Bobby Kennedy Read online

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  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE ALTAR BOY

  CHAPTER TWO AMBASSADOR’S SON

  CHAPTER THREE HONOR THY FATHER

  CHAPTER FOUR RITES OF PASSAGE

  CHAPTER FIVE COMMITMENT

  CHAPTER SIX BROTHER

  CHAPTER SEVEN THE KENNEDY PARTY

  CHAPTER EIGHT CLAN

  CHAPTER NINE HAIL MARY

  CHAPTER TEN IRISH COP

  CHAPTER ELEVEN ENFORCER

  CHAPTER TWELVE THE ENEMY WITHIN

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN VICTORY

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN FREEDOM FIGHTER

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN GENERAL

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN TWO GREAT MEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CIVIL RIGHTS

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN RELIC

  CHAPTER NINETEEN BRAVE HEART

  CHAPTER TWENTY AFFIRMATION

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE THE MOVEMENT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO VIGIL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE DEFIANCE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR SACRIFICE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE SALUTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  For Michael, Thomas, and Caroline, to learn from this man’s faith and share his lived compassion

  Man is Spirit

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  I long ago came to realize that movies are always about the present. It doesn’t matter whether the wardrobe is Elizabethan or cowboy. The story is told by and for the living, those who’ll be there to see it.

  The same is true of biography. Jack Kennedy said the reason we read about famous people’s lives is to answer the question: What was this person actually like? Can I imagine being in their presence? Can I make the personal connection? Are they a hero to root for?

  This book is about the Bobby Kennedy we’d want to have today, the kind of leader we lack today.

  The years of Bobby’s public life were my times, too—when the Kennedys first emerged in 1956; the excitement of that great presidential campaign of Kennedy vs. Nixon; the championing of equality for every American; and the campus unrest over Vietnam. All that youth and hope and sense of change: you couldn’t be alive and not feel it.

  In 1968 I joined the Peace Corps, spending two unforgettable years in Africa. That adventure took me to a new and a larger world. This, of course, I owe to the Kennedys’ arrival in Washington and the ideas they brought with them. For me, as for everyone I knew, those years were a shift from looking backward to gazing ahead.

  The books I’ve researched and written on Jack brought home to me again and again the essential role Bobby played in those historic moments. Those accounts appear here as a starting point for showing that the younger brother’s role was indispensable to history. Among them: getting his brother elected to the Senate and then the presidency; handling the Cuban Missile Crisis; and pushing the Civil Rights Act to the national forefront of the Kennedy agenda.

  And then there was Dallas.

  And then there was Los Angeles.

  To honor his life in politics, to mark the half century of his loss and the hope that our country can find its way back to the patriotic unity he championed . . . for all Americans, this is my story of Robert F. Kennedy.

  Those who loved him stand in salute of Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train.

  PROLOGUE

  On March 16, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy stood in the high-ceilinged, marble-walled Senate Caucus Room where, eight years earlier, his brother Jack had announced for president. Bobby now was doing the same. After months of agonizing and second-guessing, he’d decided to step up and make the commitment he’d been hanging back from, fearful the timing at this moment was wrong for his future political career.

  Walking into the Caucus Room that Saturday morning was for something more than a simple announcement. It was, in fact, a declaration of all-out political war. It would see him doing battle for the Democratic presidential nomination not just on one front, but two.

  The first enemy Bobby was facing down was Lyndon Johnson, the president who’d taken his oath of office in the shadow of Jack’s assassination. His aggressive prosecution of the U.S. war in Vietnam had generated a dire national conflict, especially on college campuses.

  But besides LBJ, Bobby had a second adversary, Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy, who was now holding aloft the banner of the growing anti–Vietnam War movement. The Minnesota lawmaker, with his cool professorial manner, had just, four days earlier, simultaneously thrilled the young while frightening Lyndon Johnson with a strong showing against the sitting president in the pivotal New Hampshire primary.

  Thus, two very different men now obstructed the path to a Kennedy nomination.

  Nonetheless, standing there at the lectern, surrounded by family members along with loyalist veterans of his brother’s campaigns, the forty-two-year-old Robert Kennedy was about to take on both men. He began his statement by paying homage to his brother, a tribute clear to many listening. The opening words he’d chosen were the ones Jack had spoken in that very place: “I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.”

  With the sentence that followed, Jack’s steadfast brother left the past behind and went straight to the heart of the troubled moment that was early 1968: “I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done—and I feel that I’m obliged to do all that I can.”

  But it’s what he said next that held such power and still would today: “I run to seek new policies—policies to end the bloodshed in Vietnam and in our cities, policies to close the gaps that now exist between black and white, between rich and poor, between young and old, in this country and around the rest of the world. I run for the presidency because I want the Democratic Party and the United States of America to stand for hope instead of despair, for reconciliation of men instead of the growing risk of world war.”

