August 1964–November 1964
If Bobby couldn’t travel ten feet without a crowd swarming him, Steve Smith was just the opposite. President Kennedy’s brother-in-law once walked out of the West Wing past a pack of reporters, not a single one recognizing him. Smith was the “Kennedy nobody knew,” living anonymously amid New York City’s skyscrapers, married to sister Jean, the youngest girl. He had a cool and quiet efficiency that quickly gained others’ trust. As a young man, he took his family’s business of tugboats and barges along New York’s waterways and broke them into the oil business. Joe Kennedy was so impressed with the lucrative turn, he asked his new son-in-law to help expand the Kennedy empire. Soon, Smith was managing the Kennedy family portfolio, valued around $300 million.* When talking business, Smith was either cryptic or uncomfortably blunt in a way that reminded people of Bobby. “He does not play with the ‘How’s the family?’ conversations,” a colleague would later say. “He assumes that crap is taken for granted.”1
It was good that Smith reminded people of Bobby because, as a candidate, Bobby needed a Bobby himself.
“When Steve arrived, he couldn’t even spell vote,” a Massachusetts regular said. They baptized him in Jack’s 1958 Senate reelection campaign. He raised millions for the 1960 race and steered Teddy’s successful 1962 race, during which Steve lost twelve pounds from an already athletic frame. He often came across as nervous. He chain-smoked and looked at his hands a lot when he talked. Nevertheless, Smith was on track to take the top job in President Kennedy’s 1964 reelection operation, keeping a watchful eye over vote-rich Northern states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and New York. He had complete trust, and people actually believed him when he said that he had no personal political ambitions. “Anyone can talk to him and feel he’s talking to the candidate himself,” President Kennedy told the Saturday Evening Post just a few weeks before Dallas.2
Smith had been meeting with leaders throughout New York State all year, prepping RFK’s Senate bid, planting ideas in people’s heads. And even when Bob pulled out after Teddy’s plane crash in June, Smith kept his foot in the door, seeming to understand that the attorney general would have to find something after November.3
When Johnson finally excluded Bobby from the vice presidency, Smith put an operation together in short order. One man “working behind the scenes” for Bobby told the New York Times about a call he had gotten. “He wanted my home number. He wanted my weekend number. He even wanted the number of the bars where I drink. That’s what I call an organization.” New York had a state nominating convention, not a primary, and party leaders backing RFK controlled at least 400 of the 573 delegates needed for nomination. So Bobby was the nominee before he even cracked open the state high school civics textbook two aides gave him to brush up on local history.4
And that was the problem: “ruthless” Robert Kennedy, swooping into a state he hadn’t lived in since he was a child because Massachusetts, where he was a legal resident, belonged to his little brother, and Virginia, where he lived, was its own political dominion. It was classic Kennedy calculation. Bobby was shoving aside lifelong New York Democrats—people who had climbed the party ladder for decades—to claim a power base in one of the largest Democratic bastions in the country. It helped that the bosses liked him. They knew they could work with him, and his name atop the ticket would draw hands to the Democratic lever in voting booths, another way for the grief-stricken rank and file to pay their respects by punching the party ticket. But there were plenty of New York Democrats who couldn’t stomach his power play. He hadn’t done himself any favors by whipping them so badly for Jack in 1960, telling them quite literally, “I don’t care if you survive” this election.5 Chalk it up to relentless focus; many saw ruthlessness. Now Bobby had to convince these people that he wasn’t a tyrant; that he could be magnanimous. It was going to be a tough sell.
Arthur Schlesinger went and kissed the ring of Alex Rose, who would get the Liberal Party on board. The state’s top Democrat, New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. was the son and namesake of the Empire State’s legendary New Deal senator. Having been in office for nearly eleven years with no Democratic senator or governor to rival him since 1958, Wagner had the most to lose from Bobby’s arrival in New York. He had turned on the Democratic bosses in his last reelection campaign, and his continued power depended on keeping his enemies divided. With Bobby, the bosses had the biggest name to unite behind, and Wagner had no alternative. Yet Bobby did not step over Wagner, as his powerful allies would have liked. While he didn’t need the mayor’s support, toppling him would have been just another “ruthless” mark on his record. As the bosses taunted Wagner, Bobby let him save face by saying he would only run with the mayor’s approval, which came within days. Bobby resigned his place as a Massachusetts delegate to the Democratic National Convention and leased a sprawling mansion in Glen Cove, Long Island, from a fashion designer who didn’t even know how big it was (“twenty-two or twenty-five or thirty rooms, something like that”). The New York Times editorial board begrudgingly likened the operation to a steamroller.6
Bobby announced his candidacy from the lawn of Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence, late in the morning on August 25, only ten weeks before the election. He wore a black tie and black pin-striped suit, “which made him look somewhat older than his thirty-eight years,” the Washington Post’s correspondent wrote. Ethel, in a lavender maternity dress, stood next to him under the blazing summer sun. Television trucks transmitted the announcement live as he invoked both Presidents Johnson and Kennedy with the first sentence. Bobby’s hands trembled as he turned the pages of his speech—betraying an uneasiness that every account of the morning took note of. When he finished, it was Ethel who held the press conference on the porch while Bobby and two of his dogs—a retriever named Battle and a sheepdog named Panda—roamed the grounds. Seven anti-Kennedy picketers marched in a circle across the street with GO HOME BOBBY and NEW YORK FOR NEW YORKERS signs. Some identified themselves as Republicans, some Democrats. Other women and children stood at the mansion’s fence calling out, “Mr. Kennedy! Mr. Kennedy!” Bobby walked over and shook their hands. “God love you, God love you,” they said. “You’re wonderful. We love you.” Bob appeared embarrassed. Then the Kennedys were off to the national convention in Atlantic City.
In the car to the airport, Ethel told him about a button she saw a child wearing: I HATE BOBBY KENNEDY BECAUSE …
“It will be tough,” Bobby said.
Aboard the Caroline, he got up from his chair and asked a friend, “Do you think this was the right thing for me to do?”7
New York’s state nominating conventions typically attracted a few hundred spectators to watch a thousand or so delegates pick the ticket. Not this time. On September 1, a crowd of four thousand showed to see Bobby’s name put into nomination. They crammed the Seventy-first Regiment Armory, an ancient landmark whose usual must was displaced by oppressive steam. It seemed that the aisles and balconies were packed beyond capacity. Balloons popped from the heat. Men and women in paper hats bounced placards with LET’S PUT BOB KENNEDY TO WORK FOR NEW YORK printed on them. The floor looked like “a moving forest of Kennedy banners,” wrote one reporter. Ex–Tammany Hall boss Carmine De Sapio, stopped by a Timesman, said, “I’ve been attending conventions since I was twenty-one years old”—the days of Al Smith and FDR. “We’ve had good crowds before. But this is really something.” Bobby finally appeared after “five hours of humid turmoil,” Newsday’s Stan Hinden wrote. The armory was a mess: a giant television and photographers’ platform hid the stage from most delegates’ view, and the acoustics made it impossible to hear the speeches.8
After the convention adjourned at six P.M., Bobby went to a reception at the Sheraton-Atlantic Hotel, where servers and a six-tiered cake announced, “Welcome to New York.” Otherwise the ballroom was empty—a glaring oversight: the organizers had forgotten to invite the delegates. Ruinous headlines awaited, so aides scrambled to nearby department stores, where they rounded up whomever they could. Bobby shook hands with more people with Macy’s shopping bags than delegate badges.9
In New York City politics, a winner’s first stop was always the Fulton Fish Market, and Bobby was there before sunrise the next morning. He approached tentatively. The air stank and ice crunched underfoot. The candidate stood out in his gray suit among the rubber aprons of the cutters and packers with fish guts and slime on their chests. Bobby was not a natural, initially pulling back when a worker held up a dripping-wet giant fish for a picture.10 There was something “off, almost querulous” about his voice, Scotty Reston soon wrote, and that “boyish Bugs Bunny grin.” Everyone thought he was tougher than JFK, but he lacked the elegance, the confidence, Jack projected.11 But no matter his deficiencies, when out in a crowd he became something else: a vessel for memory, a walking touchstone, a symbol of national mourning. The hardy fishermen flocked to him, scrounging for scraps of paper to get his autograph—a squiggly, illegible scrawl. “He’s a picture of his brother,” one of the men said. “I seen him twice, but I never saw this fellow before. Gee, he sure looks like his brother.”
