The House of Kennedy Read online

  Little else about the 1968 presidential contest is peaceful. More often, it’s not only heated but bitter. Bobby’s announcement comes just four days after the New Hampshire Democratic primary, where antiwar senator Eugene McCarthy nearly upset Lyndon Johnson, who as sitting president is on record for having sent half a million troops into peril.

  Senator McCarthy will never forgive Bobby for crashing the 1968 race. Though McCarthy remains cordial with his Senate colleague Ted, for decades McCarthy insists, “Bobby had an inferiority complex, but Jack never did.”

  Not twenty-four hours after the New Hampshire polls close, Bobby is quoted in the press: “I am actively reassessing the possibility of whether I will run against President Johnson.” McCarthy, an Irish Catholic like the Kennedys, takes special note of Bobby’s tactics and timing. “An Irishman who announces the day before St. Patrick’s Day that he’s going to run against another Irishman shouldn’t say it’s going to be a peaceful relationship.”

  On March 31, in a live television address, Johnson makes a surprise announcement. He’s calling an end—not to the war in Vietnam, but to his bid for a second term as president. (Instead, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, will belatedly join the race on April 27.)

  “You’re kidding,” Bobby exclaims. “I wonder if he would have done it if I hadn’t come in.” Ethel breaks out a celebratory bottle of Scotch. “Well, he didn’t deserve to be president anyway,” she tells her husband.

  A few days earlier, at a dinner party in New York, Jackie served up some provocative table talk to Arthur Schlesinger. “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby?” Jackie told him. “The same thing that happened to Jack. There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack…I’ve told Bobby this, but he isn’t fatalistic, like me.”

  Just as Jackie’s premonitions of violence in Dallas went unheard by Jack, so does her latest fear. Jackie is right. Bobby never does learn to respect the power of fate.

  But he’s not the next victim.

  Chapter 30

  On April 9, 1968, thirteen hundred mourners file into Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Bobby and Ted Kennedy are there, along with other men vying for the presidency—Senator Eugene McCarthy, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and Richard Nixon. At Bobby’s invitation, Jackie attends, her presence a comfort to the nation’s newest famed widow, Coretta Scott King.

  Five days earlier, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot while leaving Room 306 on the second floor of black businessman Walter Bailey’s Lorraine Motel in Memphis. King had been under Memphis police protection since March 28, when his demonstration for the rights of local sanitation workers had turned violent.

  Just after 6:00 p.m., on April 4, civil rights leaders Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and Reverend Ralph Abernathy witness King’s assassination by a rifle shot that severs his spinal cord.

  “I don’t even think he heard the shot [a Remington-Peters, soft-point, metal-jacketed bullet] or felt any pain,” recalls Young. “You see a picture of Andy [Young] and I pointing,” Jackson explains of the iconic photo of the eyewitnesses at the crime scene. “We’re pointing because the police were coming to us with drawn guns and we were saying the bullet came from that way,” which was a rooming house facing the hotel walkway. “And I said, ‘Martin, don’t leave us now, don’t leave us now. We need you,’” says Jackson.

  * * *

  As law enforcement searches for the gunman who shot King, Bobby is campaigning in Indiana in advance of the May 7 Democratic presidential primary.

  He’s about to make the seventy-six-mile flight from Muncie to the state capital, Indianapolis.

  On board the plane, Bobby’s press team alerts him that Dr. Martin Luther King has been shot. At Muncie’s Ball State University, Bobby had earlier reassured a black student who challenged, “You’re placing a great deal of faith in white America. My question: It this faith justified?” In an airborne interview with Newsweek’s John J. Lindsay, Bobby is distressed at the response he gave the student in light of what’s happened. “You know, it grieves me…that I just told that kid this and then walk out and find that some white man has just shot their spiritual leader.”

  The plane lands, along with the news that King has succumbed to his injuries and has been declared dead. According to Lindsay, Bobby seems to “shrink back, as though struck physically.” Confronted with yet another reminder of Jack’s assassination, he hides his face in his hands, saying, “Oh, God. When is this violence going to stop?”