  Watching intently from his hotel suite in Portland, Oregon—where he himself was campaigning—was Richard Nixon, the Republican Jack Kennedy had narrowly beaten in 1960. Now certain of gaining the Republican nomination and having expected to face Johnson, the two-term vice president turned off the TV set only to continue staring at the blank screen.

  He felt a foreboding. “We’ve just seen some terrible forces unleashed,” he pronounced grimly. He knew the force of the Kennedy magic, its power to thrill but also its power to disturb. “Something bad is going to come of this. God knows where this is going to lead.”

  For LBJ, witnessing this scene at the Senate Caucus Room, it was a nightmare taking life. Since being sworn in on the 22nd of November 1963, just two hours after the death of John F. Kennedy, he’d occupied the Oval Office in the shadow of Dallas. Now, the younger Kennedy, having served just three years as New York’s junior senator, was ready, in Johnson’s words, to claim “the throne in the memory of his brother.”

  There were millions of other attentive witnesses. All across the country, young people were obsessed with the daily spectacle of a war—glimpsed in all its horrors on the nightly news—a conflict that their country could neithe
r win nor end.

  But the news of Kennedy’s decision to run struck many antiwar activists as both threat and insult to those already in the fight. I had this reaction myself. Despite having spoken out boldly against Johnson’s war, Bobby Kennedy had for months refused to match Gene McCarthy’s courage by committing himself as a candidate. That’s the way I saw it as a grad student in economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For me, along with others of my generation facing the draft, Gene McCarthy had become a hero.

  Let me put this feeling of ours in the simplest, most human terms. McCarthy galvanized us and claimed our loyalty by being the lone grown-up with the courage to assert that the Vietnam War was ill-conceived and that he, Gene McCarthy, meant to stop it. In this escalating conflict between sons and fathers—Gene, a guy of my own dad’s era, was on our side. He told us we were right, and not just selfishly opposing a war because we were personally afraid to fight in it. We understood the patriotic call to duty our dads and uncles had answered in World War II, but Vietnam was different. They wouldn’t admit it. McCarthy had.

  Starting that Saturday with Bobby Kennedy’s declaration, there began a fight within the antiwar ranks. Why, we wanted to know, was Bobby Kennedy, having hesitated to strike first at Johnson, now jumping in? Was it because that close call in New Hampshire had revealed LBJ as electorally mortal? And if so, hadn’t Gene now showed himself capable of being more than a symbol? Wasn’t he the one man to take down Johnson? Why was Bobby coming in to steal his thunder?

  But whatever had held him back before, Bobby’s entry into the race was compelling. That he’d taken up the mantle of his slain brother was both its power and its pathos. The great achievements of JFK’s New Frontier—the robust economy, the Peace Corps, the space program, the historic commitment to civil rights, the superb leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis—remained cherished by his countrymen.

  Five years after Dallas, Bobby’s popular appeal was also for the younger brother himself and what he’d come to represent. Beyond his vocal opposition to the war, he was seen as a champion of the underdog. He spoke out on behalf of the poor blacks of the Mississippi Delta, the youth of the inner city, the isolated whites of Appalachia, the California farmworkers, the forgotten Native Americans on reservations. He just seemed to care. When he saw people in trouble, he wanted to help. Only Bobby Kennedy said the conditions facing this other America were, to use his word, “unacceptable.” As a politician, he often seemed out there alone in his insistence that America, which he believed deeply to be great, needed also to be good.

  Then, eighty days after announcing for the presidency, Robert Kennedy was killed by a bullet just as his brother had been.

  • • •

  There are two main characters in Bobby’s story. One was his father. When Joseph P. Kennedy, one of the country’s richest men—arrogant, outspoken, autocratic, widely disliked—came even himself to realize that he was politically unacceptable, his single-minded goal was to propel his firstborn all the way to the White House. He put all his ambitions into his oldest and namesake. Positioned from birth as the ultimate American winner, Joe Jr. became the vessel of every bit of glory his father could dream of, the one chosen to inherit the family claim on history.

  Yet American involvement in World War II—a prospect Joe Sr. had opposed to the point of villainy—would take from him this oldest boy upon whose future he had set his heart.

  Robert—seventh of his children, third among his sons, born between two world wars—found himself from an early age enmeshed in his own life’s struggle. In the eyes of his demanding dad, he simply lacked the qualities the father believed to be of any value.

  From childhood on, Bobby showed a large heart and generous spirit, both traits believed by Joe Kennedy to count for nothing. As utterly chilling as it sounds, a close family friend—Lem Billings, Jack’s boarding school roommate—recalled, decades later, Joe’s response when he’d praised young Bobby as “the most generous little boy.” Replied the senior Kennedy dismissively, “I don’t know where he got that.”