A driver left his haul melting on the dock for the chance to shake his hand. Asked why, he said, “When his brother died, my wife cried for a week … I’ve got to stick around and meet him so I can tell her. She’ll be daffy for him.”12
It was the same on Staten Island, where the borough president, a local pol with an Italian name that Bobby kept butchering, led the procession. The candidate looked taken aback by the commotion. He did not plunge into the crowd, as other candidates might, but was pulled in by it. He did not have pat small-talk lines ready to deploy, but instead spoke only when spoken to. Fortunately, people had lots to say to him. This much was true for Bobby Kennedy: he never had to tell anybody who he was or what he was running for. Love him or hate him, people knew him … and everyone wanted to touch him. He made short speeches from the roof of a car to stop the crowds from following. Then he would climb down and let them claw at him. In that way, it was like Poland, except he could tell what these people were saying. People were heard wandering away saying, “His brother was a great man.”13
President Kennedy was on everyone’s mind. At an airfield later, a reporter for Newsday observed Averell Harriman walk up the Caroline’s steps. Flustered by the rush of memories, the former governor blurted to Bobby, “Hello, Jack.”14
No New Frontier cabinet member had resigned his post in the first nine months of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. On September 2, a day after his nomination, Bobby became the first.
To mark his last day as attorney general, he sent form letters to his closest staffers, looking back on what they had accomplished together. “President Kennedy would have wished to thank you for that—and for your loyalty.” He signed the letters, “Bobby.”15
The candidate and his wife visited President Johnson at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to formally submit his resignation. Talking to reporters in the driveway, Bobby said he left “with some regret—perhaps more regret than the enthusiasm when I took over.” A reporter gestured to the White House and asked if he dreamed of occupying it himself one day. Bobby smiled. “I think there’s someone there. I keep reading that and I never see any statement that he is willing to move out. I think he’ll be there for some time.”
Bobby attended two going-away ceremonies. One at Cardozo High School, one of the D.C. public schools he frequently dropped in on. Three thousand schoolchildren were there with songs and speeches. A band called the Ambassadors played rock tunes. He looked at a sign that said WE’LL MEET AGAIN and said, “I hope they’re all true.” Bobby ended his speech to the students with the quotation from Shaw: “Some people see things that are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’ ”
At the Justice Department, the employees filled a courtyard to present him with gifts: the red leather chair he used as attorney general and a thirty-five-year pin, a joke about how hard he had worked in three and a half years. “When I think of all the things that have happened since that snowy inauguration day in January,” Bob told them, “I like to think our role has been the one that is suggested in an old Greek saying: ‘To tame the savageness of man, make gentle the life of the world.’ ”
The ceremony ended at 4:59—a minute before his resignation took effect.16
The crowds were not fooling him. In an interview aboard the Caroline, Bobby gamed the election. “I think President Johnson will carry New York by a million and a half votes”—dwarfing JFK’s less than four-hundred-thousand-vote margin in 1960. “I expect to run way behind the Johnson-Humphrey ticket and behind President Kennedy’s showing four years ago.” Mostly because of the “carpetbagger” rap. He couldn’t even participate in the election under New York law. “I could vote in Massachusetts, but as a resident of New York I wouldn’t want to do that.” So he said that he and Ethel would not vote.
The Democratic tide was stronger than it had been in decades, but his opponent, Kenneth Keating, was his own man. He was the only major Republican officeholder to walk out of the Republican National Convention during Goldwater’s acceptance speech. As Bobby told the New York Times, “Barry Goldwater is an unpopular figure in the state and Ken Keating isn’t. I know that.”17
Keating was tenacious. Sixty-four years old with stark white hair and a pink face, he looked like the jolly, spry grandfather he was. Underneath was a fighter. He was a Phi Beta Kappa college graduate before he turned twenty, which included time out to serve during World War I. He went on to Harvard Law, private practice in Rochester, and more military service, finishing as a brigadier general after World War II. Keating was undefeated in elective office: six times a congressman from upstate, he then beat Mayor Wagner for the Senate in 1958. He won because he campaigned from dawn till midnight, and a close margin in ’58 made him work even harder over his first six years. While Bobby was meek, Keating could spool an old-fashioned political speech. Now against the carpetbagger, he laid out his record, placing an emphasis on his liberalism, showing nothing offensive. Bobby Kennedy was trying to oust him, he said, to deprive the good people of New York his service for no other reason than a “ruthless power play”—to secure a launching pad for his political career. After Bobby announced his bid, Keating told reporters that he was sending him a road map of New York.18
“Is this the East River?” Bobby had recently asked his driver in the Midtown Tunnel, Newsweek’s Ben Bradlee taking mental notes inside the car. New York’s senator ought to know that, Bobby figured. He understood that the carpetbagger issue would be problem, saying to Bradlee, “I’d tell them right out, ‘If you want someone who has lived in New York all his life, vote for Ken Keating.’ ” It was well-known that Bobby needed reminding of local Democratic dignitaries. Privately the campaign provided him with index cards so he wouldn’t forget to mention them at rallies in their neighborhoods. Other cards were designed to avoid even more embarrassing mistakes (“The Bronx is to the north, Queens on your right, Brooklyn below you and New Jersey on your left”).19
Now that he was in it, he told the Times, he wasn’t going to let his residency define the race. “The next eight weeks will determine the winner—not what people think now … Goldwater will be an important issue, too, unless Keating completely repudiates him and says he’ll vote for Johnson.” In an early campaign speech before the state AFL-CIO, Bobby said, “I don’t think I’m carrying a bag … My opponent is carrying a bag and I think it’s kicking. It sounds like someone from Arizona in the bag.” Keating refused to endorse Goldwater and demurred about who he would vote for on November 3. Bobby blasted him for this. “I’m for Lyndon Johnson and against Barry Goldwater” was always the biggest applause line in his speeches.20 Unfortunately for the campaign, too many didn’t hear a word.
