, will have to end it. But we’ve got to do something.”71 Bobby was not there yet, but he was willing to defend those who were.

In New Jersey, free speech around Vietnam was the biggest issue in the reelection campaign of its Democratic governor, Richard Hughes, who was being pressured to fire a Rutgers University professor who had welcomed a Vietcong victory at an antiwar teach-in. Bumper stickers demanded RID RUTGERS OF REDS, while the Republican candidate for governor used a recording of the professor, Eugene Genovese, in his radio commercials—and was rising in the polls as a result. Governor Hughes resisted calls for him to dismiss Genovese from the state university for his views on the war, and Bobby praised him for it. “I would not be here today if Governor Hughes put any pressure upon the [Rutgers] board of governors to fire Mr. Genovese,” he said. “This would destroy the whole idea of academic freedom.” Bobby warned three thousand college students in East Orange that when “a single political figure can decide who will teach in our universities, it would sound the death knell of higher education.”72

Former vice president Richard Nixon, on his years-long comeback quest, became the top Republican surrogate against Genovese. “Does an individual employed by the state have the right to use his position to give aid and comfort to the enemies of the United States in wartime?” Nixon asked. He said that Bobby “misinterpreted and confused” the issue, and that he was rejecting the traditions of Democratic presidents like Wilson and Roosevelt.73

Some saw Bobby’s defense of free speech and calls for diplomacy with Communist adversaries as a naked political play—“romancing ADA-type liberals who always distrusted him,” columnists Evans and Novak wrote. His strength, they said, is “rooted in city machines.” Indeed, Bobby was more comfortable with ward bosses. Campaigning in New Haven that October with Mayor Richard Lee in the smoky lodge of the Knights of St. Patrick Club, Bobby said, “I know, looking at your faces, what President Kennedy must have seen when he visited Wexford.” He went on. “I asked Dick Lee about the Knights of St. Patrick on the way in. I asked, ‘What good works do they do?’ He said, ‘They just drink a lot!’ ” The men raised their glasses and laughed.74

William Shannon wrote that Bobby felt most at home with Democratic regulars “even when he recognizes they are narrow-minded or not wholly trustworthy”—at least he could count on them to vote the right way.75

With the retirement of Mayor Wagner, keeping New York City in the Democrats’ hands was Bobby’s chief political aim of the fall.

Looking at the numbers alone, a Republican winning in New York City seemed impossible in 1965. There were 687,397 Republicans on the voting rolls—less than a third of the 2.35 million Democrats. There were more Democrats in Brooklyn than there were Republicans in the entire city.76

But Republican congressman John Vliet Lindsay had just run a citywide campaign, plastering his 1964 slogan—“The District’s Pride, the Nation’s Hope”—far outside his tony slice of Manhattan. LBJ carried Lindsay’s district with 70 percent of the vote; Lindsay walked away with 71 percent. Six feet four inches tall, dashing and youthful, a Times columnist wrote that Lindsay’s Republican colleagues thought him “a little too good looking, a little too Ivy Leaguish and a little too curt and abrasive.” The forty-two-year-old Lindsay sought to tap into the Kennedy style for his campaign. He even tried to hire Bobby’s 1964 admen.77

Bobby looked for a suitable candidate for mayor. Steve Smith and Bobby’s New York–based Senate aide Tom Johnston drew up a list of whom they could get to run, but as they began vetting them, they found out one wasn’t registered in the city, another wanted Bobby to clear the field, and a third was actually a Republican. Meanwhile, all the candidates already vying for the job wanted Bobby on board. One even tried to get Steve Smith to join his slate at the urging of Mayor Wagner. “I don’t think it’s my role to become involved in a primary election such as this,” Bobby wound up saying in late July. Privately, he had already resigned himself to Lindsay’s impending victory. “It appears … that John Lindsay will win the election,” he wrote to a friend in London on July 19. “People want a change and they feel Lindsay will give it to them.”78

