The Empathetic Leader
HE WAS SHY AND COULD BE MOROSE. SMALL AND SLOUCHY, HE RECOILED at backslapping. As a boy and as a young man he saw himself more as an acolyte than as a priest and operated for most of his life behind the throne. He could be mean or churlish, and he was often content to remain wordless. When he finally heard the applause, he was sure it was for his martyred brother.
Yet by accident, or fate, and through the force of his own will, Robert Kennedy became a leader for his time. By a kind of human alchemy, he was able to turn his fears and insecurities into leadership qualities—into empathy with the downtrodden and an impatient drive to better their lot. Even his inarticulateness became a virtue. Through his palpable yearning, his awkward yet fervent body language, he could reach dispossessed people who had trouble expressing their own hopes and fears. He became a kind of tribune for the voiceless. During the 1960s people were drawn to antiheroes in cinema and literature. They sensed in RFK a kind of brooding anger but also a vulnerability and sensitivity, a willingness to defy authority and take risks—to “dream of things that never were, and ask why not,” in the phrase he borrowed from George Bernard Shaw.
A well-known cartoon from 1968 by Jules Feiffer shows RFK struggling to decide whether he is the “Good Bobby” or the “Bad Bobby,” the protector of small children and poor blacks of his later years or the ruthless McCarthyite of his earlier years. Mythology notwithstanding, the progression from bad to good was not steady or linear. When he was the hard guy—“Ruthless Robert”—he was never so tough as he appeared, and when he emerged as a symbol of hope, he was not quite the figure of purity and innocence his followers wished him to be. He was intensely human. He was a creature of secrets and subterfuges at one level, yet he projected a kind of authenticity and sincerity that made him stand apart from, and above, the glad-handing politicians of his or any era. He was cunning but no phony. And he was willing to do what almost no politician, then or now, is willing to do: ask voters to make sacrifices for the greater good.
Robert Kennedy was born into a family that comes as close to American royalty as any. But there was nothing about his background that suggested that he was born to rule.
He was the third son and seventh child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. His older siblings, Joe Jr., Jack, and Kathleen (known as Kick) were known as the golden trio. Attractive, athletic, charming, they were expected to succeed by their driven father, who announced on the birth of his eldest son that Joe Jr. would be president of the United States—and meant it. Robert, by contrast, was described by his father as “the runt.” Little Bobby was small and uncoordinated and unhappy much of the time. His brother Jack called him Black Robert. In a more therapeutic age he would have been diagnosed as depressed. Robert’s own description of himself as a boy verges on the pathetic: “What I remember most vividly about growing up was going to a lot of different schools, always having to make new friends, and that I was very awkward and dropped things and fell down all the time. I had to go to the hospital a few times for stitches in my head and my leg. And I was pretty quiet most of the time. And I didn’t mind being alone.”
He was, at the same time, desperate for attention. At the Kennedys’ summer place in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, Bobby was slow to learn to swim and fearful of the water. His brother Jack recalled how one day when the family was sailing off Cape Cod, Bobby threw himself off the boat into Nantucket Sound. His older brother Joe had to fish him out. “It showed a lot of guts or no sense at all, depending on how you looked at it,” recalled Jack. At the Kennedy family dinner table, the “golden trio” sat at the head with their father, discussing world affairs. Bobby sat down at the other end of the table with his sisters, baby brother Teddy, his mother, and several nuns. Bobby was known as his mother’s pet. He was the most pious of the children, an acolyte at church, especially considerate of aging clergy and the Kennedys’ domestic staff. His mother, Rose, worried that he was “puny” and “girlish” and would turn out to be a sissy.
At Portsmouth Priory School, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island, he was known as Mrs. Kennedy’s little boy Bobby, according to his roommate, David Meehan. Young Robert felt tremendous pressure to catch up to his more successful siblings. In the spring of 1942, with his brothers headed off to the war as naval officers, Robert was caught cheating on an exam at Portsmouth and kicked out. He went to Milton Academy and on to Harvard and enlisted in the navy, but he could never match his brothers (who were engaged in their own mortal rivalry; after Jack became a hero by getting his PT boat cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, naval aviator Joe volunteered for a dangerous mission and was killed over the English Channel when his plane blew up). Failing his flight aptitude test, Robert served as an enlisted man on a destroyer—the Joseph P. Kennedy, named after his martyred brother Joe—scraping paint as he sailed around the peacetime Caribbean in 1946.