Bobby’s mere presence seemed to create a screaming chaos wherever he went. The earliest example was Jones Beach on Long Island. Plans to walk the sand were scuttled when he couldn’t even get there for all of the people grabbing at him. Bobby wore a smile to mask the terror in his eyes as policemen tried to pull him through. Finally, two aides lifted him on their shoulders. Dripping in sweat, he waved his hands to quiet those around him. “There are some little children in here. They’re going to get crushed. Won’t you please push back a little—please?” The crowd only cheered.21
A young woman was overheard saying, “He’s a doll; he looks better in person than he does on television.”
Said another, “He looks older than he does on television.”22
The authorities thought the crowd might disperse if people could no longer see him, so they had Bobby get down on his hands and knees while ten park policemen locked arms around him. It didn’t help—people kept pushing forward, pushing forward. So Bobby began to crawl toward a bathhouse as a cordon of policemen locked arms at the elbows and inched along with him. When they finally got close enough, RFK popped to his feet and sprinted, dashing to the bathhouse, through a corridor to the pool area, and then over a fence, finding refuge in a locker room. He planned an escape with local authorities while more police barred the door.23
It was dangerous. A forty-four-year-old Long Island police officer suffered a heart attack after holding back the surging crowds in the parking lot of a department store in Massapequa. A local Republican official proposed officers receive hazard pay when Bobby came to town.24
The crowds often frightened and panicked him in the early days of the campaign. “I think somebody’s going to get killed,” Bobby said in a crush at Grand Central Terminal, where he was again carried on shoulders so people could see him and move on. A woman was almost trampled at the foot of the escalators, and Bobby hopped up on the partition between the banisters. “Get back! Get back!” he shouted to no effect.25
An old classmate, Dean Markham, a former marine whom Bobby dubbed “the meanest lineman at Harvard,” joined him for the campaign trail as de facto security. He and Guthman kept the crowds from pulling him out of the car, one gripping him tightly around the belt and waist, the other’s arms wrapped around his knees. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough, and Bobby would have to make a break for it, hands clawing at his shoes and ankles, jumping from parked-car roof to car roof to escape—leaving a trail of dents behind. Markham came to have a name for the autograph seekers—facepointers. They would thrust at Bobby with a pen or pencil at eye level, and Markham would take one hand to grab their hands and pull them down, all the while hanging on to Bobby’s belt to stop other people from pulling him in.26
Markham always went prepared for the worst. On blustery motorcade rides in their convertible, the wind blew back Markham’s suit jacket to reveal the pistol on his hip that he denied carrying. During a walking tour along Broadway—“more of a shoving tour,” the Times correspondent wrote—someone dropped a lit firecracker from an apartment house window. Police folded in to cover Bobby, but he just kept shaking hands. He may have been too dazed to notice it.27
While the crowds were menacing, opponents and journalists often belittled them as mostly women. “A boulevard of broken heels” was how the New York Times described the aftermath of one speech. “The biggest element in the Kennedy crowds are school girls,” the Baltimore Sun wrote. “Sometimes half or even larger portions of his screamers are teenagers”—teenagers who were under twenty-one and ineligible to vote. The youthfulness of his crowds became so cliché, the Times once had to offer a caveat that an audience was “nearly all” adults. Long Island’s Democratic boss Jack English played it cool. “We don’t count the jumpers and squealers,” he said. “We look at adults in the crowd, if they are smiling or applauding. We like what we’ve been seeing.”28
Only a week in, they had seen a dozen things that would never happen on a normal campaign. When a campaign rally in the small lower-Adirondacks town of Glens Falls was delayed from eight P.M. to one o’clock in the morning, Bobby was sure the trip was pointless. “This is crazy,” Bobby said. “Everybody’s gone to bed.” But when they landed, the plane door swung open, a brass band struck up a march, and a huge crowd roared the little town to life. Hundreds of people—many in their pajamas—lined the streets.29
A woman called out, “God bless you!”
A teenage girl jumped up and down. “I touched him! I touched him!”
A man gripped his hand and said, “Good luck.”
A local police captain remarked to journalist Peter Maas of the Saturday Evening Post, “This is crazy. I’ve been on the force for twenty years, and I’ve never seen anything like it.” In the auditorium downtown, thousands were jammed in, and the band struck up “Happy Days Are Here Again.”30
Bobby was dumbfounded. “Thank you for waiting.” He grinned. “Well, here we are, five hours late. That’s the smooth, hard-driving, well-oiled Kennedy machine for you.” Exhausted, he said he wasn’t going to make a speech, and someone yelled for him to say whatever he wanted to. “I’ll just say this. I’d like to make my very first commitment of the campaign. I promise that, win or lose, the day after the election I’m coming back to Glens Falls!” He arrived home at four fifteen in the morning, his right hand swollen from shaking hands. It was another day when he didn’t get dinner until after midnight.31
Physically, it was a miserable start. Day after day, he was scratched, squeezed, pummeled, and thrashed. He began wearing suits off-the-rack since they were shredded within a few days. He sported cloth cuff links instead of the gold ones Jack had given him since they were repeatedly torn from his wrists. He bled mostly from the hands, though a woman gashed his chin. In Plattsburgh, a large man squeezed the back of his neck and pounded his back with exuberance. “Bobby! Bobby!” Flowers, confetti, and rice flitted in the air like a disorienting dream. Three times, they bowled him over, Markham and Guthman holding fast to his legs and belt. Riding away from Plattsburgh’s dedication of the John F. Kennedy Bridge, Bobby asked in a weak voice, “Do I have to make another speech?”
“One more here, Bob. There are a lot of people waiting in town.” Each day ended by cleaning the scratches with ointment to ward off infection.32
Mentally, it wasn’t much better.
Bobby would later deny feeling any fear amid the crowds. “They were friends gathering round me, all in friendly spirit,” he told an interviewer. “Nobody wants to kill me.”33 But the look on his face told a different story. He couldn’t hide the terror in his eyes when the crowd rippled one way, then surged violently another way. He couldn’t focus. His speeches came out in spurts, awkward pauses between an unsteady voice. He was no longer doing the things in politics that he was good at—strategy, planning. Peter Maas could see his misery, writing, “For Robert Kennedy, campaigning is not fun.”
He would wind down only on his way home aboard the Caroline, sitting in the chair off by himself, with a bowl of clam chowder or a bourbon on the rocks, staring out the window.
Once, after a whirlwind of upstate events, Bobby and Guthman returned to the Carlyle and ordered up steaks. Bobby was exhausted. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “I’ve never seen crowds like you’re getting,” Guthman said, “they’ve got to be a good omen.”