While the Democrats angled, Lindsay took bites out of their base. Candidates could run on the ballot lines of multiple parties, and Lindsay locked up the Liberal Party’s nomination and organized a third line for independents who didn’t feel comfortable voting for him under the Republican or Liberal designations. In Congress, Lindsay voted with his party just 6 percent of the time, marginalizing the right wing and drawing firebrand publisher William F. Buckley Jr. into the race for mayor on the Conservative Party’s line. Buckley’s opposition to civil rights and social programs benefiting Negroes attracted working-class Irish Catholic voters—another blow to the Democratic coalition. Though a resident of Connecticut, Buckley insisted, “I have no problems that Bobby Kennedy didn’t have” in finding an address to run from as a carpetbagger.79

Bobby and Ethel had recently moved their New York residence from Long Island to a corner apartment in a new thirty-eight-story building at United Nations Plaza, but their polling place was still linked to their New York driver’s licenses, listing their address as the Carlyle Hotel. They arrived late on primary night, September 14, to cast their ballots. A reporter outside the school polling place asked Bobby if he finally felt like a New Yorker. “I thought when I was elected I became a New Yorker,” he said.80

The primary’s big winner was a quintessential New Yorker—one who never missed an election, Abe Beame, all of five feet two inches tall, the classic machine politician. New York City’s chief financial officer, he ran for mayor because it was the next rung on the ladder. He bore no sweeping vision; his campaign announcement consisted of four hundred words, read in under five minutes. While he had few beliefs, Beame did believe in the machine. His support from bosses Charles Buckley, Adam Clayton Powell, and Stanley Steingut made his candidacy tick. He didn’t give a hoot about Lindsay’s getting the pivotal Liberal nomination—“a foregone conclusion,” he called it. His campaign manager told the Times they were unconcerned by Lindsay’s appeal, saying, “You can’t run this city on grammar.”81

Beame’s surprise primary win was a mixed blessing for Bobby. On one hand, the defeat of Wagner’s choice made Kennedy the state’s undisputed Democratic power broker. On the other, Beame was a terrible candidate who drove Bobby nuts.

Nevertheless, Bobby committed a significant amount of time to the mayor’s race. Joe Dolan sent him a list of fifteen speeches to groups they had agreed to “per your oral okay” in the latter part of September and October. Bobby scribbled at the bottom, “Joe, I have never heard of half of these!!!” But with Lindsay and Buckley eating into the Jewish, Negro, and Irish votes, Bobby looked at the election as a matter of will. He believed Beame had to make a strong push in black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, and an aggressive appeal to party loyalty. He could lose almost half of the city’s Democrats and still win. Anyone would agree with the New York Times observation that Bobby campaigned harder for Beame than any other Democrat. Evans and Novak praised the senator’s “valiant” effort for a man they called a “bookkeeper” and “non-personality.” Bobby was on the docks in an icy wind, making his pitch to pier workers rounded up with hot coffee. He rolled through the city’s boroughs in the back of a truck with the candidate—sometimes alone when Beame was late—urging Democrats to stay loyal.82

Bobby gave freely of Steve Smith’s talents and assigned Peter Edelman to Beame’s campaign all month, as the Kennedys’ eyes and ears inside the operation. Edelman was on hand for a recording session with Beame and Bobby. It started fairly well. Beame talked about his hard upbringing, and Edelman thought he sounded good. Bobby wanted more out of him and began coaching. “Look at me, Abe. Get mad at me. Bring your fists down … All right, Abe Beame, tell us why you think you deserve to be mayor of New York.”

“That’s great …” said Beame. “And then what do I say?”

So Bobby gave Abe Beame an idea or two why Abe Beame might want to be mayor. After they wrapped, they walked out of the studio together and Beame said, “Senator, thank you very much for coming and doing this with me. I really know better now why I want to be mayor.”

Bobby went for a bite to eat with his aides and asked them who they would vote for. Tom Johnston said Lindsay. Edelman recalled saying, “I guess I would vote for Beame, but only because I’d been working on the damn thing.”83

Everything about Beame’s campaign seemed wrong. Rolling through the streets of Manhattan with Beame, a campaign worker kept calling through a portable sound system, “Here he is, the man of the hour, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Abe Beame!”