Robert yearned to get his father’s attention. “I wish, Dad, that you would write me a letter as you used to Joe & Jack about what you think about the different political events and the war as I’d like to understand what’s going on better than I do now,” he wrote in 1945. He cast about for a role, for some way of proving himself worthy of the family name.
In the 1952 race for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts, he found a useful niche in the shadow of his brothers. Stepping into the void left by Joe Jr.’s death, Jack had won a congressional seat in 1946 and was running against the incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge. Father Joe needed someone to manage Jack’s campaign, an enforcer who would do the hard and dirty work, who would dole out the cash where it mattered and chase off the hacks and old pols who hung around campaign headquarters with their hands out. Grudgingly at first, then with a kind of bird dog ferocity, Robert took on the role of brother protector.
He may have found some commonality with his father. “He hates like me,” Joe Sr. reportedly said—in a way, a measure of respect. RFK developed a hard shell around his soft heart. He was curt and dismissive and ruthless when he had to be. Once, in a confrontation with the headquarters hangers-on, he shouted, “I don’t want my brother to get mixed up with politicians!” The politicians felt the same way about Bobby. “The candidate’s brother,” as he was usually introduced, just shrugged. “I don’t care if anyone around here likes me,” he muttered, “as long as they like Jack.”
The Kennedy brothers were a unique blend of old and new, heralds of the postwar generation that was changing American politics. Massachusetts Governor Paul Dever shrewdly described JFK as “the first Irish Brahmin” and Bobby as “the last Irish Puritan.” Bobby proudly identified with the Irish and with the underdog. That was how he came to have his strange and regrettable association with Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Red-baiting demagogue whose congressional investigations terrorized government bureaucrats in the early 1950s. McCarthy was an old Kennedy family friend, a sometimes date of Bobby’s sisters (“he kissed very hard,” recalled Jean Kennedy Smith), and—to Bobby at least—a proud Irish tough guy who, as Bobby saw it, stood up to the pantywaist elitists in the State Department. At his father’s recommendation, RFK signed on as a staff lawyer for McCarthy. That McCarthy was a fraud and a bully did not bother RFK, at least in the beginning. Kennedy did clash with McCarthy’s henchman Roy Cohn, who called Kennedy a “rich bitch.” The two nearly came to blows, and Kennedy eventually quit McCarthy’s staff.
He remained a hard-charging lawyer for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, however, turning his prosecutorial attention to mobbed-up unions, particularly the Teamsters. Kennedy’s investigation of mobsters like Momo “Sam” Giancana, the boss of the Chicago Mafia, has led to some psychohistorical theorizing. A onetime bootlegger, Kennedy’s own father had some shadowy connections to organized crime, never fully proved but often speculated about. Certainly RFK was aware of the rumors. Was he playing with fire by going after the mob? Joe Sr. was furious when RFK told him of his intention to investigate organized crime. But young Kennedy went ahead, producing sensational televised hearings in the late 1950s that exposed nefarious ties between the Mafia and organized labor. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has speculated that some deeper Oedipal urge was driving RFK. Was he somehow trying to get even with the father who had ignored him and favored the more successful older sons? Kennedy’s psyche was so complex that armchair psychologizing is intriguing but ultimately not determinative.
In any case, RFK never turned up any ties between his father and the mob (or, rather, links that were made public). And he continued to play his role as brother protector.
In December 1960, at the father’s insistence, President-elect John F. Kennedy nominated his brother Robert to be attorney general of the United States. (Joe wanted Bobby to keep an eye on FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Joe knew that Hoover kept files, including one on a sexual affair between then Lieutenant John F. Kennedy and a woman suspected as a Nazi spy, Inga Arvad, during World War II.) Such nepotism would be unthinkable now, but RFK was easily confirmed by the Senate in February 1961.