  Across the country, cities are erupting in riots, and more conflict is anticipated on the streets of Indianapolis, where Bobby is scheduled to speak. Mayor Richard Lugar tries to intervene, but Bobby refuses to change his plans. “I’m going to Seventeenth and Broadway,” Bobby says. “I’m going there and that’s it and I don’t want any police going with me.”

  He sends a fearful Ethel on to the hotel as word of King’s death continues to spread. “Dr. King is dead and a white man did it…Why does he [Kennedy] have to come here?” a black woman beseeches a white pastor in the gathering crowd, some of them armed.

  Bobby’s police escort leaves him on the outskirts of the ghetto (later called the Kennedy-King neighborhood). His only protection are the words of press secretary Frank Mankiewicz. “You should give a very short speech. It should be almost like a prayer.”

  In a parking lot, Bobby stalwartly climbs onto a makeshift podium, the back of a flatbed truck equipped with a microphone. Under the dark sky, the weather has turned. “He was up there,” television correspondent Charles Quinn recalls, “hunched in his black overcoat”—one that used to belong to Jack—“his face gaunt and distressed and full of anguish.”

  Bobby announces King’s death to a collective cry of disbelief. Though the Washington Post has cataloged Bobby’s public-speaking flaws—“the nervous, self-deprecating jokes; the trembling hands on the lectern; the staccato alternations of speech and silence; the sudden shifts of mood”—all of these awkward mannerisms fall away as he speaks for the next six minutes.

  In the midst of his remarks, Bobby makes his first public reference to Jack’s assassination. “For those of you who are black and tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”

  Over one hundred cities see riots that night, but not Indianapolis. McCarthy campaign volunteer Mary Evans, sixteen, stands among high school classmates and listens to Kennedy speak. “The minute he started talking, it was like the laying on of hands. Every word out of his mouth was a balm. The whole crowd was swept up in the emotion, and I stopped being scared.”

  Abie Washington, a twenty-six-year-old navy veteran, says, “My level of emotion went from one extreme to another. He had empathy. He knew what it felt like. Why create more violence?” And to Black Radical Action Project member William Crawford, “The sincerity of Bobby Kennedy’s words just resonated, especially when he talked about his brother.”

  Later that night, Bobby phones Coretta Scott King, saying, “I’ll help in any way I can.” When he hears of Mrs. King’s plans to retrieve her slain husband’s body from Memphis, Bobby makes a generous offer. “Let me fly you there. I’ll get a plane down.” She accepts, ignoring advisers’ concerns about the possible impropriety of accepting an expensive favor from a presidential candidate.

  * * *

  Bobby downplays King’s assassination in his campaign stops, though he does comment to journalist Pete Hamill, “It’s very interesting that they can’t find the killer of Martin Luther King, but they can track down some twenty-two-year-old who might have burned his draft card.”

  Although Memphis police arrived on the scene of King’s assassination within minutes, it takes months for them to track down the gunman, easily identified as James Earl Ray from the copious fingerprints he leaves at the
crime scene, including on the gun, and on a newspaper detailing Dr. King’s whereabouts. Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, manages to escape Memphis for Canada and then England before finally being arrested in London two months later on June 8, 1968, and sentenced to life in jail.

  Long before Ray is captured, on the eve of Dr. King’s funeral, Bobby meets with the King family, as well as the leaders in the black community, who are all trying to find their way forward. Reverend Hosea Williams recalls a collective desire “that Bobby Kennedy would come up with some answers,” since “after Dr. King was killed, there was just no one left but Bobby.” The civil rights leader John Lewis feels the same way. “Dr. King may be gone but we still have Bobby Kennedy, so we still have hope.”

  But Reverend Williams warns Bobby, “You have a chance to be a prophet. But prophets get shot.”

  Chapter 31

  In May 1968, pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s portrait of Bobby, his brown hair swooping over his forehead, appears on the cover of Time magazine. Compared to his close-cropped 1950s cut, Bobby has been growing out his hair, sixties-style.

  The longer length appeals to young voters. At Hickory Hill, hours before Bobby announced his presidential candidacy, Ted had tried to intervene with Bobby’s barber, saying, “Cut it as close as you can. Don’t pay attention to anything he says. Cut off as much as you can.”