“Just say, ‘Robert Kennedy and Abe Beame,’ ” Bobby finally told him.84

Beame was glad for Bobby’s help, if sometimes deflated by it. His pride was bruised when Bobby would introduce him, step away from the microphone, and the crowd’s attention would dissipate. “A lot of people would be going to him, asking for his autograph,” Beame later said, adding that Bobby was embarrassed for both of them. “I think he really would have preferred it not happen because he knew that it would sort of have some kind of an effect on the candidate.” Though Beame wouldn’t have wished for the attention RFK got. Standing between Bobby and the crowd was like “taking your life in your hands,” Beame said. “We’d go there and they’d just pull him down, drag him down and push everybody in his way.”85

Count Basie and his band warmed up a predominantly Negro crowd at a nighttime rally in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant section. Bobby finished his remarks, and the crowd rushed forward to touch him. A mother at the front struggled to shield her baby from the crush. Kennedy reached down and scooped the baby out of her arms and onstage with him. He cradled the child through Beame’s speech and then, as Basie struck up the band, took the baby for a spin as if they were on a dance floor. He kissed the baby on the head as he handed him back to his mother.86

William White wrote in his column that the “emotion-prone” and “image-worshippers” had shifted their allegiance from Bobby to Lindsay. On a walking tour on Fourteenth Street, an elderly woman rushed up to Bobby, grabbed his hand, and said, “It’s good to meet you, Mr. Lindsay.” Between one of the rolling rallies in Manhattan the weekend before the election, a man in a leather jacket came up to Bobby’s car, held out his hand, and said, “I’m still for you, but I can’t go along with Beame. To me, he’s the antithesis of everything I thought you stood for.”87

RFK’s campaigning on Abe Beame’s behalf served only to remind reformers of his ties to Charles Buckley and the machine. Murray Kempton wrote that “the contest seemed very like those occasions when John F. Kennedy used gracefully to go to the sidelines and simply watch, making it clear by his abstention that he could not be expected to go down for a hopeless Democrat against an appealing Republican.” As leader, Bobby would do no such thing, even though Kempton had heard he was talking about Beame’s hopelessness. “I think what’s happening to Abe Beame must be rubbing off on me,” Bobby was alleged to say. “I’m not sure I can afford to make these trips with him any longer. I’ve never seen crowds so cold. It’ll take me six months to get anyone to speak to me again.” Yet the loyal Bobby marched right on alongside the Beame team.88

The Daily News and Herald Tribune polls showed the race neck and neck in the final weekend. On the last day of campaigning, Bobby and Beame had eight rallies in the Bronx and another six in Brooklyn.89

Bobby and Ethel waited more than an hour to vote at Public School #5 on East Eighty-first Street and Madison Avenue. When their turn came, Republican city councilman Theodore R. Kupferman contested their eligibility for the cameras: “I challenge your right to vote because I don’t believe you’re a resident of this district.” Bobby and Ethel had to sign affidavits that they maintained a residence at the Carlyle Hotel a few blocks away.90

“It’s nice publicity for him,” Bobby said of the final indignity before defeat.91

John Lindsay won with about 45 percent of the vote, only three points ahead of Beame—sapped by Lindsay’s inroads with blacks and Jews, and William F. Buckley’s support among Irish Catholics—while the down-ballot Democratic candidates won. Loyalty carried them through.92

Across the river in New Jersey, Governor Richard Hughes was reelected despite an onslaught of attacks over the pro-Vietcong professor. New Jersey Democrats credited Bobby for leading the charge in defense of free speech. Landing in Los Angeles for meetings and appearances three days after the election, Bobby kept up the discussion of civil liberties at the University of Southern California. A capacity crowd of seventeen hundred packed the school’s main auditorium, while even more jostled to gain entry. As Bobby began his remarks, some of the locked-out students began banging on the doors. Bobby paused and said, “I’d let them in,” into the microphone, and the university president relented. Making noise had gotten them somewhere—but it wouldn’t solve everything, Bobby assured them.93

He began by talking about the incredible change between his experiences with student activists and his brother’s. “In 1960, people spoke of youth as the Silent Generation—the uncommitted. No one would say that now.” And yet “sometimes,” he said, “it is made more difficult by those acting not so much as youths but as children.”94

“I defend the right to dissent, the right to criticize … But we must be careful not to let disagreement with national policy jeopardize the success of the efforts in which student participation has been so important.”95

“The fact is that disagreement need not and should not bring disengagement,” Bobby said, citing a declining interest in the Peace Corps because of the war in Vietnam. “It would be most ironic if dissent from other phases of our country’s policy were to damage the programs which the dissenters feel we should be doing more of.”96

Yet within a few hours, Bobby’s message was overshadowed by stray comments in a news conference at the Ambassador Hotel.97 “Have there been any instances in which the anti-Vietnam-day demonstrations and protesters have gone too far?” one reporter asked.