Robert Kennedy turned out arguably to be the best attorney general in history. Certainly, his legacy on pressing for civil rights and prosecuting organized crime is unrivaled. The Deep South was still under the hold of Jim Crow in the early 1960s. The U.S. Supreme Court’s order to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed” had been met with massive resistance, and blacks were still, by state law, excluded from whites only restrooms and hotels and other public accommodations. The civil rights movement was rising but had still not aroused the national conscience. In the spring of 1961 a group of black and white activists calling themselves Freedom Riders began traveling on buses in the South to force federal intervention to uphold the law outlawing segregation in interstate commerce. The Freedom Riders were beaten bloody by white mobs (with local police standing by watching), and their bus was burned. The spectacle drew international attention—and brought shame on the United States just as the new president was preparing for a summit meeting with the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June. JFK was furious about the Freedom Riders. “Tell them to call it off!” the president angrily instructed his special assistant for civil rights, Harris Wofford. “Stop them! Get your friends off those buses!”
Robert Kennedy had dispatched one of his assistants, John Seigenthaler, to Alabama to meet with local officials and “hold their hands” to avoid violence. But when Seigenthaler himself was beaten over the head and hospitalized as he tried to rescue a black woman from the mob, RFK began to see things in a different light.
All through his life, Robert Kennedy was experiential. He went searching for new experiences, and he allowed himself to be moved and stirred and shaped by what he saw and heard and felt. He was open to change and very sensitive to unfairness and injustice. Kennedy himself began traveling to the South as attorney general, and what he experienced there, talking to everyone from segregationist police chiefs to poor children with distended bellies, profoundly influenced him. Not right away—he was impatient with angry young blacks and their leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., with whom he had an uneasy relationship—but slowly he came to appreciate what they were fighting for and, crucially, to identify with them. As time went on, he became the most important advocate in the Kennedy administration for not only enforcing the existing laws but changing them to outlaw segregation and discrimination everywhere.
Blessed with a shrewd sense of the possible and good political timing, Kennedy and his brother the president waited for the right moment, then pushed hard. The time came in June 1963. Governor George Wallace of Alabama was defying efforts to integrate the state university, and in Birmingham, Sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor was turning fire hoses and police dogs on small black children marching for freedom. A new witness, the TV camera, was recording it all for the nation to see. On the warm June day that Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door” to defy the U.S. Justice Department, RFK persuaded his brother to seize the moment and address the nation, calling for a federal civil rights bill to outlaw racial discrimination everywhere in the land. RFK saw the need, as his aide Burke Marshall put it, “to get at the heart of the matter.”
In retrospect, JFK’s speech, which launched the legislative effort that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was a stroke of great political courage, one that required real sacrifice. By siding with the civil rights movement, President Kennedy was in effect writing off the base of his own political party. The Democrats would never carry the Solid South again. Southern state and local leaders, who all were, in 1960, Democrats, within a generation or less became almost entirely Republican. Most of Kennedy’s political advisers were well aware of the political risk involved. In the internal deliberations preceding President Kennedy’s speech, “every single person who spoke about it in the White House—every one of them—was against President Kennedy sending up that bill, against making it a moral issue,” Marshall recalled. The “conclusive voice within the government” was Robert Kennedy’s. “He urged it, he felt it, he understood it. And he prevailed.”
In the South “Bobby” became a curse word. RFK was also scorned as “Raul” (after Raúl Castro, the Cuban dictator’s younger brother). When the attorney general went south to speak in the autumn of 1963, President Kennedy, in the wry, slightly mocking tone that the Kennedys used with one another, urged his brother to come back soon—or not at all.
While the attorney general was bringing federal law enforcement to bear in the cause of civil rights, he was also attacking the mob. Fearing corruption of his own agents, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover had always been reluctant to take on the Mafia. But Kennedy ordered the bureau into action, investigating, wiretapping, shadowing, and, where possible, bringing cases against mob bosses. The biggest of these and the target of the most Justice Department attention was Momo Giancana, boss of Chicago.
In Kennedyland, things are rarely as simple as they seem. In February 1962 the attorney general was informed by the director of the FBI that the president of the United States had been sleeping with a girlfriend of the most powerful figure in the Mafia. Giancana’s moll was a woman named Judith Exner. JFK had encountered her during his Senate years, while palling around in Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra, the singer who allowed himself to become too close to gangsters. The Judith Exner affair, one of many for the eternally priapic president, continued into the White House. The FBI had learned of it through wiretaps on Giancana. Hoover reveled in such items of potential blackmail, which gave him a kind of job insurance and power over his nominal bosses.