  Bobby’s true nature was known to those up close, his mother, Rose, among them. “It’s pretty easy to watch somebody compete fiercely and see the grimace on his face,” Jack’s close friend Chuck Spalding observed of the younger brother he’d known since his boyhood. “You see that and then you translate it into terms of ruthlessness. But what you don’t see is the softness, because it’s been disciplined not to show.” Jack’s bride, Jacqueline, newer to the family, could discern nonetheless that Bobby, of all his children, was the least like the father.

  Even when trying hardest not to show his different side—playing Harvard football, or serving in the navy—the younger Kennedy couldn’t help but reveal himself if circumstances evoked it. When he heard a popular Boston priest preaching the doctrine of “no salvation outside the Church”—he openly challenged him from the pews, later writing a letter of complaint to Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing. The devout Rose Kennedy worried that her boy had gone too far—until she saw the intolerant priest excommunicated.

  But Rose Kennedy worried about her third son. She saw how open and vulnerable Bobby was, how his natural sweetness might work against him. With four sisters between him and his next-oldest brother, Jack, she feared his winding up “puny,” even “girlish.” The father’s judgment was harsher. It bordered on outright dismissal. Bobby could feel it. It didn’t take this young boy long to realize he needed to show his father—and show him repeatedly—how tough he was.

  The other main character in Bobby’s life was Jack. Though their shared heritage was on both of their map-of-Ireland faces, the two brothers hardly made for a match. For obvious reasons of age as well as personality, they’d never been close when young. “All this business about Jack and Bobby being blood brothers has been exaggerated,” their sister Eunice once revealed. “They didn’t really become close until 1952, and it was politics that brought them together.”

  Jack and Bobby simply were different, always. And by the scorecard of the day, the advantage went to the older. Jack was elegant, Bobby awkward. Jack was charming, confident socially, jaunty as Joe Jr. had been. Bobby was smaller and quieter, less naturally gifted at athletics than his brothers and sisters. He was moodier and more anxious. He liked being alone.

  Jack, meanwhile, was one of this world’s sunny princes. His longtime close friend Chuck Spalding—they’d met in 1940, when in their early twenties—once offered to me a wonderfully vivid description of the effect Jack had on companions. He made you feel, Spalding said, as if “you were at a fair or something.”

  Bobby Kennedy, for his part, came to reveal a definite aptitude, as his mother put it, “to make difficult decisions.” That is to say, tough calls, favoring one person’s interest over another, saying no as well as yes; even cutting people out of the action altogether. This tendency wouldn’t, as time went on, win him friends.

  In 1946, when Jack was just starting off in politics and running for Congress, he didn’t even like having his brother around. “Black Robert” he called him, viewing him as too serious, too earnest, too much the straight arrow. One strategy for keeping him out of the way back then had involved sending this twenty-year-old family member off to work in an East Cambridge Italian neighborhood where the campaign didn’t expect to get many votes. It worked out surprisingly well. Bobby ended up spending his time playing softball with the local kids and making a hit. Later, the campaign would credit Bobby’s own style of community outreach with cutting the rival candidate’s margin in those wards.

  In the seventeen years they had left together, the brothers’ political partnership saw them linked and striving ever higher and achieving ever-greater success—from the House to the Senate to the White House.

  The question has long been what the loss of Jack—which Bobby could only bring himself to call “the events of November 1963”—did to him. As a close family member once suggested to me, the effect on RFK in the public sphere
amounted to a shift in emotional focus. Before Dallas, he’d focused on going after those he saw as villains. After Dallas, he threw himself into making a difference for those he recognized as life’s victims.

  Today, a half century after his death, Robert Kennedy is remembered with an emotion very different from the afterglow enshrouding the memory of the brother he’d served. The endurance of the idea of “Bobby” is, I believe, because he stood for the desire to right wrongs that greatly mattered then and which continue to matter every bit as much in the twenty-first century. Let me state that more starkly—now more than ever.

  When his body was carried south by that twenty-one-car train, leaving New York for Washington—his final destination where he’d join his brother at Arlington National Cemetery—it’s estimated that a million admirers lined the route to pay tribute. News footage recorded those mourners, and in my mind’s eye I still can see clearly the expressions on their faces—young, old, black, white, men and women, few well-off, all caught up in their shared devastation.

  That outpouring along the New Jersey rail tracks captured what the idea of Bobby Kennedy would come to mean. He was, for so many, the one American leader of our lives who refused to turn his eyes from the people swept aside in our country’s rush for economic prosperity and global prominence.

  Over my years in Washington, I’ve seen the rarity of hero worship. You’ll hear little of such talk in this capital city. In the newsrooms and after-hours watering holes of Washington—where veteran political writers are to be found and where sentiment is kept to oneself—few are recognized. Yet Robert Francis Kennedy is quietly revered as the genuine article. As difficult as he was to figure out, and even at many times to deal with, what thrilled his supporters and scared the hell out of his opponents was that, in matters of justice, they believed he’d do exactly what he said he would.