  Before the upcoming West Coast Democratic primary swing (Oregon, May 28; California, June 4), Bobby flies to Cape Cod to visit his parents. “How will you feel being the mother of two presidents?” Bobby appeals to Rose. “That makes you quite a girl, doesn’t it?”

  On his way to victory in the Indiana primary with 42 percent of the vote, Bobby had chipped a front tooth (when a crowd in the town of Mishawaka pushes him up against his car) and spent a fortune campaigning. (Bobby admits to six hundred thousand dollars, perhaps only half the actual amount.) Rose Kennedy, a veteran campaigner, is on hand with a page from Joe Sr.’s script on politics and money. “It’s part of this campaign business. If you have money—you spend it to win. And the more you can afford, the more you spend.”

  Bobby has another Kennedy lesson for McCarthy. “I don’t know whether people think it’s so good to be second or third. That’s not the way I was brought up. I was always taught it was much better to win. I learned that when I was about two.”

  Having run Jack’s victorious senate and presidential campaigns, Bobby well knows that a candidate’s fortune can turn in a day. As he admits to the press, “It’s a long time until August” and the Democratic national convention that will be held in Chicago at the end of that month.

  Bobby aims to keep topping the primary ballots, and sets himself a steep goal: “I have to be able to win in every state.” But the issues of race and poverty feel less urgent to Oregon’s largely white middle-class suburban constituents, who are more attuned to McCarthy’s antiwar message. At Portland State College, two students wave signs at Bobby reading, “Cut your hair, then we’ll vote!”

  Not enough of them do vote for Kennedy on May 28. The next morning, the front page of the Oregonian delivers the news: “Senator Eugene McCarthy won a dramatic victory Tuesday night—becoming the first candidate to defeat a Kennedy.” It’s a crushing blow to the RFK campaign—and the Kennedy family. “Let’s face it,” Bobby admits. “I appeal best to people who have problems.”

  In Hyannis Port, Bobby is determined to make up the loss, confiding to his wheelchair-bound father, “Dad, I’m going to California for a few days and I’m going to fight hard. I’m going to win one for you.” With the Oregon defeat rankling Bobby, there is no turning back.

  Kennedy California campaign headquarters is on Wilshire Boulevard, and from there Bobby rallies his staff: “If I died in Oregon, I hope Los Angeles is Resurrection City,” he tells them. There is much ground to cover before the primary, set for June 4 (the same date as the South Dakota primary). Bobby campaigns by train and in open-top cars, shaking hands until his own are painfully swollen.

  The “Hollywood for Kennedy” committee, led by singer Andy Williams, offers some glamorous relief by organizing two “star-studded” nationally televised galas on May 24 in Los Angeles and June 1 in San Francisco.

  On June 2, writer George Plimpton is hosting a campaign-themed live call-in radio show and has an alarming exchange with an anonymous voice on the line demanding, “Is Bobby Kennedy ready?” and then in response to Plimpton’s “Ready for what?” yells, “Ready to be killed. He’s doomed! He’s doomed!”

  Another local threat against Bobby occurs months earlier, on April 4, 1968, the same day Martin Luther King Jr. is shot. Alvin Clark, a Los Angeles trash collector, recalls a conversation with a man on his route with whom he’s talked politics over the past three years. The two express mutual dismay over King’s death, but when their conversation shifts to the upcoming primary, they disagree. “I told him I was going to vote for Kennedy,” Clark says, recalling that the man responded, “What are you going to vote for that son of a bitch for? Because I’m planning on shooting him.”

  Two days before the primary, on June 3, Bobby travels more than twelve hundred California miles. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, a loud popping sends Ethel crouching into the wheel wells of the convertible. Earlier in the campaign, Bobby had vowed to Charles Quinn of NBC News, “If I’m ever elected president, I’m never going to ride in one of those God-damned [bulletproof, bubble-top] cars.” When the pops in San Francisco prove to be Chinese firecrackers, Bobby continues to greet the crowds there and in Los Angeles and San Diego, where he nearly collapses from fatigue.