To complicate matters further, Giancana had been hired by the CIA to try to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. The mob hit on Castro, a hated and feared figure in the fervid Cold War era, never happened (or even came close). But Giancana’s multiple ties to the administration created, at the very least, a political headache for RFK. The potential for scandal was enormous, even at a time when the press was relatively more docile and did not write about the sex lives of politicians or probe too deeply into the CIA.
Still, Kennedy continued to press the FBI to investigate Giancana, to shadow the mob boss. On tapes of secret FBI bugs planted in his Chicago headquarters, Giancana was heard to complain that the constant pressure and scrutiny from the feds made him feel as if he were living “in Russia.” Deputized by his brother to oversee CIA covert action against Cuba, RFK also pressed hard to overthrow or kill Castro, alienating many spooks with his meddling in CIA matters.
Robert Kennedy had created a host of enemies. When his brother Jack was slain by an assassin’s bullet on November 22, 1963, Kennedy immediately feared an act of retribution. From his house, Hickory Hill, in McLean, Virginia, he called his informants in Chicago to ask if the mob had killed his brother, and he called an informant in a CIA safe house in Washington to ask if the anti-Castro Cubans had turned on the president. He asked about the Teamsters’ Jimmy Hoffa, and he directly asked the director of the CIA, John McCone, if there had been any CIA involvement. He did all this on that bright November afternoon before he went to Andrews Air Force Base to greet the coffin returning from Dallas, and to the day he died he was never satisfied with the answer that Lee Harvey Oswald had been a lone gunman, that there was no conspiracy behind him.
After his brother’s death Robert Kennedy sank into darkness. Many years later, recalling the weeks and months after the assassination, John Seigenthaler described Kennedy as a “man on a rack.” He seemed tortured, haunted. He began to waste away, disappearing into his brother’s black overcoat and bomber jacket, which he wore like a hair shirt. (Sailing on a yacht off the coast of Maine, RFK watched in horror as the bomber jacket blew over the side. Like the little boy who had been rescued by his older brother, he dived in after it and nearly drowned of exposure before he was fished out of the water, holding the jacket.) His humor, always sardonic, turned black. “Been to any good funerals lately?” he would ask. He began driving his convertible, too fast, at night, often to Arlington Cemetery. He would climb over the wall and sit by his brother’s grave until dawn. For a time he lost his faith. On the night of his brother’s death, as a friend closed the door to the Lincoln Bedroom, where Robert had gone to sleep (or tried to), the friend heard Robert’s voice cry out, “Why, God?”
In March 1964, Robert accompanied the president’s widow, Jacqueline, to the island of Antigua, where they stayed with other houseguests at the home of Mrs. Paul Mellon. Jackie gave RFK a copy of Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way, and Kennedy spent most of the next several days in the cool dark of his room, lost to the world. He read of the House of Atreus, doomed to repeat the sins of their fathers; of overweening pride that brings men low; of fatal hubris. He felt that the great Greek poets and playwrights were speaking to him, about his own family and the curse of pride. He memorized Aeschylus:
All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears
God calls men to a heavy reckoning
For overweening pride.
“In agony learn wisdom!” cries the herald in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Kennedy tried to. Slowly and painfully he pulled himself out of his depression. Though never much of a student, he began reading Shakespeare and Camus, marking up the texts of the books, which he carried in his pocket or briefcase. He forged a crude existential philosophy, a conviction that yes, man is doomed, but that is no excuse to give up. Rather the opposite. Man must get up every day and challenge the fates to give meaning to existence.
He willed himself back into public life. In the summer of 1964 he decided to resign as attorney general (he had almost stopped going to the office) and run for the U.S. Senate from New York.
Though Kennedy had known great power as his brother’s unofficial deputy president, he had always worked behind the scenes. He had been a shrewd consigliere. “Thank God for Bobby,” JFK had said to his aide Dave Powers after the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. It had been RFK, more than any other in the so-called Ex Com of top advisers who worked with the president during those perilous thirteen days, who understood how to mix public firmness with private conciliation toward the Soviets. The communication between JFK and RFK had been almost nonverbal. “They hardly had to speak with each other. They understood each other from half a word,” recalled British diplomat and philosopher Isaiah Berlin. “There was a kind of constant, telepathic contact between them.”