“Yes, I think they have,” Bobby said. “For example, where they won’t let those with opposite views speak. Or where violence is used.” Asked about draft-card burning, whose punishment was increased after a unanimous voice vote in the Senate, he said, “If a person feels that strongly and wants to make that kind of sacrifice, he can go and burn his draft card and take the consequences. But I don’t agree with it personally.”98

“Will it have a snowball effect?”

“I don’t think it will,” Bobby said. “No.”99

Then a reporter asked about a new, sensational form of protest just coming to light. As a backlash to the antiwar demonstrations, more than 150 Stanford University students in favor of the war organized a blood drive to benefit American and South Vietnamese soldiers. In response, a few dozen antiwar Stanford students controversially pledged their blood to those fighting for the North.100

A reporter asked Bobby, “What about giving blood to the North Vietnamese? … Is that too far?”

“If we’ve given all the blood that is needed to the South Vietnamese, I’m in favor of them having blood.”

“Even to the North Vietnamese?”

“Yes,” RFK said. Someone started in on another question before Bobby cut back in, “—I’d rather concentrate on the South Vietnamese and those who need it at the moment,” but it was too late. Bobby’s humanitarian impulse put him knee-deep in a campus controversy. Without realizing it, he had effectively endorsed a fringe suggestion to ship Americans’ blood to the Vietcong.101

Veteran Los Angeles Times reporter Carl Greenberg, whom Richard Nixon singled out for fairness at the end of his disastrous 1962 gubernatorial campaign, returned to the issue. “Senator, so that it may be abundantly clear,” Greenberg asked, “are you now saying that even though we are in combat with North Vietnamese, who are killing our troops, that if the North Vietnamese need blood, it’s okay to give it to them?”

“Yes, I would do it through—if the Red Cross is making a drive for blood and feels that can be helpful, as our own—” Bobby stopped and started his sentence over. “Any North Vietnamese that are captured, for instance, by our troops in Vietnam are treated, they’re helped by blood, they get help by assistance. If more of that kind of blood is needed through an organization such as the Red Cross, then I would—”

“Then you are speaking of prisoners of war, and not the shipment of American students’ blood into Vietnam—North Vietnam?”

“No, I’m talking about through an organization such as the Red Cross.”

“Which is not making such a drive, to our knowledge.”

“The blanket question as to whether we would furnish blood to anybody from North Vietnam, I would furnish it under the circumstances I have described. I think that that’s in the oldest traditions of our country.”102

Bobby had made a giant mistake, one he would only realize after. Later that afternoon, he clarified that he opposed sending blood to the North Vietnamese because “it might violate our laws.” The comments opened up a floodgate of criticism. “Bobby Bleeds for the Enemy,” the Chicago Tribune declared. “Sending blood is a very special thing,” columnist Marguerite Higgins wrote, “a sign of sympathy.” Joe Dolan eventually added a rare public statement that “Senator Kennedy has always opposed any direct action by groups in this country to send blood or other supplies to the North Vietnamese.”103

Barry Goldwater was by far the harshest critic, telling Republican activists in New Mexico that the Democratic Party was “in the hands of the extreme, radical left,” supporting war opponents “to the edge of treason.” His voice rising with anger, Goldwater boomed, “Why the silence today, when a United States senator says—as he did last night—that there was nothing wrong with sending American blood to our Communist enemies? It is appalling to me that the press of this nation hasn’t jumped down his throat even though he retracts and retracts and retracts and retracts.”104