  On June 4, Bobby, Ethel, and six of their children stay in Malibu as guests of the film director John Frankenheimer. While voters take to the polls, the family enjoys the beach—until David, a week and a half shy of his thirteenth birthday, is caught in a dangerous undertow. Though Bobby rescues his son, David, a sensitive, good-looking boy (“If we ever go broke,” Ethel once told journalist Dolly Connelly, “we’ll make a movie star of David and live off his earnings”) is traumatized by the event, and both Kennedys sustain minor bruises and scrapes.

  It’s a physically and emotionally exhausting experience, and later that day when adviser Richard Goodwin encounters Bobby “stretched out across two chairs in the sunlight…his head hanging limply over the chair frame; his unshaven face deeply lined and his lips slightly parted,” he can’t help fearing the worst. Even after realizing Bobby is only sleeping, Goodwin thinks to himself, “I suppose none of us will ever get over John Kennedy.”

  The polls close at 8:00 p.m. It’s after six when Frankenheimer speeds along the Santa Monica Freeway toward the Ambassador Hotel, where the campaign team will watch the election returns. “Take it easy, John,” Bobby Kennedy tells him. “Life is too short.”

  Chapter 32

  The party in the fifth-floor campaign suite at the Ambassador is in full swing, but Bobby cautiously asks aides, “Do we know enough about it [projected returns] yet?”

  He slips away to phone Kenny O’Donnell in Washington, telling him, “You know, Kenny, I feel now for the first time that I’ve shaken off the shadow of my brother. I feel I’ve made it on my own.”

  When, just before midnight, the numbers point to a narrow margin of victory—Kennedy, 46 percent; McCarthy, 42 percent—Bobby and Ethel descend to the ballroom. They pass through the hotel kitchen to cheers from the workers—“Viva Kennedy! Viva Kennedy!”—and emerge into a crowd singing “This Land Is Your Land.” As president, Bobby has promised columnist Jack Newfield, he will make the Woody Guthrie song the new national anthem.

  “I was just shocked by the fact that he didn’t have any security. I think he had one person,” recalls Latino activist and Kennedy campaign staffer Dolores Huerta. No police are present. Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty is a Nixon man, and under his orders the LAPD labels Bobby as “nobody special” and not only refuses to attend his motorcades but issues the campaign twenty-three tickets on more than a hundred alleged
traffic violations. Bobby’s sole bodyguard, former FBI agent Bill Barry, is unarmed. Per government policy in 1968, as a mere presidential candidate, Bobby doesn’t qualify for Secret Service protection.

  “We are a great country, an unselfish country, a compassionate country,” Bobby says after fifteen minutes of unscripted remarks. His twelve-year-old son David is the only one of Bobby’s ten children (Ethel is pregnant with number eleven) awake and watching the live television broadcast. “So my thanks to all of you and now it’s on to Chicago and let’s win there.”

  As Bobby is speaking these words, his staff agrees to a press conference. The ballroom is so crowded that Bobby fears for his pregnant wife’s safety. “Look after Ethel,” Bobby says to Barry as they retrace their route through the hotel kitchen at 12:15.

  Seventeen-year-old busboy Juan Romero shook Bobby’s hand the day before, and now the candidate offers him a second handshake.

  A slight, dark-haired man dressed all in blue slips in among the kitchen staff. Inside a rolled-up Kennedy poster he’s hiding a .22-caliber Iver Johnson pistol loaded with eight bullets. He extends the weapon at Bobby and squeezes the trigger. A bullet pierces Bobby’s head. Two more hits follow, one in his back and the other in the right shoulder. (Many will later note the similar physical positioning of the brothers’ fatal injuries.) Bobby drops immediately to the floor.

  News cameras continue to roll.

  “Shots! Shots! Look out, look out, there’s a madman in here and he’s killing everybody!” someone screams.

  The “madman” is the same person who trash collector Alvin Clark remembers pledging to shoot Bobby on the day that Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. His name is Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a twenty-four-year-old Christian Palestinian whose family fled Jerusalem for Pasadena in 1956. Sirhan—whose notebook containing repeated declarations that “RFK must die” was entered into evidence at his 1969 murder trial—rejects Bobby’s pro-Israel stance.