But now Kennedy had to take the public stage, to speak out, to ask for votes. The family expectation—Kennedys are winners—hung over him. After JFK had been elected president, he had given his brother a cigarette case with the half-joking inscription “When I’m through, how about you?” But the younger brother felt weak, unsure, unsteady—unready, perhaps never ready. Two months into the campaign, looking out a hotel room window at a vast crowd assembled in downtown Buffalo, he said, mournfully, “They’re here for Jack.” RFK continued to mope, muttering about doom, until a campaign aide, Paul Corbin, grabbed him and said, “Get out of this mysticism. Get out of your daze…. God damn, Bob, be yourself. Get a hold of yourself. You’re real. Your brother is dead.”
Kennedy was swept into office on the tailwind of LBJ’s 1964 landslide (he badly trailed LBJ’s vote total in New York, galling to RFK, who loathed Johnson as a usurper). Kennedy did not turn out to be much of a senator in the conventional sense. “He was in the Senate, but not of it,” recalled Majority Leader Mike Mansfield. He was not nearly as effective at working the cloakroom or tending to his home state base as his little brother, Edward (who, in the jokey way of the Kennedys, gave RFK a book, entitled What I Know About New York Politics, with the pages left blank). But he was, in his own way, a visionary leader. Sensing the rising despair of the inner city, he created a model for urban redevelopment in the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. Wary of straight welfare payments, he emphasized jobs as a way to restore the dignity of young black men who felt they had none. He was able to reach out to black voters in ways that most white politicians could not—by not just pretending to listen but by conveying, almost ineffably, his empathy. Sonny Carson, a black activist, recalled watching RFK walk into a local church. “Man, it was like the Pope walked in,” said Carson. “There was a strangeness that caused blacks to love him. He was the younger brother full of pain.”
In June 1966, Kennedy was invited to South Africa, to address the students who were agitating against apartheid. It was a very low time in South Africa. Most of the world had turned away from the plight of the country’s oppressed black majority. But Kennedy went, spinning out his existentialist credo, at once melancholy and hopeful, high-minded but direct. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, these ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance…” said Kennedy, in his reedy but urgent voice, in his Day of Affirmation speech at Cape Town University. When he finished, there was silence. Like a child, recalled Margaret Marshall, his student leader host, he looked around him, “as if to say, was the speech okay?” Then, with a rush, a roar of applause crashed over him. For the next three days, he traveled about the country, often stopping to address impromptu crowds while standing on the roof of his car. Blacks, banned from touching whites in South Africa, reached out to hold his hand. Later Marshall recalled his impact: “He reminded us—me—that we were not alone…. We all had felt alienated…. He reset the moral compass, not so much by attacking apartheid, but by simply talking justice and freedom and dignity—words that none of us had heard in, it seemed like, an eternity. He didn’t go through the white liberals, he connected straight—by standing on a car. Nobody had done that. How simple it was! He was not afraid.”
At home students were increasingly agitating to protest against the Vietnam War, taking over school buildings and shutting down campuses. By the long hot summer of 1967, race riots were erupting in cities from coast to coast, so severe in Detroit that army paratroopers were called in to stop the sniping. Kennedy began touring the country, meeting with Hispanic migrant workers, destitute Native Americans on reservations, and blacks living in rural poverty. His daughter Kathleen recalled him bursting into the family dining room at Hickory Hill, back from a tour of the Mississippi Delta. “In Mississippi, a whole family lives in a shack the size of this room,” he announced to his nine children, ages two to fifteen. “The children are covered with sores and their tummies stick out because they have no food. Do you know how lucky you are? Do you know how lucky you are? Do something for your country.”
As the Vietnam War dragged on and deepened, Kennedy had been slowly transformed from a hawk to an outspoken dove. By the winter of 1968 he was under growing pressure to challenge President Johnson for the Democratic Party nomination. Kennedy loathed Johnson and wanted him out of office. But he hesitated to run against his old rival. In tense conversations with his advisers, he worried that his candidacy would badly split the Democratic Party and elect a Republican—Richard Nixon—in November. He may, at some level, have feared for his own safety. He was an obvious target for assassination, though whenever he was made aware of a threat against him, his instinct was to defy it and stick to any public speaking plans.