Goldwater remained bullish on the fighting in Vietnam. “I see a chance the war could end by Christmas,” he said of the growing troop levels on October 14. Bobby was hearing the opposite. Times correspondent R. W. Apple Jr. updated him in a letter from Saigon. “You had suggested before I left that I suggest, and not simply criticize,” Apple wrote. “We seem to believe that General Motors can overwhelm guerillas … But the acceptance of guerilla warfare as guerilla warfare must be extended to the whole U.S. military effort here … Bombers aren’t the solution; I truly believe that they make as many new V.C. as they destroy.” The American death toll crept higher. The Pentagon said 902 had died in combat. Nearly five thousand had been wounded.105

Edelman was along for the California trip and spent much of the day trying to stem the blood comments’ damage, calling reporters, saying, “Please, he didn’t mean it. What he said was …” He and Bobby stopped into the offices of the Los Angeles Sentinel, a Negro newspaper in Watts, where a KENNEDY FOR PRESIDENT sign greeted them. Bobby got a kick out of it, which surprised Peter amid all the uproar. They walked around and talked to people. On one street corner, Bobby spoke with a middle-aged man, who looked perfectly healthy, about what he thought was wrong with his neighborhood.

“Flustration.”

“Excuse me?” said Bobby.

“Flustration.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, man,” he said, “when you’re over fifty and you is black, you can’t get a job nohow.”

Later, Bobby and Edelman walked into the Ambassador Hotel, where he was speaking at a Democratic Party fund-raiser, and an aide to the district’s congressman approached them in the lobby. “Senator,” the aide said, “you went into Watts this afternoon and didn‘t tell us.” On the streets, Bobby had heard again and again from people complaining that their congressman was missing in action. Some claimed that he hadn’t even been by since the riots three months earlier. With a small group standing around, Bobby didn’t flinch. “When was the last time your boss was there?”106

Like the youths he focused so much of his attention on, Bobby was quick to stand up for ideals, even if the truth was reckless. His words reflected an attraction to change that couldn’t come fast enough. And it resonated—in Watts, and around the world.

Far away, in South Africa, a young student leader named Ian Robertson had heard Bobby’s appeal to youth. Robertson was head of the National Union of South African Students, the largest multiracial organization in South Africa, which resisted the apartheid regime that grew more and more belligerent with each passing year. In July, shortly after Bobby first spoke about the “revolution now in progress,” Robertson invited him to address their group at Cape Town University in the spring of 1966 for their annual Day of Affirmation. It was the day in which the members rededicated themselves to the ideals of freedom—a holiday the organization had created in 1959, when the government barred nonwhite students from the universities. Authorities alleged NUSAS members were part of a violent rebellion against the government. South Africa’s minister of justice—the equivalent of the U.S. attorney general—called NUSAS “a damnable and detestable organization,” and its leaders “the offspring of snakes.” He offered to remit sentences of political prisoners whose parents signed statements that said their children were misled into joining.107 But mostly, they were thousands of young people trying to create change.

The students had already invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak, but his admittance to the country seemed unlikely after state media, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, suggested he was a Communist. He was unlikely to get a visa. “I very much look forward to SABC’s attempt to prove that Senator Kennedy is also a Communist,” Ian Robertson said. The ruling Nationalists in the South African parliament said Robertson and his allies were “playing with fire.”108 They soon put Robertson under house arrest and marked him a legally “banned” person, who could not thereafter appear or be mentioned in public.

In late October 1965, Bobby wrote back that he was “very happy to accept” the students’ invitation. The decision marked a dramatic turn for those trying to control South Africa’s future. The government was faced with a dilemma: blocking a world leader from their country, or seeing him denounce their policies in its streets. The South African regime was fiercely anti-Communist, but stopping the entry of someone with Bobby’s stature would be an admission that the regime had broken completely from open society. Bobby drove this point home, speaking in New York: “I have visited more than fifty countries on every continent in my lifetime, and I look forward to meeting the people of South Africa.”

Some thought the government might ban NUSAS to prevent Kennedy from visiting, or that the government would not formally refuse his visa but indicate they could not show the required “hospitality” to protect him.109

“It is unlikely that he will ever go,” Murray Kempton wrote of the South Africa trip. “What is extraordinary is the fact of the invitation … Senator Kennedy has a name then at which lonely men grasp in their loneliness.”110