Bob looked at him pensively. “Don’t you know? They’re for him—they’re for him.”34
A sense of purpose drove him, even in the dark moments. “I’m not in this for the title or for the hell of it,” he gravely confided to a friend. “It’s because I think I can do a job.”35
Bobby pushed himself always. “He’s living on nerves,” Jack said of him in 1960. Those first weeks wore him down. A reporter counted Bobby shaking 654 hands in twelve minutes outside the Westinghouse Electric Corporation before the seven A.M. shift. After a while, he began stumbling over his words. He looked dazed. The schedulers were summoned to the mansion at Glen Cove. Justice Department aide John Nolan and Justin Feldman, a New York lawyer and Democratic operative, found Bobby next to the swimming pool. He looked so exhausted that Feldman didn’t even recognize him. Justin put out his hand. Bobby tentatively reached back with a few fingers, waving his other hand to show how swollen and mangled it was. “This is why I wanted to talk to you … Are you guys trying to elect me or kill me?” If they wanted him on the breakneck schedule, he said, “I’ll do it. I can physically do it. But I’m going to be so exhausted and I won’t be able to think.”36
The pace had to slow down, and it did. He got a day off the trail every week. The pandemonium kept up. In a way, it was the only thing driving the campaign. Their main message was that Bobby was a Democrat who supported the Democratic platform. “He was shaking hands, he was getting big crowds, he was getting encouragement,” Feldman said, “but he was saying nothing on the issues. He was being purely and simply President Kennedy’s brother, and he just wasn’t coming through.”37
Nor were the liberals coming around. Bobby was a wiretapper, a McCarthyite, the worst kind of Cold Warrior, an antiliberal, unprincipled political animal. And then some just plain didn’t like him. There were plenty of noble excuses to mask their personal disdain. Respectable liberals formed an umbrella group called Democrats for Keating. The journalist-crusader I. F. Stone wrote, “A vote for Kennedy is not just a vote for a U.S. Senator. He acts as if the country owes him the White House.” Stone accused Bobby of being insufficiently tough on big business and asserted that “Bobby’s only criticism of McCarthy was that he didn’t do enough research and relied too much on [Roy] Cohn and [Cohn’s assistant David] Schine!”38
“It would be very easy to give you a canned speech how I’m all for civil liberties,” Bobby told a journalist. “Nothing would be easier than to agree with all the attacks on McCarthy—it makes you very popular. It’s easy to sit here and attack McCarthy as an SOB. I’m not going to do it. The facts are I left the committee in ’53 because I disagreed with the way it was run. I came back in ’54 as counsel for the Democratic minority. I wrote the final report. I’ll stand on what I wrote about McCarthy in my book.”39
The liberals punished him for his past, for not being John Kennedy—or rather, how people remembered John Kennedy. The contrast was Bobby’s fault. “I want my campaign to be based on the record of the Kennedy administration,” he said in an early strategy session. None of his advisers had the guts to tell him “No” or “That won’t be enough,” one aide later said. Partly because they didn’t know what would work, partly because Bob was still in such a fragile state. “You never knew when he was going to just turn off and go and stare out the window,” said Milton Gwirtzman, one of Teddy’s Senate aides on loan to the campaign.40
Being the receptacle of grief for his brother—“a fabulous ghost returned to earth,” as a top political reporter described him—was a heavy burden. Murray Kempton called Bobby “the ultimate echo.” Everything he was came back to his brother. “He carried himself like an icon through the streets,” Gwirtzman said, “so that people could, through him, show how they felt about his brother.” Living in New York, he spent more time with his brother’s widow, a fellow constant mourner, contributing to his depression and distraction. Jackie shied away from the trail. “I expect that the widow of the late President will be on television before the campaign ends,” said the Republican state chairman, certain that a desperate Bobby would stop at nothing. “Kennedy is the revered name of a martyred president, but if they keep exploiting it, they’ll ruin it.”41
Once Bobby took John John to see the family’s old house in Riverdale in the Bronx. Cynics cried that Bobby was trotting out the world-famous little boy, in red shorts with chocolate smeared on his face, for a ruthless photo op. Aides said he was merely trying to be a father figure to his nephew.42
His wife, Ethel, always pulled him out of the pits of grief. She was the sunny counterweight to Jackie’s sorrow, living every moment to the fullest. Thirty-six years old, mother of eight children and seven months pregnant with a ninth, Ethel was a shaky public speaker who nevertheless threw herself into rallies to boost her Bobby. She wrote all her speeches herself before running them by Steve Smith. “I deliver the speech by phone to him and he criticizes my diction as well as the content,” she told a Washington Post reporter. “Sometimes, he says the delivery is fine but that I need a new speechwriter.”43
Sometimes Jean Kennedy Smith would step in for her very pregnant sister-in-law. “I know you were expecting Ethel, but that’s the story of my life … They always want Jackie first, then Ethel, then Pat Lawford, but they usually get me.”44
But often it was Ethel. In downtown Brooklyn, police officers locked arms to keep her safe from all those pushing for an autograph or a touch. She signed whatever people put in front of her—record covers, store receipts, college registration slips—signing with her right while shaking hands with her left. “I suppose it’s better to be mobbed than to have nobody show up at all,” she said. “If it’s helping Bobby, I really like it.”45
She was his bottomless well of confidence.
Late in September, Bob and Ethel took a car down from the Bronx with Jimmy Breslin in tow. “The Warren Report comes out tomorrow,” the writer told Bobby, referring to the findings of the official government investigation into JFK’s assassination.
“Is this going to put the thing right back into your mind all over again?”
“No,” he replied. “I don’t need the reminder. There are a lot of other things to remind me. I don’t need the report.”
“Have you read it?” Breslin asked.
“No. I know what is in it. I’m not going to read the report.”
“Not at all? I thought it is history and you have a sense of history.”
“No.” Bobby said, “No,” a second time and shook his head, then stared out the window.
They rode in silence for a few blocks while Bobby looked away.
Breslin piped up again. “The papers are going to print an awful lot of it tomorrow.”
Bobby snapped. “Bully for them!”46
“Few who loved John Kennedy, or this country, will be able to read it without emotion,” the New York Times’ Anthony Lewis wrote the morning after its release. The paper printed a forty-eight-page insert with the report’s findings. Bobby’s Senate campaign put out a sterile two-paragraph statement, reiterating what he said spontaneously in Poland that summer—a disturbed young man named Oswald did it and did it by himself. The statement confirmed that Bobby accepted the report’s findings and that he would not read it and its story of JFK’s assassin and the gory final moments. He did not wish to discuss it further.47
As the public devoured the report, Bobby canceled a series of appearances in lower Manhattan, opting to spend the morning with Jackie. Aides said that they strolled unnoticed in Central Park. In the afternoon, he boarded the Caroline at LaGuardia Airport to fly to Ithaca. The Caroline was like a flying living room: sofas, chairs, and tables. One big easy chair was off from the others—the one Jack had sat in. Bobby took off his gray suit jacket and put on a tan pullover sweater he often wore—also rumored to have been Jack’s. It hung loose on his smaller shoulders and taut frame. One reporter wrote how going from adoring crowd to adoring crowd aboard the Caroline made it feel “like the 1960 campaign all over again,” except that Jack was always high-spirited between the stops, “whereas vestiges of the stricken haunted expression still come over Robert Kennedy’s face and he stares out the window in long silences.” This was one of those flights when Bob said nothing and just stared.48
Aides warned him that reporters would ask for his reaction to the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone.
Bobby looked up with glazed eyes. “Why? What are they going to do that for?”49
Kenny O’Donnell told a writer that sometimes he would see Bob talking to himself. Only later did he realize that he was actually talking to Jack. The day was chilly and gray.50
Bobby seemed miserable. “He hated himself,” Justin Feldman would remember years later, “for being here.” It made him awfully tough to deal with.51
Ken Keating was suffering in a different way. After a long and successful career in politics, his crowds were being measured against the biggest draw since the Beatles. Newsday found his audiences “surprisingly small.” New York Times veteran reporter Homer Bigart felt embarrassed watching him try to whip up a mere thirty people on a street corner. Startled pedestrians gave him quizzical looks when he reached out for their hands, his aides rushing up behind, whispering, “It’s Senator Keating of New York.”52 The old man’s only option was an aggressive, multipronged attack campaign.