Kennedy was furious when he saw someone at a rally hold up a poster that read KENNEDY: HAWK, DOVE—OR CHICKEN? When an aide laughed at the sign, Kennedy sharply told him, “It’s not funny.” But he continued to agonize. At a dinner with his wife, Ethel, and friends at Hickory Hill in January, he said, “I think if I run I will go a long way toward proving everything that everybody who doesn’t like me has said about me…that I’m just a selfish, ambitious little SOB that can’t wait to get his hands on the White House.”
And yet…it was Robert Kennedy who liked to quote Dante that “the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” In snowy New Hampshire, Senator Eugene McCarthy, running as a peace candidate, almost defeated LBJ in the traditional nation’s first primary.
On March 16, 1968, Robert Kennedy declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. The day after, he flew to Kansas State University to deliver a long-scheduled lecture. The KSU field house was packed with fifteen thousand students, some of them actually hanging from the rafters, waving signs like KISS ME, BOBBY. His voice flat and stammering, his right leg shaking, Kennedy began tentatively but then cut loose, jamming his fist in the air while pounding out an antiwar diatribe. When he was done, “the field house sounded as though it was inside Niagra Falls; it was like a soundtrack gone haywire,” recorded journalist Jack Newfield. After a similarly raucous event at his next stop, before seventeen thousand at the University of Kansas, Stanley Tretick, a photographer for Look magazine, gawked at the hysteria and exclaimed, “This is Kansas, fucking Kansas! He’s going all the fucking way!”
RFK knew better. The party establishment was against him. “Who else could have brought together Big Business, Big Labor, and the South?” Kennedy boasted self-mockingly to a speechwriter, Milton Gwirtzman. “And the Jews,” added Gwirtzman. Kennedy was slow to find his voice. At first his speeches were too hot, then too cool—too much like his brother’s. At the end of March, Kennedy received an enormous boost when LBJ, who was having nightmares about RFK’s deposing him, announced that he would not seek reelection. But Johnson made clear that the party machinery would work to elect Vice President Hubert Humphrey, not Kennedy. In a casual conversation with Gene McCarthy, Johnson avoided saying anything about Kennedy. Instead, he drew his hand across his throat, in a cutting gesture. Johnson began feeding bits of gossip about Kennedy to investigative reporters, including hints of Kennedy’s involvement in the Castro assassination plots and his role as attorney general in wiretapping Martin Luther King.
On April 4, only five days after Johnson dropped out of the race, Kennedy and the entire nation were jolted when a gunman shot and killed Martin Luther King as he stood on a motel balcony in Memphis.
Kennedy was on the way to a rally in the inner city in Indianapolis, where he was campaigning in the Indiana primary. The local police told him they could not guarantee his safety in the ghetto and peeled away. Kennedy went on. Standing on a flatbed truck, his hands thrust into the pockets of his brother’s black overcoat as he hunched over in the wind and cold, he told the crowd, most of whom were still unaware in that pre-CNN age, that King was dead. There was an audible gasp. But Kennedy continued:
For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed….
My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote, “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.
So I shall ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, that’s true, but most importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love—a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke….
Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago; to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of the world.
Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and our people.
The inner cities blew up on the night King died: riots in 110 cities, thirty-nine deaths, more than twenty-five hundred injured. But Indianapolis stayed calm.
King’s assassination seemed to make Kennedy even more willful about ignoring threats against his own life. In Lansing, Michigan, one week after King was shot to death, police informed Kennedy’s staff that a man had been seen on a rooftop holding a gun. Fred Dutton, Kennedy’s closest aide, pulled the blinds down in RFK’s hotel room. “Don’t close them,” Kennedy instructed. “If they’re going to shoot, they’ll shoot.” Kennedy told Dutton, “We’re not going to start ducking now.” In his daybook, he quoted Camus: “Knowing that you are going to die is nothing.”
For the first three weeks of April, Kennedy crisscrossed the nation, drawing huge throngs, trying to prove his popularity to the bosses who controlled the Democratic National Convention. “The crowds were savage,” recalled John Bartlow Martin, who traveled with Kennedy as an adviser. “They pulled his cufflinks off, tore at his clothes, tore ours. In bigger towns, with bigger crowds, it was frightening.” In Kalamazoo, Michigan, a housewife reached into the car and calmly removed Kennedy’s right shoe, which she displayed to reporters as a trophy of war. One overheated woman yanked Kennedy’s head down by the tie; another pulled him out of the car altogether, breaking his tooth on the curb. Kennedy’s shyness would seize him at the beginning of a motorcade or mass rally. He would grimace, tight-lipped, before plunging into a crowd, as if he were diving into icy water. As the crowd closed around him, he would let his body go limp. “It was like he wasn’t there,” observed Peter Fishbein, a young aide who traveled with the candidate. “His stare was vacant.” Once, when their car was nearly rolled over by a wildly impassioned crowd in California, Fishbein looked at Kennedy, who was limply waving and looking away. “Even for him, it could be scary,” said Fishbein.