Conservatives and Republicans already had reason to dislike Bobby, so Keating went after solid Democratic voters: Jews, blacks, Italians. He said RFK had selfishly “deserted” the civil rights struggle “in an hour of great crisis” by resigning to seek office and further his political career. Baseball great Jackie Robinson came to Keating’s aid in his syndicated newspaper column, blasting Bobby for urging moderation as churches were bombed, and blaming him for the FBI’s “miserable failure” at curbing the brutality toward civil rights workers.53
Bobby was labeled anti-Italian for assisting in televised congressional hearings on organized crime featuring Joseph Valachi, a former member of New York’s Genovese crime family serving a life sentence for narcotics and murder. Valachi believed he was marked for death and sang for protection, spilling gruesome details. The public was riveted. Italians felt stereotyped as thugs before a national audience. Keating attacked Bobby for his support role—supplying Valachi and the files—to “hearings [that] resulted in nothing … He just put on a show to divert attention from other matters”—namely, the LBJ–Bobby Baker gifts scandal.54
But the harshest attack suggested Bobby cut a sweetheart deal to allow former Nazis to rake in millions of dollars. The General Aniline and Film Corporation was one of many German assets seized at the outset of World War II, and the Kennedy Justice Department oversaw its transfer to a Swiss company, a common postwar practice that would render millions of dollars to America in claims that Germany still owed. Bobby was aware of the deal’s controversy at the time, Guthman later wrote in his memoir. “The Civil Division lawyers on the case were unanimously opposed, primarily on the grounds that former Nazis well might benefit from a settlement.” Yet, after numerous meetings, “Bob decided to settle. He believed the terms were equitable; that possible benefit to former Nazis, while hard to swallow, was outweighed by the advantages to the company being free of government control and by the fact that proceeds from the government’s share of the settlement would be used to pay claims of American citizens for injuries and property damage suffered at the hands of the enemy …”55 It was a compromise of governing.
Keating called it a sellout. He said Bobby’s decision aided a “foreign front” for a “huge Nazi cartel and one of the chief producers of chemicals for Hitler’s war machine.” Bobby’s Justice Department had given a “mere cloak” to transfer $60 million in assets back into dubious hands. Bobby had been prepared for all the other attacks—ruthlessness, be it toward blacks or Italians or liberals. He had faced those questions for years. And while he always knew the General Aniline decision was controversial, the charge took him by surprise.56
It was and would remain the boldest attack of the campaign. Even the New York Times editorial board—hostile to Bobby from the get-go—said Keating had transgressed the bounds of decency.57 Keating replied, “I have not said anyone was guilty of any heinous crimes. I have simply criticized my opponent.”
“Ruthless” Robert Kennedy was suddenly the aggrieved victim. “I can’t believe the campaign has descended to these depths,” he said. “I am surprised and shocked—I can’t understand for the life of me why he made these statements.”
When a reporter in the scrum asked if Keating was being sincere when he said he didn’t know how the issue would affect the Jewish vote, Bobby shouted, “No!” He paused to collect himself and added, “He is not, in my judgment, being truthful. I don’t think there’s a person of the Jewish faith in New York who hasn’t had a relative killed by the Nazis. The charge that I made a deal with Nazis can’t help but have an adverse effect on how Jewish people feel about me. It will have an adverse effect on every voter—not just Jews. If this kind of charge were true, I wouldn’t deserve to be elected to any public office. The charge isn’t true. My family, too, has suffered from the Nazis. I lost my brother and my brother-in-law to the Germans. The idea that I would turn over money to the Nazis is ridiculous.”58
“The charge is not true, of course, but the problem is that you never catch up with these things. People read the first headlines and say that I’m pro-Nazi.”59
The attacks came just as the air was coming out of his campaign. The crowds were huge, but there was no substance. Three weeks in, and Bobby had made only three formal speeches. The crowds wouldn’t listen to staid, thoughtful speeches—he could barely get a full sentence heard in their frenzies. By early October, the lack of substance showed up in the polls: he was fading. Bobby wrestled with the implications. “I think I came into this campaign just as a Kennedy,” he told the Boston Globe. “The newspaper stories have all been about the crowds … Three girls fainting or a policeman falling off his motorcycle … The people have not really been listening to what I’ve been saying to the issues.”
Bobby had worried that if he attacked Keating, he would create a sympathy vote for the old senator.60 After Keating’s Nazi speech, he no longer had to worry.
He set up a strike team to knock Keating on his heels. Bill Haddad, a New York ally from 1960, compiled an opposition-research book titled, “The Myth of Keating’s Liberalism.” They needed to package it inside of a few inches for the newspapers, so they called in Joe Dolan, a cagey Western operative, to produce ads. Peter Edelman, a pensive, brilliant young lawyer in the Civil Division under John Douglas, helped refine it. Edelman was finishing his tour at the Justice Department and had already accepted a job in private practice, but took a diversion to the campaign. His final nights at Justice included staying after hours and compiling an extensive analysis of Keating’s voting record.61
Bobby’s strategists had sought to conserve their ad dollars for the final weeks of the campaign.62 They just needed the right commercials to air.
Robert Kennedy was lousy at reading a script straight-to-camera about why he would be the better senator. He came across uncomfortable and stilted; not authentic. But he had to find a way to communicate through the powerful medium of television. It appealed to his aides, New York Times correspondent David Halberstam wrote, “because they do not have to deal with a middle man—the press.”63
They had some success filming Bobby taking questions outside a suburban supermarket in New Rochelle. “He needed to see people and talk to them face-to-face,” advance man Jerry Bruno would write, “and they needed to see him.” Once that happened, “the ruthless thing just faded, went out the window.”64 Bobby’s aides realized he had a natural outlet—his interactions with young audiences.
He took it for a walk in late September before a thousand students at the University of Rochester. He gave a speech on foreign policy and started taking questions from the students. One asked if he would serve all six years—past the next presidential election. “I intend to serve until my term is up,” Bobby said. “But let’s just assume I am going to use it as a stepping-stone. Because that is the implication of the question. I don’t know where I can go …” The audience broke into laughter.
“Assume that I was using it as a power base. That’s … the expression that is used. Using it as a power base, the only thing I can think of is that I want to be president of the United States. Let’s just assume then—let’s just assume the worst … In the first place, truthfully now, I can’t go any place in 1968. We’ve got President Lyndon Johnson, and he’s going to be a good president and I think he is not only going to be president in 1964, but he is going to be reelected in 1968 … and he’ll have my support and my efforts on his behalf … Now let’s go to 1972. Let’s assume I am using it as a power base. I’m going to have to be reelected in six years. That means that if I have done such an outstanding job and I want to be president, I’ve got to do an outstanding job in the state of New York … that means that in eight years I have got to do such an outstanding job that people will be demanding all over the country that I be a presidential candidate … I don’t see how New York suffers.”
An aide ran over and told reporters not to take that as a declaration of candidacy for 1972. But they did see something different emerge in Bobby’s performance. His coiled demeanor loosened during Q&A. He was most comfortable in the format—conditioned to it after hundreds of hours of combative hearings, sparring with the likes of Jimmy Hoffa and mobsters. Bobby liked the college kids because their questions were tough and direct. “They usually ask the best questions,” he told an interviewer, “and when there’s opposition in the audience, it’s basically more stimulating.” Softball questions bored him. His eyes deadened and he gave monosyllabic answers. With the kids, Bob might look annoyed at first, his television man Fred Papert recalled years later. Then Kennedy would remember that they were just kids and he should have some fun.65 Papert’s firm handled accounts for liquors, cigars, and cold medicines. Bottling Bobby’s encounters with youth was a breeze.
Papert had his cameras rolling when Bobby and Ethel pushed their way to the front of a packed auditorium on October 5 for a joint session of the Columbia University and Barnard College Young Democrats. A thousand students crowded the aisles inside the hall, another two thousand outside hoping to get in.66 Bobby took the microphone to applause, and then the room became awkwardly silent, and so did he.
“A, uh, bright group of students,” Bobby said sarcastically with a jab of his fist. He grinned. “I’ve learned—I’ve learned to say that since I’ve been a candidate.” They laughed. “I thought that maybe you had some questions and we could just proceed …”
And proceed they did. Why New York and not some other place? He explained that he had lived longer in New York than anywhere else. “If the election is going to be decided on my accent or where I also have other associations with, then I think that people are going to vote for my opponent. I think that the election really should be decided on the basis of whether my opponent or myself can do more for the state of New York and make the greatest amount of difference for this state and the country over the period of the next six years. Again, if it’s going to be judged on who’s lived here in the state of New York longer, then my opponent has. But maybe you should elect the oldest man in the state of New York.” The audience laughed and applauded.
Another asked about his using New York as a “jumping-off place,” and Bobby again explained his lack of options until 1972. “Frankly, I don’t need the title, because I can be called General, I understand, for the rest of my life. And I don’t need the money and I don’t need the office space … Frank as it is, and maybe it’s difficult to understand in the state of New York”—he was speaking from the heart now—“I’d like to just be a good United States senator. I’d like to serve.”67 There came applause.
His aides knew they had the footage they needed. Bobby was playful, earnest, loose. By making him vulnerable, stripping away his standard speech and the laundry list of Democratic cheers and Republican boos, he was able to communicate who he was behind closed doors. What was supposed to be a half-hour forum turned into a two-and-a-half-hour Q&A, and they were getting it all on film, to show the whole state.68
Though they would not show the entire exchange, for when he was asked about the Warren Report, the mood changed.
“Now, Mr. Kennedy,” a man asked, “in the light of certain speculations of people like Mark Lane about the validity of the Warren Commission report, I wonder, do you still have implicit faith in their findings?”
Bobby’s demeanor hardened in an instant. “I’ve made my statement on that.” Jimmy Breslin was struck by the sudden irritation in his voice. Then he bowed his head and ran his hand through his hair, as if he needed to compose himself. A thousand sets of eyes and lights bore down on him. “I don’t—I don’t think there is anything that I can add to what I have said. I believe …” The room hung in anticipation on his pauses. “I answered a question of some Polish students when I visited Poland about the matter, what my judgment was, that Mr.—that this was an individual matter.” That was all Bobby would say. The lights for the cameras exposed tears on his eyelashes.69
For the most part, student Q&A’s were a relief. At New York University, one of his answers landed on an awkwardly solemn note and no one applauded. So Bobby began to clap gently for himself. The students laughed. The candidate grinned. “A little encouragement makes a big difference. Mr. Khrushchev always claps for himself. I’m going to introduce that here.”
One student asked him the “ruthless question”—why he was running?
“I could have retired and lived off my father,” he said. “When I left the Justice Department, they gave me a flag. I could have run my flag up somewhere and spent the next sixty years telling people about how I saved the country. Or I could run for the Senate here. I’m putting a lot on the line. I want to be a part of the government. There is nothing more sinister to it than that.”70
Within two days of the Columbia event, the campaign spent tens of thousands of dollars buying half-hour evening blocks on local television—70 to 80 percent of the campaign’s expenses ultimately went toward television. Newspaper ads for the spots promised to show Robert Kennedy answering “tough” questions “from a critical audience of New York college students.” These New Yorkers were young—most under twenty-one. “He is wasting his time,” the Times’ Homer Bigart wrote, “the audience is too young to vote. But he likes young people, and they like him.”71
“You notice people always call him Bobby instead of Mr. Kennedy,” an aide told Newsday. “They called his brother Jack. This means that people are identifying with him, thinking of him as a contemporary. It helped Jack and it will help Bobby.”72
He still had to stop Keating. Bobby sharpened his rhetoric on the stump, adding more substantive attacks. Peter Edelman created a visual aid to keep track of the back-and-forth between the two campaigns, an all-encompassing sheet of paper Kennedy could absorb it from. Edelman took one of their campaign handouts with side-by-side comparisons of their positions and taped on little notes—facts about Keating’s record, his attacks, and Kennedy’s counterattacks. They called it the Accordion because of the way it folded out as they kept adding notes. Edelman would bring in the Accordion before important appearances or during downtime for Bobby to refresh himself. The candidate would carry it around the room, tapping his front tooth, as was his habit. Other times, he would spread it out on the edge of a bed as if it were a desk, kneel down on the floor, and study it. He would take his glasses on and off, staring intently. If he asked a question, he would do it without looking up, trying not to break his concentration on the words before him. Bobby seemed so focused, Edelman occasionally wondered if he even knew his young aide’s name.73
The campaign found its footing. Bobby did enough to rehabilitate his image from a ruthless political climber to a results-oriented law enforcer, while hacking away at Keating’s liberal credentials with negative ads. Surrogates worked liberal enclaves to vouch for Bobby’s trustworthiness. “I thought everybody loved and admired Bobby Kennedy until I arrived in New York,” Ted Sorensen said, “and found there were some very bitter divisions, even among Democrats.” Bobby even swallowed his pride and latched onto Johnson’s coattails, ditching the slogan of “Let’s Put Bob Kennedy to Work for New York” for “Get with the Johnson-Humphrey-Kennedy Team.” The President joined Bobby for a series of campaign stops in the big urban centers, riding through New York City’s streets in an open car before tens of thousands, having addressed fifty thousand people in Buffalo and another twenty thousand in Rochester. “This is the largest crowd I’ve seen in all my travels, from Maine to California,” the President boasted in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Keating remained stuck on the carpetbagger issue and Kennedy’s supposed slights to Negroes, Italians, and Jews. A Daily News straw poll showed Bobby with a 3–2 lead.74
“I’ve been involved in a lot of campaigns,” Bobby told a reporter, “but this one is so different in so many ways. In previous campaigns, our family was so closely bound up together. There was one candidate, but we were all sort of involved, including my father, of course, who felt so strongly about it. Now my brother isn’t here, my father can’t speak, and my younger brother isn’t around. The whole operation is different. Everything is different.” Bobby talked about what it was like to be the candidate and not the one running the show. “It’s a relief in a way. I like being out of Washington. That’s first. And I like seeing so many other people. I like communicating again with that part of American life. I like looking at people, in all the towns and all the cities all over the state. They smile. They don’t have an angle. It’s very lifting. They’re just ordinary American citizens. Washington is so inbred. Washington is a one-industry town. Everyone reads the columnists. Everyone reads the editorial page. Something disturbs them each day. Here, the people that come to an airport to meet you just seem to have sort of a basic confidence that the country is in good hands. They represent the United States so much better than what we have in Washington. They smile. The impression you have is that they look happy, and yet serious at the same time. And they listen to you. It’s just nice, that’s all. It’s just the way they look. That’s what makes it worthwhile.”