Viewed several decades later, the films and photographs of Robert Kennedy’s eighty-eight-day campaign seem feverish, almost hysterical. Not just the jumpers and screamers waving signs that said BOBBY IS SEXY, BOBBY IS GROOVY, I LOVE YOU, BOBBY, but the farmers and workers and housewives who closed in on him, clutching at him, pulling him from his car and—twice—stealing the shoes off his feet. They came out, at first, to cheer the myth of Camelot restored. They saw, instead, a raw, somewhat reticent young man struggling to be honest with them and with himself. His speeches were effective not so much for their words, which, when scripted, were usually bland, or their delivery, which was often flat or awkward, as for something more ineffable: the emanations of compassion and understanding that he conveyed. Inarticulate but urgent and sincere, Kennedy could reach poor and dispossessed people who themselves had difficulty articulating their needs and anxieties. People loved him even though he challenged, even baited them to overcome their fears and narrow self-interests. He embarrassed middle-class college students, whose support he desperately wanted, by belittling their draft deferments, pointing out that the casualties in Vietnam were disproportionately suffered by minorities and the poor.
On April 26, Kennedy spoke to an audience of medical students and doctors at the University of Indiana. His hands were shaking as he gripped the podium. His knuckles shone white, and his fingers nervously played along the fluted pedestal. The students, almost all white and middle class, looking forward to their prosperous careers, challenged Kennedy on his plan to provide more health care for the poor. “Where are you going to get all the money from for these federally subsidized programs you’re talking about?” one of the students asked.
“From you,” Kennedy replied. There were boos and hisses, but Kennedy hung in, quoting Camus on the duty to reduce the number of children who suffer: “If you do not do this, who will do this?” Just as a few in the crowd began to clap, Kennedy taunted them some more: “You sit here as white medical students while black people carry the burden of the fighting in Vietnam.” By the time he was done Kennedy had won grudging but respectful applause.
John Bartlow Martin, a Hoosier himself, watched with fascination as Kennedy stumped around the mostly conservative state: “He went yammering around Indiana about the poor whites of Appalachia and the starving Indians who committed suicide on the reservations and the jobless Negroes in the distant great cities, and half the Hoosiers didn’t have any idea what he was talking about; but he plodded ahead stubbornly, making them listen, maybe even making some of them care, by the sheer power of his own caring. Indiana people are not generous or sympathetic; they are hard and hardhearted, not warm and generous; but he must have touched something in them, pushed a button somewhere. He alone did it.”
Some of Kennedy’s appeal was a matter of body language, of tone. One is struck, listening to scratchy recordings of Kennedy’s speeches, how deeply mournful he sounded. Martin described Kennedy’s strangely captivating aura of frailty, urgency, and humility: “He always looked so alone, standing up by himself on the lid of the trunk of the convertible—so alone, vulnerable, so fragile, you feared he might break. He was thin. He did not chop the air with his hand as his brother Jack had; instead he had a little gesture with his right hand, his fist closed, the thumb sticking up a little, and he would jab it to make a point. When he got applause, he did not smile at the crowd, pleased; instead he looked down, down at the ground or at his speech, and waited til they finished, then went on. He could take a bland generality and deliver it with such a depth of feeling that it cut like a knife. Everything he said had an edge to it.”
Kennedy won the Indiana primary on May 7, then Nebraska, an even more conservative state, a week later. (There were far fewer primaries in those days; Kennedy ran in only a half dozen.) But in Oregon on May 28 he lost to McCarthy. Kennedy was too hot, too edgy for some voters, who associated him with riots and blood feuds. (Oregon is “one giant suburb,” Kennedy fretted to a newsman on the plane to Portland. “It’s all white Protestants. There’s nothing for me to grab a hold of.”)
Kennedy’s last week of campaigning in California was a blur of motorcades and stifling auditoriums, screaming teenyboppers and little black schoolchildren, gaily running beside Kennedy’s car. In Watts, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty refused to provide police protection (Yorty regarded RFK as a subversive), so a militant group called Sons of Watts escorted Kennedy’s car through the ghetto. In Chinatown in San Francisco, a loud popping car sent Ethel Kennedy diving to the bottom of the car. Kennedy, standing on the hood, remained upright, but his knees buckled. The loud bangs were only firecrackers. In San Diego that night Kennedy, exhausted, sick, stopped in mid-speech to go offstage and vomit. He returned to the ballroom and finished, as he always did, by paraphrasing Shaw: “Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and say why not.”
The next day Kennedy won the California primary over McCarthy by 46 to 42 percent. “We are a great country, an unselfish country, and a compassionate country,” he told the sweltering crowd in the Ambassador Hotel shortly before midnight. “So my thanks to all of you,”—he wound up—“and now it’s on to Chicago, and let’s win there.”
Kennedy was supposed to exit through the ballroom doors, but the crowd was so heavy that his bodyguard, Bill Barry, veered in a different direction, escorted by the hotel maître d’ though a back entrance into the kitchen corridor. Members of the kitchen staff reached out to shake the candidate’s hand, but as they did, a mentally deranged drifter named Sirhan Sirhan stepped out and shot Kennedy in the head with a snub-nosed pistol. There were screams and a struggle. Back in the ballroom “an awful sound” rolled “like a moan,” recalled Jack Newfield. A woman screamed uncontrollably, “No, God, no. It’s happened again.”
Robert Kennedy was no Jack Kennedy—or Martin Luther King. He lacked the rhetorical force and commanding presence to be a conventionally gifted leader. But in his time he was a force in part because of the qualities that were not presidential, at least in the way most politicians wish to project. John Bartlow Martin captured the ineffable differences between JFK and RFK: “Jack Kennedy was more the politician, saying things publicly that he privately scoffed at. Robert Kennedy was more himself. Jack gave the impression of decisive leadership, the man with all the answers. Robert seemed more hesitant, less sure he was right, more tentative, more questioning, and completely honest about it. Leadership he showed; but it had a different quality of searching for answers to hard questions in company with his bewildered audience, trying to work things out with their help.”
It is far from clear that Kennedy would have won the Democratic nomination. Humphrey had the support of organized labor, still a great force in the party, and most of the big party bosses. Even if nominated, Kennedy might have lost to Nixon in the fall. The nation was fearful in 1968, and Kennedy’s heat and passion may have been too much for Nixon’s “Silent Majority.”
It is also difficult to say whether Kennedy would have been an effective president. He would have tried hard to disengage from Vietnam, perhaps saving thousands of lives (America lost another thirty thousand soldiers after Nixon was elected). Without question, Kennedy would have tried to face the problems of race and poverty. But those were, and are, bedeviling problems, and Kennedy might have found himself mired in interest group politics as he tried to push legislation on Capitol Hill. Kennedy’s ruthless streak did not just vanish amid the hearts and flowers of 1968. He had a secretive side, and it’s possible he would have resorted to subterfuge and dirty tricks against his foes—wiretapping at home and covert action abroad.
But it is more likely that Kennedy would have displayed a style of leadership that has almost vanished from modern politics. He would have been honest with voters about the sacrifices they needed to make. He would have offered more than lip service to the need for the country to face up to its problems. He believed fervently in public service, and he would have set a personal example while impatiently goading the young to honor their personal commitment to change. He might have failed, but he would have failed trying honestly and with all his heart.
When Robert helped design JFK’s grave, he disagreed with his brother’s widow. RFK wanted a plain white cross. Jackie wanted something far grander, more elegant, and she prevailed. Today, from the hillside at Arlington Cemetery, you can see all of the federal city stretched before JFK’s memorial, with its eternal flame and sweeping curve of marble engraved with the words of Kennedy’s inaugural address: “Let the word go forth from this time and place….”
To find Robert Kennedy’s grave, you must wander down a narrow alley shielded by trees. On a block of marble are carved some fragments of speeches he wrote, mournfully quoting Aeschylus. His body lies under a small, plain white cross, inscribed only with his name and the years of his birth and death. The effect is a little lonely. You wonder about the frightened small boy who almost became a great man, and where he might have led us had he lived.