“I’m always trying for communication,” he said. At a Catholic-sponsored forum in Long Island, where a thousand nuns in habits roamed about, Bobby looked at his prepared text for the schoolteachers—“vaguely about youth,” he said—and discarded it. “I was handed a speech written for me at one in the morning, and I was supposed to speak at ten,” he complained later. “I found I didn’t like the speech. It was very pedantic and routine. It just didn’t have any idealism.”75 He began by talking with the sisters about civil rights, and then about where he was two years before that very hour—with his brother, at the start of the Cuban missile crisis. He told them frankly that the President’s advisers were split over a strike against the Soviet missile sites—“split almost even—perhaps seven one way, five another.”
Bobby said President Kennedy asked how many civilians would be killed in the air strikes on the missile sites. The intelligence advisers came back and said twenty-five thousand.
“These were people who probably weren’t Communists,” Bobby said, “and weren’t involved in bringing the missiles into Cuba.” Yet they would have died because the President’s advisers believed bombing was “the safer way.”
“We would have gone in and knocked out all their bases—there wasn’t any question about it—and then started bargaining.” The story was frightening—all the more shocking since it was the first time anyone had shared a Cuban casualty figure if the President had chosen to bomb.
But that choice, he told the sisters, would have been a “Pearl Harbor in reverse.” He said that the President chose the blockade because “of his education, because of his moral training, and because of his belief in what is right and what is wrong.” Political life was hard but worth it, he told the sisters, “because an individual can make a difference.” He told them what he had told many others about the life of a politician: “If President Kennedy’s life stood for anything, it was the idea that one person can make a difference.” Afterward, the nuns surrounded him and Ethel for autographs. Bobby broke away and got to the car. His wife stayed behind, still signing. “Ethel,” he called out, “I’m the candidate.”76
Bobby’s troubles weren’t over. Keating’s aides seized on a line in a speech Bobby gave in Syracuse where he said Keating had “ridiculed” the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Everywhere Keating went the next day, he waved a copy of a Senate resolution pressing President Kennedy to secure the treaty. “I was a leader in the fight for the treaty and he says I ridiculed it,” Keating said. “That’s a falsehood.” Bobby was a liar, lying about his record—and had been lying all along. A Keating aide remarked to a young Newsday reporter, Robert A. Caro, “We’ve discovered the flaw now, and we’re going to keep hitting it all the way.”77
The arbiter of political justice, the Fair Campaign Practices Committee, leaked a private letter to the Kennedy campaign calling Bobby out for a “false and distorted”—perhaps “deliberate and cynical”—misrepresentation of Keating’s record. Bobby’s alleged deceptions were front-page news. “Kennedy Fighting ‘Ruthless’ Image” was the next day’s New York Times headline. Newsday editorialized that his “show-off” tactics “forfeit for him public respect and stand in sad contrast to those of his late, beloved brother.”78 Times reporter David Halberstam wrote that RFK had two opponents: Keating, and his own reputation as “a strong-arm man for his brother’s campaigns, an image of a ruthless man interested in power for its own sake.” Bobby understood the caricature but chided the press for giving Keating the moral high ground, routinely citing his “principled” opposition to his party’s nominee Goldwater.
“That’s bravery?” Bobby asked. “How would you like to be associated with someone who’s going to lose the state by three million votes?”79
In fact, Keating’s virtuous reputation intimidated Bobby. “If I were him,” Bobby said of Keating just after the election, “I would have run just on my record. I would have remained aloof and talked about my record and said, ‘Here is this ruthless young man trying to come into this state and take my job.’ If he had done that, I don’t know what I would have done. He had been very fatherly towards me in Washington, and I couldn’t go after him unless he started in on me first.”80
Bobby lobbied two members of the Fair Campaign board to resign in protest, while two Kennedy staffers were handed the evidence for their side’s claims, sent to the FCPC office, and told to sit on the door until the letter was withdrawn. Within a few hours, another letter was issued citing “additional material” and acknowledging, “The letter should not have been written, and any accusations in it were necessarily unfair to Mr. Kennedy.”81
For almost the entirety of the campaign, no agreement could be reached on whether the candidates would meet in a face-to-face debate. The decision on both sides rested almost entirely on the polls. When Senator Keating was down in September, he pressed Bobby to debate him, but Bobby, worried about the appearance of beating up on the older man, stayed away. “He looks like your grandfather, and there’s no way you can win it.” Bobby only accepted the offer after polls showed him sliding, but by then it was Keating with something to lose, and his campaign worried that Kennedy’s youth would make Keating seem elderly. Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican presidential nominee in 1944 and ’48, who was advising Keating on strategy, warned him that Bobby was better versed in the “sixty-second answers” of the television age.82 However, the polls swung back in Bobby’s direction, and facing a national wave against Barry Goldwater leading the Republican ticket, Keating had no choice but to renew his challenge.
In late October, CBS offered the campaigns a prime-time slot from seven thirty to eight thirty on Tuesday, October 27—one week before election day. Keating bought the first half hour and Kennedy the second for $5,400 each, but they couldn’t agree on a format to combine their time slots into an hour-long debate. Rapidly sinking in the polls from the weight of Goldwater, Keating invited Bobby to share his program regardless, saying he would either debate Kennedy or his “empty chair.” Bobby was still deciding just an hour before the debate began, sitting on his bed in the Carlyle, shirtsleeves rolled up, his tie loosened and shoes kicked off. His advisers warned that the debate would be dangerous. The Keating campaign had control of the cameras and microphones, and no format had been established to keep things civil—which made it all the more likely Bobby would be painted as the opportunistic interloper badgering a kindly white-haired man.
“I can’t let him debate an empty chair,” Bobby said to his advisers.83
It was decided. Part of his strategy was to rattle Keating by showing up as late as possible. In fact, the plan was to arrive at two minutes to air, 7:28 P.M.… It never crossed their minds that the candidate could be barred from entry.84
Bobby exited out the back of the Carlyle in order to maximize surprise and reached CBS studios at 7:27 P.M.85 About fifty reporters and photographers crammed the hallway. “I’m here,” Bobby announced. “It’s seven thirty, and I’m ready to go in.” A CBS executive and two other CBS employees stood in Bobby’s way, telling him he could not enter. Kennedy’s voice got louder. “Then this is a dishonest show. I’m here. Keating said he wanted to debate. He’s going to have that empty chair in there. I want to fill it.” The executive told Bobby he had missed the three thirty P.M. deadline for a response. “At least have that empty chair removed,” Bobby said.
“That can’t be done,” the executive said.
Bobby turned toward the newsmen. “I’m wasting my time here.”
Inside the studio, Keating said Bobby refused to face him, “man-to-man, toe-to-toe.” He pointed to the chair for the camera. “This is how he backs up his charges. This is how he shows his contempt for the voters of New York.” Keating was emphatic. “I wanted this debate for the benefit of the people of New York and also for my own sake because I know a face-to-face meeting between my opponent and myself would expose his ruthless attempt to destroy my lifetime character.” Republican senator Jacob Javits joined him, complaining that Bobby kept invoking the name of President Kennedy. The camera regularly panned to the empty leather chair behind a desk with a placard reading ROBERT F. KENNEDY.
Meanwhile, photographers snapped pictures of Bobby standing in front of a locked door with a handwritten sign: PLEASE KEEP OUT. NO VISITORS. KEATING. The images of Keating pointing toward the chair and Bobby locked out were juxtaposed on the front pages the next day. It was an utter disaster for Keating.
The hallways of CBS were a pandemonium of shouting newsmen, Kennedy aides, and network security. Guards barred doorways, and Ed Guthman was shoved back when he attempted to enter his own candidate’s studio. As Bobby went on the air at eight, reporters gathered outside the front door to Keating’s studio. Then a photographer spotted the senator and three aides slipping out a side door and shouted, “There he goes!” The newsmen gave chase. Keating rushed toward an elevator through a narrow corridor with props and furniture shelved along the wall. Attempting to slow the reporters down, Keating’s aides knocked down chairs and a table behind them. Artificial palm trees and cue cards started flying. The aides pulled out a sofa to completely block the path. Newsday’s Myron Waldman tumbled over it onto his back. Keating made it to the elevator and down to the street. He claimed no knowledge of a chase and said he was merely on his way to another engagement in White Plains.86
The day after the debate, Kennedy campaign aides cast off their wariness and began talking openly about “winning big.” Keating had lunch with an old reporter friend who said, “He seemed more hurt than angry.” The senator collapsed in the polls that weekend.87
Bobby spent the final days of the campaign like a winner, whisked from adoring crowd to crowd. “It makes me feel like a Beatle,” the Times quoted him.88
He began election day in Manhattan at early breakfasts for Democratic poll workers with heavy New York accents. “You gonna do awright here,” one told him on the East Side.
“That’s what we are going to find out today,” Bobby said in his Boston voice. He headed back to his campaign headquarters, which had emptied out for the final push.
Alone, Bobby walked across Fifth Avenue at Fifty-seventh Street, his hands plunged in his pockets, his shoulders stooped. He wore his mourning outfit: a black pin-striped suit, black shoes, and a black tie with a gold PT-109 clip. On the headquarters wall, he scanned an editorial pinned to a clipboard. One of the few that endorsed him. His hands were puffed and bruised.
Lonely as he could seem, family was near. He, Ethel, and seven of their eight kids spent the day at the Bronx Zoo. Friendly crowds surrounded them. He held up five-year-old Mary Kerry to feed an elephant named Pinky. News cameras clicked noisily, and the elephant swung her trunk in their direction. “Go get ’em, Pinky,” Bobby yelled with a smile. A reporter asked whose side he was on, the elephant’s or the reporters’. “I’ll tell you after the votes are counted,” Bobby said. He and Ethel had a late dinner at Jean and Steve Smith’s Fifth Avenue apartment with Joe and Rose, Sarge and Eunice Shriver, and Jackie. Teddy remained in Boston, strapped facedown to a special bed frame, watching the returns on TV through a prism of mirrors on the floor.89
The networks called the race before ten o’clock. Keating gave his concession speech shortly after midnight, and Bobby addressed the surging crowd in the ballroom of the Statler Hilton, surrounded by his family and New York’s high-ranking Democrats. He thanked his supporters and the Harrimans, Mayor Wagner, Chairman McKeon, local party leaders John Burns and Peter Straus, and “a relative”—Steve Smith—who “went far beyond the effort one brother-in-law gives to another brother-in-law.” Bobby said the results were “a mandate to continue the efforts begun by my brother four years ago—the effort to get something started in this country—and a vote of confidence for Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey.” Bobby never explicitly thanked Johnson, though. Then, as he often did during the campaign, he closed by quoting Tennyson: “Come, my friends; ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
“This is what I dedicate myself to in the next six years for the state of New York.”90
In Austin, Texas, LBJ watched the speech on his television set, livid. Though Bobby mentioned him, he never thanked him.
“If I kept my mouth shut, he’d been beaten,” he told Bill Moyers and McGeorge Bundy the next morning. Bobby won his race by ten points, but with less than 54 percent of the vote. LBJ had racked up nearly 69 percent in New York, the state Newsweek said he valued “second only to Texas as his personal power base.” After all the miles of campaigning he’d done for Bobby, LBJ said to Bundy and Moyers, even Lady Bird “couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t acknowledge that the President had had anything to do with this landslide victory in the worl—country.” Johnson rattled off all the “county judge so-and-so and county surrogate so-and-so and county so-and-so” no-names that Bobby had thanked.
“Well, Mr. President,” McGeorge Bundy said, laughing, “he didn’t realize you were in that room, and all those other sons of bitches were.”91
In fact, Kennedy’s victory speech also forgot to mention the Liberal Party, whose early endorsement doomed Keating and bolstered Bobby with skeptical New York reformers.92 And immediately after, he called the President to thank and congratulate him on his landslide over Goldwater.
“We got a lot to be thankful for, Bobby,” Johnson told him. “Let’s, uh, let’s, uh, let’s, uh, let’s stay as close together as he’d want us to.”
“That’d be fine. That’d be fine, Mr. President. Congratulations—”
“Tell all that staff of yours ain’t nobody gonna divide us, and I’ll tell mine the same way and we’ll—”
“That’s right,” Bobby said.
“—and we’ll move ahead and there’s plenty in life for all of us.”93
The next morning, Bobby sat aboard the Caroline in the candidate’s swivel chair, on his way to see his brother Teddy, after a promised stop in Glens Falls. He was wearing his horn-rimmed glasses, the morning papers on his lap.
“Now I can go back to being ruthless,” he said to the newsmen.
One would write, “Had the phrase been spoken by Adlai Stevenson, it would have been merely funny. But such is the public image of Robert Kennedy that it was also believable.”94
RFK later told a journalist that he might still have run for the Senate had President Kennedy lived, but as for reality, “I just wanted to keep myself busy and have something to occupy my mind.”95
One friend said it sounded “corny” but was nonetheless true: Bob was proud of President Kennedy’s accomplishments and “he thinks of himself as the guy to whom the torch has been passed. He’s not at all modest about that.”96 Doing his best to psychoanalyze, New York Times editorialist William V. Shannon would soon write how after the 1960 campaign, John Kennedy stopped using the phrase the New Frontier in his speeches, but that Robert Kennedy never did.
Shannon was wrong; JFK hadn’t.97 But his observation was characteristic of how many viewed Bobby: fiercely loyal, sticking to the course his brother had laid out. After all those months of trying to capture the vice presidency, of searching for a way to keep the Kennedy legacy as close to power for as long as he could, Bobby had followed the path as far as it was going to take him.
The New Frontier was behind, and he had no choice but to find his own way forward.
* About $2.4 billion in 2017 dollars.